Matt Weiland is a vice president and senior editor at W. W. Norton & Company, the independent and employee-owned publisher in New York.
At Norton, Weiland edits both nonfiction and fiction. Bestselling books he has edited include Between You & Me by New Yorker copyeditor Mary Norris, Underland by Robert Macfarlane, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan, Good to Go by science journalist Christie Aschwanden, The Long Haul by long-haul trucker Finn Murphy, Boy on Ice by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter John Branch, Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz, Capital by the novelist John Lanchester, and The Great War by cartoon journalist Joe Sacco.
Weiland previously worked as an editor at Ecco, Granta Books, The New Press, and Columbia University Press, as well as at the literary magazines Granta, The Paris Review, and The Baffler. He served as project director for American RadioWorks, the documentary radio unit of NPR and Minnesota Public Radio, and he co-founded Bell & Weiland Books to publish Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Mike Wallace’s A New Deal for New York in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
On the side, Weiland is the co-editor of three bestselling books. State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (2008), co-edited with Sean Wilsey, was inspired by the WPA State Guide series of the 1930s and featured original pieces on all 50 states by 50 leading writers; The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup (2006), also co-edited with Sean Wilsey, featured original pieces on the 32 nations participating in the World Cup by 32 leading writers; and Commodify Your Dissent: The Business of Culture in the New Gilded Age (1997), co-edited with Thomas Frank, was the first anthology from the literary magazine The Baffler.
Weiland’s essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, New York Magazine, Bookforum, Slate, The New Republic, and The Nation. He has written the introduction to two NYRB Classics reissues: George R. Stewart’s Names on the Land, a narrative account of how pretty much everything in America got its name; and Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, his classic portrait of an English village.
Weiland has taught fiction and nonfiction workshops at the CUNY Writers Institute, the Bennington Writing Seminars, the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, and the NYU Department of Journalism’s Program in Literary Reportage. He is a member of the Visiting Committee for Literary and Historical Manuscripts of the Morgan Library & Museum, and he is the captain of the U.S. Writers World Cup soccer team (which has yet to play a game).
Originally from Minneapolis, he lives in Brooklyn.