About Our Team
Faculty and Staff
Manuela Soares
Director, Lecturer
As Director of the Pace University Press, Soares works with editors on a variety of academic journals. Well-known for its studies of Virginia Woolf and medieval literature, more recent additions to the Press list of publications include journals on acting, comics, philosophy, and psychology. As Director, Soares reviews new submissions and oversees the operation of the Press and its staff. Soares is also the Director of the MS in Publishing program at Pace.
Erica Johnson
Associate Director
Erica Johnson is a Professor of English at Pace University. She is the author of several books including Caribbean Ghostwriting and, most recently, Cultural Memory, Memorials, and Reparative Writing. She enjoys the teamwork of editing books and has co-edited The Female Face of Shame and Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches with Patricia Moran, Memory as Cultural Capital with Éloïse Brezault, and Wide Sargasso Sea at 50 with Elaine Savory. She has published widely in the field of literary studies in such journals as MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Biography, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, Contemporary Women’s Writing, The Journal of Caribbean Literatures, Anthurium, Meridians, and Woolf Studies Annual.
Wairimũ Mũrĩithi
Graduate Assistant
Wairimũ Mũrĩithi is a first year MS in Publishing student from Nairobi, Kenya. She is a freelance writer, editor, curator, educator and researcher, with work appearing in The New Inquiry, Down River Road, Making a Feminist Internet (Africa), Ja. Magazine and others. She is an avid zine reader, and she is one half of the zine-making collective, no sweetness here, and is currently working on “A Manifesto Against Resilience.” She has a BA in English and Economics, and a Masters in English, with a particular interest in postcolonial crime fiction, queer African literature and speculative futures. She loves to make kombucha and pickles, bike around the city and claim that she’s working on a novel. She is currently trying to figure out how to keep her plants alive.
Rachel Smithline
Graduate Student Aide
Born in Connecticut, Rachel Smithline remembers writing at an early age in a sparkly Barbie notebook full of stickers. She received her BA in Anthropology from the University of New Hampshire. While there, she was one of the founding members of the Anthropology Club and a participant in the Undergraduate Research Conference (’18). Since then, she has been a bookseller, a literary assistant, and now a graduate student studying Publishing and Writing. She looks forward to joining the team and hopes to one day use the experience to build a publishing imprint for diverse voices.
Adjei Kwesi Boateng
Graduate Assistant
Adjei Kwesi Boateng is a Graduate Assistant at the MS Publishing office where he is pursuing his Master’s degree. He is from Ghana, West Africa where he has spent most of his life. He is a published novelist with the pseudonym J. K. Knowlife. He’s best known for writing the mystery thriller The Homecoming. He writes mostly fiction, on subjects ranging from folklores, fantasy, mystery thrillers to sci-fi. You can find some his books on Amazon by searching his pen name. He hopes to use his degree to improve his publishing firm.
He loves reading and playing video games, as should all fun-loving gentlemen born from the ’80s on