Who We Are . . . and Who We Were

Emily Shelton Poole

Owner & Managing Editor

Emily has a bachelor’s degree in music from Brigham Young University. This makes it seem weird that she’s now an editor, but she taught herself how to read at age three, which has given her plenty of time to develop a critical eye and impeccable story sense. Emily was on Jeopardy! once. She knows the answer to almost everything, and if she doesn’t know, she’s really good at talking herself into the right answer sounding extremely authoritative about all of it; even though she’s often right, she is also often making it up.

Emily loves to read. She reads in the bathtub. She reads while she’s drying her hair. She reads while she’s waiting on kids to have music or tennis lessons. She reads in the car and on airplanes and sometimes during movies and always in bed, late at night. She believes wholeheartedly that placebo sleep is a real thing: if you don’t know it is 3 AM when you finally turn off the light, it could be 11 PM, and that totally counts. All of this reading means she has a deep understanding of what makes stories work, what makes characters believable, and how to polish prose into something that sings. When she’s reading for fun, she loves intricate plots with compelling characters and will literally read in any genre. If a book surprises her—and almost none do—she will champion it with a deep and abiding love usually only reserved for cute babies that aren’t hers, puppies that also aren’t hers, and God’s one perfect creation: peaches.

Emily lives in the mountains of North Carolina with her husband, four children, and Lotte, the golden doodle who thinks she’s a person. In addition to her work as an editor, she plays viola professionally in most of the symphonies within a reasonable driving distance of her home. Emily also just completed her master’s degree in English—Professional Writing and Rhetoric from Western Carolina University, for which she received scholarly awards and wrote a thesis on the impact of outsourced critical thinking on deliberative democracy. She starts her PhD program in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design at Clemson University in 2024. Clearly, she doesn’t like sleep enough to say no to anything, but when she has free time, she loves to cook and bake, and she lives for the time of year when her “food life” can start over again in the spring. She is a slow runner of half-marathons, she has inexplicably well-muscled shoulders, and her house is almost always filled with music, to which she dances poorly but with great enthusiasm.

In January 2022, Emily took over ownership of Midnight Owl Editors from Jenny Proctor.

Jenny Proctor

Founder

Jenny published her first novel in 2013 and has been fully immersed in the writing and publishing industry ever since. Since then, she has authored or co-authored more than fifteen contemporary romance novels. You can find more information about Jenny’s books at her website, www.jennyproctor.com.

Jenny lives in Charleston, SC with her husband, Josh, and a house full of children. In In 2018, Jenny officially opened the digital doors of Jenny Proctor Edits. Six months later, she’d quadrupled her income and established a client list of more than seventy-five authors without spending a penny on advertising. Overwhelmed but eager to continue serving the clients she’d grown to love, she hired her sister Emily, the smartest editor she knew, to work along side her; the business continued to grow, and soon, Midnight Owl Editors was born.

In 2022, the demands of being a full-time author required Jenny to step back from editing. Luckily, Emily was ready to take up the reins.