Special Guest Author, Agent, and Editor July 2023!

For our Go Deep retreat, we are bringing in one amazing author–of novels and memoir–for several days. She will lead the Master Class and introduce us to her agent and editor, and her books. She will go deep with us!

Jasmin Darznik is the New York Times bestselling author of three books, The Bohemians, Song of a Captive Bird, and The Good Daughter. She was born in Iran and came to the U.S. at the time of the Iranian Revolution. She holds a PhD in English from Princeton and an MFA in fiction from Bennington. She is an associate professor and chair of the MFA Program in Writing at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her forthcoming novel is American Goddess.

Guest Presenters–Authors and Agents–April 2023!

Authors

Tania Malik is the author of the novel HOPE YOU ARE SATISFIED (forthcoming in May 2023) as well as THREE BARGAINS that received a Publishers Weekly Starred review and a Booklist Starred review. She was educated in boarding schools in the foothills of the Himalayas and has had a varied career in the travel and non-profit fields. She was raised in India, Africa and the Middle East and currently lives in San Francisco’s Bay Area. She can be found at @taniamalik on Instagram and www.taniamalik.com.

Susanne Pari‘s second novel, IN THE TIME OF OUR HISTORY, is a portrait of a large Iranian-American family caught between the traditional values of the older generation born in Iran and the postmodern views of their American bred children. Her first novel, THE FORTUNE CATCHER, is an examination of the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution through the eyes of an Iranian-American, Muslim-Jewish woman. Susanne is a novelist, book reviewer, and essayist. She has written forThe New York Times, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, andNPR. She divides her time between Northern California and New York.

Nina Schuyler’s novel, Afterword, will be published in May 2023 by Clash Books. Her short
story collection, In this Ravishing World, won the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections
and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature and will be published by Regal House Publishing in
2024. Her novel, The Translator, won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General
Fiction and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize. Her novel, The
Painting, was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award. Her nonfiction book, How to
Write Stunning Sentences, is a bestseller. Her short stories have been published by Zyzzyva,
Fugue, Your Impossible Voice, Santa Clara Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. She has a
new nonfiction book, Stunning Sentences: Creative Writing Journal. She teaches creative writing
for Stanford Continuing Studies and the University of San Francisco. She lives in California.

MASTER CLASS

Keenan Norris’s latest novel is The Confession of Copeland Cane, the winner of the 2022 Northern California Book Award. Keenan teaches American literature and creative writing at San Jose State University. His essays have received “a 2021-22 National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award and 2021 Folio: Eddie Award. Most recently, he’s published the book of essays Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings and the novella Lustre. His editorials, essays and other short work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Review of Books, San Francisco Chronicle, Alta and on TED-ED.

Agents

Anna Ghosh started her career as a literary agent in New York City in 1995 and was a partner at Scovil Galen Ghosh before moving to San Francisco to found Ghosh Literary in 2013 (www.ghoshliterary.com).

Anna’s client list includes New York Times bestsellers, award winners as well as unheralded gems. Her literary interests are wide and eclectic and she is known for discovering and developing new writers. She is particularly interested in literary narratives and books that illuminate some aspect of human endeavor or the natural world. Anna does not typically represent genre fiction but is open to compelling storytelling in most guises.

Anna studied Literary Journalism and Cultural Anthropology at Hampshire College, Massachusetts and Intellectual history at the New School for Social Research, New York. Originally from India, she lived in New York City for 16 years and now lives in the San Francisco bay area.

Juliana Arvai McBride, Literary Agent
Juliana began her career in New York City at Penguin Random House in 2000. After a decade working with all the in-house and third-party publishers in various sales and marketing roles, she and her husband (and twin daughters) embarked on their second act in California producing and selling wine. She never gave up her penchant for good stories though, cue act three.  At the onset of the pandemic, she returned to her first love, but on the other side as an agent, finding joy in the discovery of fresh new voices and narratives. Juliana represents writers of fiction primarily in the young adult, adult and middle grade genres. You can find her on twitter at @juliananotabot and on instagram @julianalovesbooks.  Her MSWL link can be found here.  

October 2022 Authors, Editors, and Agents

Industry Panel: the Author, Agent, and Editor of Circa, a novel

Devi S. Laskar is the author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, winner of 7th annual Crook’s Corner Book Prize (2020) for best debut novel set in the South, winner of the 2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature & finalist for the Northern California Book awards. Her second novel, Circa was published May 3, 2022, by Mariner Books. Her third novel, Midnight, At The War will be published by Mariner in early 2024. A native of Chapel Hill, N.C., she now lives in California with her family.

