Hal Clifford

I have been editing and ghostwriting books since 2008. For several years I was the editor in chief at Scribe Media, an independent publishing company. I left there in early 2023 to focus entirely on building my own company. I had a lot of fun working with New York Times– and Wall Street Journal– bestselling authors such as David Goggins and Chris Voss, and also first-timers for whom writing a book is both a profound challenge and a deeply rewarding achievement. I wanted to do more of that.

Previously, I was the executive editor at Orion magazine, where a story I edited was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for Best Essay. Other pieces I edited were included in Best American Science and Nature Writing. During my tenure, Orion won the Utne General Excellence Award. I worked with Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Rebecca Solnit, Terry Tempest Williams, Bill McKibben and dozens of other talented writers, known and unknown.

I moved to Colorado almost by accident after graduating from Dartmouth College with a major in English literature and a minor in Environmental policy. Soon I was accepted to business school. Instead of attending, I hitchhiked around the South Pacific for a year, where I wrote travel stories on borrowed typewriters and mailed them Par Avion to newspaper editors—all of whom, beneficently, published what I sent. I was hooked on words.

Returning to Aspen, I became a newspaperman-ski bum, working for a daily paper with the memorable masthead slogan “If You Don’t Want It Printed, Don’t Let It Happen.” I met my wife there, striking up a conversation about bad poetry. We have a teenage son and a daughter who just graduated college. At the dinner table, we laugh a lot, because laughter is one of the great currencies of abundance, and I am a great believer in the power of abundant thinking and the superpower of gratitude.

I wrote and published three nonfiction books under my own name with HarperCollins and The Mountaineers, University of California, and Longstreet Press (visible here, here, and here). I also wrote a couple of novels that live in a desk drawer.

After spending most of my adult life in Colorado, in 2021 I moved with my family to the coast of South Carolina. Mountains are awesome. So is ocean. Now I live 400 yards from an estuary rich with roseate spoonbills, wood storks and great egrets. Here I intend to get good at flyfishing for redfish and maybe even standup paddling.

I love traversing mountains, cooking Italian food for people I like, dogs of all flavors, jigsaw puzzles, natural history, American history, biathlon, skeet shooting, flyfishing, just about any book I can lay my hands on, yoga, and birdwatching. Sometimes I even try to write not-bad poetry.