A note from Proofed & Proven’s CEO, Nicole Halper:
This business began a long time ago.
Even though I started my career as a physics teacher, it was inevitable I ended up here.
I grew up on a farm running pumpkin-picking and summer veggie stands. In my early twenties, I got roped into selling Cutco knives and put myself through college with the commissions. At Colgate, where I got my degree in physics and environmental science (+Hebrew), an entrepreneurship program put me in rooms with venture capitalists, serial founders, and business mentors. If nothing else has been consistent, I’ve always been a problem-solver.
I’ve also been a writer all my life: poetry, personal essay, plays, short stories, journals, travelogues. I’ve taken a red pen to literary journals, student newspaper articles, resumes, friends’ novels, everything. I’ve spent many seasons traversing continents, just walking and looking, collecting stories and making my own.
The town I grew up in Central Jersey had me going to school with a culturally diverse population, but it wasn’t until I took a college environmental justice class that I realized that redlining, “white flight,” NIMBYism, unchecked governance, and systemic racism weren’t past-tense abstractions. They are alive and well.
My family experienced this firsthand when our farm was condemned and seized via eminent domain. One more story in an intergenerational lineage of displacement: 18th-century pogroms, Holocaust survival, and legalized thievery. It’s no wonder that themes of trauma, politics, social justice, and objectivity show up time and again in my work.
What is my work?
Four years into my teaching career, the pandemic hit and, like many others, disillusionment forced me to make a change. Mixed messages, bureaucratic weak will, and plain exploitation had me rethinking my goal to teach social justice in science. During lockdown, I returned to my writing roots and decided to go into business healing people with stories.
My clients have run the gamut:
- A multinational company selling affordable travel deals to the middle class;
- A nonprofit think tank publishing the results of guaranteed income experiments (spoiler: guaranteed income payments lift people out of poverty);
- A PhD researcher writing her dissertation on Afrofuturist Girlhood and Citizenship in Black Literature and Film.
There comes a time in every writing project where an author just doesn’t want to look at one more citation, can’t figure out if that one paragraph sounds ridiculous, or has any idea how to satisfy an academic journal’s publishing guidelines. That’s where Proofed & Proven comes in.
I started this company to help activists, academics, and authors with a social justice focus get published. We’re here to inspire in you the confidence that your work represents you at your best. We make sure your content is error-free and professional, safeguarding your reputation and giving you the reassurance that your audience will see your contributions as credible, meticulous, and trustworthy. We hope you join the ranks of repeat clients whose testimonials we’ve built our business on!
Let’s make your writing unstoppable. Check out our services and see how we can help you stand out.
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