When I first met Michelle Ereda Mulligan a few years ago, she was the editor-in-chief for Cosmo for Latinas, a job she almost convinced herself she couldn't get.

We will get into that, along with how Michelle's career has taken her from the world of

magazine publishing to the world of book publishing.

She's now a senior editor at Atria Books, and she's giving us really useful insights into

publishing and what it takes for writers to catch an editor's eye.

Thank you, Michelle, for doing this.

Thank you for inviting me. I'm excited.

I was watching your TED Talk last night. I loved it.

Oh, thank you.

And you make a really powerful argument for dreaming wild.

What does that mean to you?

For me to dream wild means thinking beyond the boundaries of your own experience.

So for someone like me that grew up in a low-income house cold, a child of

immigrants, it was impossible to imagine even leaving my town. My mother, for her to imagine me not

even being within 30 miles driving distance, you know, coming from a Latina family.

That was unheard of. Going to college was unheard of. And then that didn't even take into account

all the other nevers and shouldn'ts I heard once I got to New York. And I think that what can happen,

especially when you're a member of the media, you're a storyteller, you're an artist of any kind, or any kind of creative person, is that pretty quickly you're going to start hearing why you don't fit or your ideas don't matter or why they're not quite right.

Sometimes they'll use code language, like, well, that doesn't seem like something that we could

break out or that our audience doesn't really like that kind of story or doesn't really relate

to this.

There'll be so many, so many different versions of the same message, which is that you don't fit.

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