“[A] tight, insightful novel…By following Heera from high school to adulthood, the author teases out nuanced tensions…A heartbreaking examination of family ties.” –Kirkus Reviews

Reiko Davis has been an agent at DeFiore and Company since 2016, prior to which she was at Miriam Altshuler Literary Agency. She focuses on literary and upmarket fiction and narrative nonfiction, as well as middle grade and YA literature. A graduate of Brown University and the Columbia Publishing Course, she grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and now lives in Jersey City, NJ. Her clients include Devi S. Laskar (winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Fiction and author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues and Circa), Genevieve Plunkett (O. Henry Prize winner and author of Prepare Her), Shannon Sanders (PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize winner and author of the forthcoming Company), Lucy Jane Bledsoe (Stonewall Award winner, Lambda Literary Award finalist, and author of A Thin Bright Line and No Stopping Us Now), Sean O’Brien (former Director of Speechwriting to Vice President Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden and Special Assistant to President Barack Obama), Mallory Weggemann (Paralympic swimmer for Team USA and author of Limitless), bestselling writing coach Alan Gelb, Brittany Wagner (Netflix Last Chance U star and author of Next Chance You), YA novelist Lindsey Klingele, middle grade authors Andrea Debbink and Brittany Geragotelis, and journalist Nancy A. Nichols.

Rakia Clark is an executive editor at Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. She acquires fiction and nonfiction. Rakia’s first acquisition for Mariner, Punch Me Up to the Gods, a memoir by newcomer Brian Broome, won the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and was named to the New York Times’ list of 100 Notable Books of the Year, as well as several other best of the year lists. Other recent and forthcoming titles include Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD by former Army captain and Missouri state legislator Jason Kander; Water Mirror Echo, a cultural biography of Bruce Lee, by Jeff Chang; Burn It Down, an investigation of institutional power and abuse in Hollywood, by Vanity Fair’s Maureen Ryan; and The Black Joy Project, a love letter to Black joy as a source of healing, resistance and regeneration, by educator and activist Kleaver Cruz. Prior to Mariner, Rakia served in editorial roles at Beacon Press, Kensington and Viking. She was named a Star Watch honoree by Publishers Weekly in 2018.

Master Class with Elmaz Abinader: The Power of Voice

Voice is the writer’s fingerprint, a unique combination of inheritance, culture, language, experiences and identity. Voice also is the primary encounter between the writer and the reader/ listener.  Often our voice is colonized by institutions and educations and gets lost in requirements, expectations, and decorum. The authentic voice of our characters, our speakers and ourselves are buried in a world of performance. In this master class, this community of writers work to liberate our individual voices to truly speak/tell/present our stories/poems/pieces.  Specific exercises allow us to unearth our voices, while exchanging with one another to create an exciting writers’ dialogue. We will produce pieces where our voices, interior and exterior, come to life.

Elmaz Abinader is an author, a performer and educator. Her most recent poetry collection, This House, My Bones, was The Editor’s Selection for 2014 from Willow Books/Aquarius. Her books include a memoir: Children of the Roojme, A Family’s Journey from Lebanon, a book of poetry, In the Country of My Dreams… which won the Oakland PEN, Josephine Miles Award. Her plays include Ramadan Moon, 32 Mohameds, and Country of Origin and have been performed worldwide. A recent finalist in the Rita Dove Poetry Contest, she has been anthologized widely including The New Anthology of American Poetry, Radical Hope, Truth to Power and in The Colors of Nature. Most recently her fiction has appeared in Fifth Wednesday and Nimrod. Elmaz is a former Fulbright Senior Fellow, a resident fellow at the MacDowell Colony, BAU Institute, and Montalvo, among others. Elmaz is one of the co-founders of The Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA/Voices) a writing workshop for writers-of-color. She teaches at Mills College, and for Hedgebrook. www.elmazabinader.com

