Devika Patel Email & Phone Number

My supervisor once told me I’m “a great storyteller,” which is essentially how I see myself. I used to tell myself stories when I was still in the crib, and before I left fifth grade, I was writing all of those stories down as they came to me. My writing has seen me through sadness and grief, joy and delight, as well as those times when I didn’t understand what was happening around me, and drew my pen out to help figure things out. I look for stories everywhere and am delighted when someone wants to read the stories I tell. I knew early on that I had a writer’s soul and nurtured it as I grew. It is my candle of solace in a windy world. I was raised in Manhattan by a Newsweek editor mom and writing and editing have been in my blood from an early age. I have written on and edited a range of topics for a highly diverse audience. I have written creative opinion pieces and features for newspapers and online ‘zines, press releases and ad copy to promote companies for media outlets, created blurbs, SEO tags and calls to action for Web sites, interpreted press releases and SEC filings from corporations to report their financial news to investment professionals and even taught creative writing to high school kids. I have brainstormed ideas for online content, searching for the right ideas and messages to deliver to particular audiences and demographics. I matriculated to study writing at Cornell University, which has arguably the best Creative Writing Program among the Ivy League universities, have worked as a reporter for Prospect News, a Wall Street financial newsletter reporting on investment-grade bonds and private placements, as a features writer and copy editor at the Bristol Herald Courier, a Pulitzer Prize winning publication, as a marketing copy writer for retail companies and as a new media content producer for Oxygen Media, then owned by Oprah Winfrey. An editor once told me that she didn’t believe I could produce bad writing if I tried, which was the highest compliment anyone ever gave me. Deadlines are a breeze for me. I have worked under a newspaper’s nail-biting deadlines and finished with time to spare without my work suffering. I most recently reported financial news, where attention to detail and speed are imperative.