About Westwood Academic Consulting

Westwood Academic Consulting exists for the work that sits between a strong draft and a published contribution to your field. We support university faculty, academic presses, and scholarly journals through manuscript preparation, full-service publication, and English–Spanish translation.

As PhDs and publishers, we understand this world from the inside. We know the standards a monograph must meet, the workflows a publisher depends on, and the precision a peer-reviewed journal expects. That understanding shapes everything we do. We are not generalists who happen to work with academics. We are a specialized publication partner built for the demands of scholarly work.

Our Team

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Jessica Kaplan, PhD

Publishing Director & Editorial Consultant

Jessica is a publishing director, consultant, and editor with a PhD in Anthropology from UC Santa Barbara. She has spent the years since applying that researcher's rigor to the world of professional publishing, guiding trade books and academic works from manuscript through final production and into readers' hands.

As a publishing consultant and fractional director, she works with universities and organizations on the full arc of manuscript preparation, from editing and proofreading through design, print, and metadata preparation for publication. Past clients include Discover Magazine, the Archaeological Research Facility at UC Berkeley, the University of Oregon, Tate & Clayburn, the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band of California, and Learn-It-All Press. Her publication credits reflect the same range: peer-reviewed volumes, illustrated children's educational books, and academic works across disciplines and readerships.

As Publisher at Westwood Press, she oversees all core functions of the press, such as title acquisition, production, design, distribution, sales, marketing, and royalty administration. Titles include What We Can't Burn, On the Road for Climate Change, and Spirits Distilled. Before Westwood, as a publishing assistant at Granville Island Publishing, she managed authors, vendors, budgets, and project timelines across a wide-ranging catalog spanning YA fiction, memoir, history, and poetry.

Her work extends beyond publishing into the verification and accuracy layer that strong academic editorial practice demands. As a professional fact checker for Discover Magazine from 2019 to 2025 — and for clients throughout — she has brought the same research rigor to journalism and editorial review that she applies to every manuscript she produces.

Jessica's work is defined by the researcher's instinct for accuracy and the publisher's command of the editorial and publication process. She knows what a finished book requires at every stage and she knows how to get it there.

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Edward Zegarra, PhD

Publisher, Editor, & Translation Consultant

Edward is an anthropologist, publisher, editor, and Spanish–English translator with a PhD in Anthropology from Binghamton University. He founded Westwood Press as an independent publishing house focused on works of narrative nonfiction rooted in the humanities and social sciences and has built his consulting practice around the same rigorous standards he applies to every book he publishes.

At Westwood Press, Edward has brought a remarkable range of works into print. His titles include What We Can't Burn: Friendship and Friction in the Fight for Our Energy Future—recommended by Harvard University to all incoming freshmen for Fall 2025—as well as titles on climate action, natural science, and spirits culture.

Alongside that publishing work, Edward has provided academic editing and publication consultation for a wide range of scholarly projects, with past projects including UC Berkeley Archaeological Research Facility volumes, a Duke University Press monograph, a Latin American studies high school textbook for Gibbs-Smith Education, journal articles in Latin American cultural studies, and dissertations from graduate programs at Leiden University and UC Santa Cruz, among others.

His translation work spans English and Spanish in both directions, with clients including the Cooperative Development Institute, Oregon Health Sciences University, Prisma, and the Institute of Andean Studies at Berkeley. He has also completed cultural sensitivity and competency reads for major academic textbook publishers, including Human Kinetics.

What ties all of Edward’s work together is a scholar's sensibility applied to every project. He knows what a strong academic argument looks like, what it takes to move a piece of scholarship from draft to distribution, and how a press expects a manuscript to arrive. He brings that same depth to every engagement—whether the work is a journal article, a full-length monograph, or a complex, multi-contributor volume.

How We Work

Together, Edward and Jessica cover the full span of academic publication, from the first editorial pass to the final published page, in English and in Spanish. Few providers can offer that range with genuine depth and academic experience.

Our approach rests on a few simple commitments:

  • We treat your work as scholarship, not just text. Rigor, accuracy, and intellectual integrity guide every decision we make.

  • We write to your standards. We meet the conventions of your discipline, your press, or your journal, not a one-size-fits-all house style.

  • We work as peers. You are the expert on your ideas. We are the experts on preparing them for publication. The best results come from that partnership.

Most of the people we work with came to us through someone who trusted us first. That trust is the foundation of everything we do.

Let’s Work Together

Tell us about your manuscript, your journal, or your press — and we'll show you how we can help.