Authors Panel

Aimee Phan grew up in Orange County, California. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa. She is the author of two books of fiction, the story collection We Should Never Meet and the novel The Reeducation of Cherry Truong. She has received fellowships and residencies from the NEA, Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, MacDowell Arts Colony, the Headlands Arts Center, Djerassi Resident Artists Program and Hedgebrook. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, CNN.com, and USA Today, among others. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Novelist and poet Barbara Quick is best known as author of the 2007 international favorite Vivaldi’s Virgins, still in print, translated into 13 languages, made into an audiobook, and currently in development as a mini-series by award-winning director Agnieszka Holland. Winner of the Discover: Great New Writers prize for her first novel, Northern Edge, Barbara was awarded the 2020 Blue Light Press Poetry Prize for her debut chapbook, The Light on Sifnos. Barbara’s fourth novel, What Disappears—over a decade in the making—will be launched by Regal House on May 17^th. Five of Barbara’s poems were recorded by Garrison Keillor and featured on The Writer’s Almanac last year. She has been a frequent guest—most recently on May 2^nd, on Grace Cavalieri’s archived program from the Library of Congress, “The Poet and the Poem,” which has featured both her poetry and her novels. One of her poems was published as a full-page spread in the May 2022 issue of Scientific American. Her 2010 novel from HarperTeen, A Golden Web—about the 14^th century teenage anatomist Alessandra Giliani—continues to intrigue and attract historical fiction fans. A trained dancer and avid organic gardener, Barbara is based on a small farm and vineyard here in the Wine Country. More at BarbaraQuick.com  

Greg Sarris received his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, where he was awarded the Walter Gore Award for excellence in teaching.  He has published several books, including Grand Avenue, an award-winning collection of short stories, which he adapted for an HBO miniseries and co-executive produced with Robert Redford.  He is serving his fifteenth consecutive elected term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. In addition to serving as Chairman of his Tribe, he serves as President of the Tribe’s Economic Development Board, overseeing all of the Tribe’s business interests, including the Graton Resort and Casino.  Formerly a full professor of English at UCLA, and then the Fletcher Jones Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University, Greg now holds the title of Distinguished Emeritus Graton Endowed Chair in Native American Studies at Sonoma State University, where he taught a number of courses in Creative Writing, American Literature, and American Indian Literature.  His book How a Mountain Was Made, a collection of stories was published in October 2017 and was awarded a Bronze Medal from Independent Publisher Book Awards.  His book Becoming Story: A Journey among Seasons, Places, Trees, and Ancestors will be released in April 2022.  Currently, he is executive producing the documentary bio on Joan Baez, he has been appointed to the Board of Trustees for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

March 2022

Authors:

Before becoming a writer Elizabeth Gonzales James was a waitress, a pollster, an Avon lady, and an opera singer. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Idaho Review, The Rumpus, StorySouth, PANK, and elsewhere, and have received numerous Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. In 2021 she is a regular contributor to Ploughshares Blog. Her debut novel, Mona at Sea, was a finalist in the 2019 SFWP Literary Awards judged by Carmen Maria Machado, and is available now. Originally from South Texas, Elizabeth now lives with her family in Massachusetts.

Sonora Jha, PhD, is an essayist, novelist, and professor of journalism at Seattle University. She is the author of the memoir How to Raise a Feminist Son: Motherhood, Masculinity, and the Making of My Family (Sasquatch Books USA and Penguin Random House India, 2021), the novel Foreign, and her op-eds and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Seattle Times, The Establishment, DAME, and in several anthologies. Her forthcoming novel, The Laughter, will be published by Harper Via in early 2023.

Sonora grew up in Mumbai and has been chief of metropolitan bureau for the Times of India and contributing editor for East magazine in Singapore. She teaches fiction and essay writing for Hugo House, Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, and Seattle Public Library. She is an alumna and board member of Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat and has served on the jury for awards for Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, and Hugo House.

Master Class with Sanjena Sathian

Character Development: from Magical Thinking to Backstory.

Looking at two stories — “Roy Spivey” by Miranda July and “Escape from Spiderhead” by George Saunders — and one poem, we’ll discuss several key drivers of character development in fiction: how characters behave, what they believe in, and how they tend to their personal cosmologies set against their material backstories. We’ll consider several theories of character development, ranging from “Hemingway’s iceberg” to Laura van den Berg’s “oceanic register.”

Sanjena Sathian was raised in Georgia by Indian immigrant parents. Her novel Gold Diggers was named one of The Washington Post‘s 10 Best Books of 2021, chosen as a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, Electric Literature, Amazon Editors, and more. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, A Good Morning America Buzz Pick, and long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Gold Diggers has already landed a TV deal with Mindy Kaling.

