For the first two decades of my life, I was asleep—listless and adrift. I didn’t care what happened to me. Then, on the morning of my 21st birthday, I woke up in my dorm to find out my dad had died suddenly in the middle of the night.

His death shook me, and I became aware that one day I also wouldn’t wake up. That realization forced me to take a stake in my own life, and to start living immediately.

Even though I swiftly secured an internship at a folk music magazine (with help from Moravian English department faculty), joined various organizations on campus, and made the dean’s list for the first time, mentors and close friends sensed I was in pain and pointed me toward books of poetry and philosophy, from which I attempted to extract a cure. Within that abyss, the power of language bewitched me. I realized that if you wielded it well, language could change someone’s life.

After graduation, I lived at home and worked as a security guard to save money, but six months sitting alone in a parking lot—sometimes 16 hours a day—was enough. All I knew at the time was that I wanted to live, and having been to only a handful of places outside of my hometown, nowhere else seemed to contain more life than New York City. I couldn’t idle any longer. With no job, no plan, and just enough money saved to last about a month, I left.

It became immediately clear that tens of thousands of hungry English majors enter the publishing applicant pool every year, vying for a shot at using their degree editing books or magazines. I wasn’t any different. Fortunately, a friend opened a door. And once I was through, I felt I had something to prove, so I got to work.

In the decade since, I have published more than 600 books across all genres and worked with partners and people I never could have imagined—kids’ activity books with Sesame Street, a reissue of The Pentagon Papers in partnership with the New York Times, a cookbook with a renowned chef, and essays about the joys of travel by a veteran travel writer, among so many others.

While I am so grateful to still be in this business, the once-great excitement of publishing books was doused by the familiarity of routine. But about two years ago, I opened Instagram and saw a post about another Moravian alumnus, Tom Turcich ’11, who, after the death of a friend, embarked on a seven-year walk around the world. He and I had never met, despite an overlapping year in 2010, but I felt a peculiar kinship between us. So I reached out the next day, highlighting our Moravian link, and told him I wanted to publish his story.

Tom spent more than a year poring over old notes and journals from his walk to write the book, and the last nine months have been a joyous frenzy of editing, refining, and refining again. I can say with certainty that The World Walk turned out to be something far beyond anything I could have hoped to read. (See page 10 for a glimpse into Tom’s journey.)

Helping him tell this extraordinary story of resilience reminded me why I got into publishing in the first place—and woke a part of myself I had begun to forget.