Please welcome another newbie to the Social Media team at Oxford University Press, Sonia Tsuruoka, who joined the gang in January 2015 as an OUPblog Deputy Editor and Social Media Marketing Assistant! She has been working at OUP since June 2014.
When did you start working at OUP?
I started as a social media intern the summer before my senior year of college. A year later, I hopped over to Online Marketing for a full-time job, where I grappled with all things HTML. Now, I’m back where I started (at the very same desk I had when I was an intern!), and couldn’t be happier.
What is your typical day like at OUP?
No day is exactly the same in social media, which is the beauty of it! Between handling standard editorial stuff for the OUPBlog, I could be doing anything from researching poetic rhetoric to hunting for Richard Dawkins gifs.
What drew you to work for OUP in the first place?
A lot of people think the publishing industry draws bookworms like moths to a flame. My answer will probably not change that suspicion.
What’s your favourite book?
Moby Dick—I’m a huge Herman Melville enthusiast. I’ve even visited the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and I have a wooden box inscribed with “and the great flood gates of the wonder world swung open…then it collapsed, and the great sea shroud of the sea rolled on.”
What was your first blog post ever?
For my first post, I blogged about the politics of “slum tourism.” Then I wrote a retrospective on William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus.” I was a double major in Political Science and Writing Seminars, so I’m always bouncing back and forth between both worlds.
If you didn’t work in publishing, what would you be doing?
I’d have trouble deciding between political speechwriter, sleep-deprived English professor, and full-time Marilynne Robinson groupie.
What are you reading right now?
Right now, I’m working my way through books written by two professors I had the amazing privilege of working with in the Johns Hopkins’ Writing Seminars program—Return Fire by Glenn Blake and Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer by Steve Scafidi. Great people, and even better writers. There’s just something so arresting about the Southern poetic.
Open the book you’re currently reading and turn to page 78. Tell us the title of the book, and the third sentence on that page.
“There is a long bridge over these waters, and as you drive across, you can look to the south and see where the Old River and the Lost River become the Old and the Lost.” (Return Fire, Glenn Blake)
What is the strangest thing currently on or in your desk?
The best Secret Santa gift I have ever received.
What is your favourite word?
It would be a toss-up between saudade and schadenfreude. There’s such loveliness outside the English language.
If you could trade places with any one person for a week, who would it be and why?
Bruce Springsteen. I think this is every native New Jerseyan’s dream.
Most obscure talent or hobby?
Totally random, but I can recite Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” by heart. To this day I have no idea how this happened.
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