She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an alumna of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and a former Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow. She has also worked as a journalist in San Francisco and in Mumbai. Her award-winning short fiction appears or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, Boulevard, Joyland, Salt Hill, and The Master’s Review. She’s written nonfiction for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Food and Wine, The Boston Globe, The Juggernaut, The Millions, OZY, and more. She has taught creative writing to high school, college, graduate, and post-graduate level students in Iowa, Alaska, India, and New Zealand. (Photo by Tony Tulathimutte)

Publishing Panel

Claire Oshetsky is the author of three novels.  Her latest novel Chouette (Ecco: 2021) draws on her experiences of motherhood. Chouette was just longlisted for the Pen/Faulkner award. Her short fiction has appeared in Guernica, North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Fiction International, and elsewhere. She lives in Santa Cruz. (Photo by Ellen Zensen.)

Claire’s agent is Alexa Stark. Alexa represents a range of literary and upmarket fiction as well as select nonfiction. She is particularly drawn to literary debuts with a unique voice and perspective, stories about dysfunctional friendships and families, edgy coming-of-age tales, character-driven suspense and thrillers, and fiction that delves into the surreal. On the nonfiction side, she is drawn to narrative nonfiction, cultural criticism, voice-driven essay collections, popular science, psychology, and women’s issues.

Claire’s editor at Ecco is Sara Birmingham. Sara Birmingham (she/her) joined Ecco in 2018 after stints at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Oxford University Press. She primarily acquires literary fiction, especially debut, with a particular focus on works that investigate the bonds of family and friendship, explore an underrepresented culture or setting, or offer warmth and humor. She also acquires memoir, narrative nonfiction, and essays with a contemporary focus. Her recent and forthcoming titles include the #1 New York Times bestselling World Travel by Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever, Days of Distraction by Alexandra Chang, Weightless by Evette Dionne, Foreverland by Heather Havrilesky, The Removed by Brandon Hobson, Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim, Chouette by Claire Oshetsky, South to America by Imani Perry, and On the Rooftop by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton.

******

October 2021

Industry Panel:

Two-time Edgar Nominee, Author Heather Young with Her Agent, Michelle Brower, and Editor Katherine Nintzel

Michelle Brower began her career in publishing in 2004 while studying for her Master’s degree in English Literature at New York University.  After stints at Wendy Sherman Associates and Folio Literary Management, she joined Aevitas Creative Management, where she is a partner. She is looking for literary fiction, suspense, “book club” novels, genre fiction for non-genre readers, and literary narrative non-fiction.  Her authors include Tara Conklin, Kathy Wang, Erika L. Sanchez, Jason Mott, Erika Swyler, Clare Beams, Riley Sager and Jaquira Diaz, among many others.

Katherine Nintzel is an Executive Editor at Custom House, a boutique imprint within HarperCollins. Her writers include New York Times bestselling authors Christina Baker Kline, Tara Conklin, and Lucy Foley, New York Public Library Young Lions-Award finalists Matt Bell and Meng Jin, B&N Discover pick Kathy Wang, Indies Introduce selection Brian Castleberry, and two-time Edgar nominee Heather Young.

Heather Young is the author of two novels. Her debut, The Lost Girls, won the Strand Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The Distant Dead was published on June 9, 2020. It was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel and named one of the ten best mystery and suspense books of the year by Book Page. A former litigator, Heather traded the legal world for the literary one and earned her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in 2011. She was also awarded a Fellowship by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and is an alumnus of the Squaw Valley Writers’ Workshop and the Tin House Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Mill Valley, California, where she writes, bikes, hikes, and reads books by other people that she wishes she’d written.

Special Presentation: an Author’s Journey

Terry Gamble

Terry Gamble is the author of three novels: The Water Dancers, Good Family, and The Eulogist, all published by William Morrow. Born in Pasadena, she is the younger daughter of resolutely Victorian parents. A strange, pale child, she spent most of her childhood under a piano or on a closet shelf reading books. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Michigan with a degree in Art History and English, she worked as a maid, a waitress, a shop girl, and an interior designer before returning to her first (and equally profitable) love: writing. Her children grown, she lives in San Francisco and Sonoma with her artist husband Peter and an aging cat.

Laleh Khadivi

May 2021

Authors:

photo by Art Streiber

Lisa Ko‘s first novel, The Leavers, was a national best-seller that won the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and her essays and nonfiction in The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.

Renee Swindle is the author of Please Please Please, Shake Down The Stars and A Pinch Of Ooh La La. She lives in Oakland, CA. She is currently working on her fourth novel.

