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Our Mentors

Gladys Qin
Gladys Qin is not mentoring this year, but has mentored Adult
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Gladys Qin
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Gladys Qin gets through life by cracking one dad joke at a time. Although she can’t tell dogs apart, she is a meticulous editor with a MA in Creative Writing, Publishing, and Editing under her belt.

As a kid, she loved to redirect movies to star her own family members. (She was the main character, of course.) She also wanted to be a business wizard who’d bring her favourite Chinese fast food chain to Australia. Then she wanted to be a rockstar, and then a mechatronics engineer. Long story short, she traded robots for books but still attempts to invent fictional tech in her spare time.

Gladys still wishes she could be all of those at once, but for the moment, she’s attempting to go around the publishing machine while working in finance. In 2018–2019, she was the production editor for local print publications, Grattan Street Press and Antithesis Journal, managing the process of putting Inside Story: The First Ten Years and Antithesis Vol. 29: Devotion out into the world.

After an immersive internship at a literary agency and a stint as a Pitch Wars mentor that got her mentee 25 agent requests, 3 offers, and subsequent representation, Gladys decided to use her platform to give free industry advice. She is now a freelance editor, shaped by Tessera Editorial’s mentorship program.

Never one to stop, Gladys is looking forward to the first step to world domination— She means… growing within the publishing industry. Her goal is to support diverse talent and ideas beyond the limitations of genre, as well as lift books that make people think long after the story is over.

Favorite Books

Touch by Claire North
The Dry by Jane Harper
The Book of M by Peng Shepherd
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Years Mentored
2019, 2020