Jill Smith

As senior editor, Jill Smith works with authors and their teams to help them bring their book from manuscript stage to completed book. She works with first-time authors as well as established authors—always giving their books the same level of attention. After all, every book starts out as someone’s baby, and it deserves to be tended to with care.

Jill comes to Forefront by way of HarperCollins Christian Publishers where she was a Bibles editor for Thomas Nelson Bibles, and before that, the publications managing editor at an international ministry based in Colorado. But her editing acumen came from her years of teaching English to middle school, high school, and college students. It was a career where she may have overdone the half-point deductions on student papers for absent commas or misplaced apostrophes. After countless weekends spent grading essays, she knew it was time to call it quits and go where her punctuation obsession was welcomed—even celebrated.

Although deep-down, she is still an aspiring author, she knows that editing and project management is her forte. She loves when others do the hard work of writing and then hand their work over to her where she can make it shine. Both her writing and editing interests run the genre gambit, from children’s books to young adult and general fiction to non-fiction for all ages.

Jill graduated with a B.A. in English and a minor in Business from Northeastern State University in Oklahoma, where she wrote a rough draft of a novel during her business law class. She has three grown children, in-law children, four grandchildren, and multiple granddogs. She lives with her husband of three and a half decades and their two dachshunds, who seem to cost more money to raise than their “real” children ever did.