Joy Lanzendorfer is the author of the novel Right Back Where We Started From. Other work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and Poetry Foundation. She’s the host of the book-oriented radio show/podcast What’s the Story? on 95.9 FM The Krush.

Master Class: It’s all in the Revision with Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera is the award-winning writer of the novels, Island of a Thousand Mirrors and What Lies Between Us. She is widely published and the Huffington Post raved, “Munaweera’s prose is visceral and indelible, devastatingly beautiful-reminiscent of the glorious writings of Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan and Alice Walker, who also find ways to truth-tell through fiction.” She lives in Oakland, California, and is finishing her third novel, a psycho-sexual literary thriller.

A Book’s Journey: Industry Panel

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018. Currently, he is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Jamil will appear with his agent, Jin Au, and his editor, Laura Tisdel.

Studio Visits:

Regina Marler is a freelance writer and independent scholar based in the San Francisco Bay Area. While still in graduate school, she was chosen by the Estates of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell to edit the artist Vanessa Bell’s letters for publication. Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell was published by Pantheon in 1993. She wrote a study of the Bloomsbury industry, Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom (Holt, 1997) and edited the anthology Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America on to Sex (Cleis, 2004). Marler writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and has contributed frequently to the New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, the New York Observer, the Advocate, the TLS, and the Signet Classics series. Recent academic essays on Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury have appeared in The Oxford Guide to Virginia Woolf, The Cambridge Companion to Bloomsbury, and elsewhere.

*****

February 2021

Agents:

Reiko Davis has been an agent at DeFiore and Company since 2016, prior to which she was a literary associate at Miriam Altshuler Literary Agency. She focuses on literary and upmarket fiction and narrative nonfiction, as well as middle grade and YA literature. A graduate of Brown University and the Columbia Publishing Course, she grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and now lives in Queens, New York. Her clients include Devi S. Laskar, Genevieve Plunkett, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Lindsey Klingele, Andrea Debbink, Brittany Geragotelis, Alan Gelb, Micah Perks, Mallory Weggemann, Brittany Wagner, and Shannon Sanders.

Susan Golomb graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as a theatrical production coordinator and story editor before starting her own literary agency in 1988, and later joining Writers House in 2015. She represents a diverse list of literary fiction, upmarket commercial fiction, psychological suspense, memoir and big idea non-fiction by bestselling and award winning authors. Her clients include Jonathan Franzen, Rachel Kushner, Imbolo Mbue, William T. Vollmann, Janelle Brown, Angie Kim, Wayétu Moore, Brando Skyhorse, Krys Lee, Noah Hawley, Mikel Jollett and Yvon Chouinard.

Authors:

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson‘s stories or essays have appeared in Best American Short Stories (2018), The Guardian, Guernica, and elsewhere. Her fiction debut, My Monticello, five stories and a novella, all set in Virginia, is forthcoming from Holt in the US and Harvill Secker in the UK in the fall of 2021. A veteran public school art teacher, Johnson lives and writes in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Angie Kim is the debut author of the international bestseller and Edgar winner Miracle Creek, named a “Best Book of the Year” by Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus, and The Today Show, among others. Her novel also won the ITW Thriller Award, the Strand Critics’ Award, and the Pinckley Prize. A Korean immigrant, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, and one of Variety Magazine’s inaugural “10 Storytellers to Watch,” Kim has written for Vogue, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Glamour, and numerous literary journals. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and three sons

Kate Milliken is the author of the 2013 Iowa Short Fiction Award-winning collection of stories, If I’d Known You Were Coming. Kate holds her MFA from Bennington College Writing Seminars and her work has been supported by fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Yaddo, and the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop. Her debut novel, Kept Animals, a story of desire, betrayal, and loss centering on three teenage girls and an accident that changes everything, will be published by Scribner Books in April 2020. Kate lives in Northern California with her family.

Shobha Rao moved to the United States from India at the age of seven. She is the author of the short story collection, An Unrestored Woman, and the novel, Girls Burn Brighter. Rao is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction and the recipient of an Elizabeth P. George Foundation Fellowship. Her story “Kavitha and Mustafa” was chosen by T.C. Boyle for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2015. Girls Burn Brighter was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the California Book Award. She lives in San Francisco.

Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Map of Salt and Stars and The Thirty Names of Night. He is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI); his work has appeared or is forthcoming in KINK: Stories (Feb 2021), Salon, The Paris Review, Shondaland, [PANK], Mizna, and elsewhere and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. The Thirty Names of Night was a 2020 Indie Next Book Pick; The Map of Salt and Stars has been translated into twenty languages and was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner, a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist, and was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. Joukhadar has received fellowships from the Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Program, the Arab American National Museum, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Camargo Foundation, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

YOGA WITH ILEANA CHAMPLAIN

ILEANA CHAMPLAIN, our yoga teacher, has been a mover her entire life.  She has studied yoga and dance extensively.  She is a teacher and practitioner of Shaivite Tantrisim.  Combining her years of immersion in the practice of non dual with her love of movement, her yoga classes blend vinyasa style asana with meditation on present moment awareness and connection with source.  Her movement classes are fun, sweaty, and will get your body moving and grooving.

December 2020

Agents:

Jeff Kleinman, Folio Literary Management

Jeff Kleinman is a literary agent, intellectual property attorney, and founding partner of Folio Literary Management, LLC, a full-service literary agency located in the historic Film Center Building in Manhattan. Our agents work with some of the most exciting talent in the business, representing bestsellers, thought leaders, celebrities, and award-winners across every genre. Jeff is a graduate of Case Western Reserve University (J.D.), the University of Chicago (M.A., Italian), and the University of Virginia (B.A. with High Distinction in English). As an agent, Jeff feels privileged to have the chance to learn an incredible variety of new subjects, meet an extraordinary range of people, and feel, at the end of the day, that he’s helped to build something – a wonderful book, perhaps, or an author’s career.  His authors include the New York Times bestsellers The Art of Racing in the Rain (Garth Stein), The Eighty Dollar Champion (Elizabeth Letts), The Snow Child (a Pulitzer finalist; Eowyn Ivey), Widow of the South (Robert Hicks), and Mockingbird (Charles Shields), to name a few.

Mariah Stovall, Howland Literary

Mariah Stovall is a literary agent at Howland Literary. She is seeking voice-driven adult fiction and nonfiction and loves doing in-depth editorial work with her clients. She previously worked at Writers House, Gallery/Scout Books and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and is a graduate of Pitzer College. In her free time, she volunteers as the Survey Coordinator for VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts. She is also a writer and knows firsthand how difficult the querying process can be. Find her on Twitter @retiredpunk.

Master Class:

Otherness – writing, reading, and experiencing the other in fiction with Venita Blackburn

The sacred yet rarely spoken covenant between author and audience states that prose should be both entertaining and educational. What happens when the lesson taught is woefully inaccurate? How do we judge accuracy in fiction when approaching characters with experiences wildly different than our own from nationality to sexuality to political alignment to gender to age to race? This will be a class on choices, audience, research, point of view, humility, compassion and empathy.

Works by Venita Blackburn have appeared or are forthcoming in Apogee, Iowa Review, Foglifter, Electric Literature, the Paris Review and others. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. In 2018 she earned a place as afinalist for the PEN/Bingham award for debut fiction, finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award and recipient of the PEN America Los Angeles literary prize in fiction. She is founder of the literary nonprofit Live, Write (livewriteworkshop.com), which provides free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Her home town is Compton, California, and she is an Assistant Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

Authors:

Kaui Hemmings is the author of a story collection, House of Thieves, and the novels, The Descendants, The Possibilities, Juniors, How to Party with an Infant, and Testimony From Your Perfect Girl. The Descendants was made into an Oscar-winning film. She lives in Hawaii with her three children. https://www.instagram.com/kauiharthemmings/

Aya de León directs the Poetry for the People program in the African American Studies Department at UC Berkeley, teaching poetry and spoken word. Kensington Books publishes her award-winning feminist heist series, which includes SIDE CHICK NATION, the first novel published about Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. In May 2020, Aya published her first children’s chapter book, EQUALITY GIRLS AND THE PURPLE REFLECTO-RAY, about an Afro-Latina girl who uses her superpowers to confront the president’s sexism. In December 2020 Kensington will publish her first standalone novel, A SPY IN THE STRUGGLE, about FBI infiltration of an African American eco-racial justice organization. Aya is a founding blogger with The Daily Dose: Feminist Voices for the Green New Deal, and she organizes with the climate movement and the Movement for Black Lives. Her work has also appeared in Ebony, Guernica, Writers Digest, Bitch Magazine, Mutha Magazine, VICE, The Root, Jacobin, Ploughshares, and on Def Poetry. Aya is at work on a YA black/Latina spy girl series for teens called GOING DARK. She is an alumna of Cave Canem and VONA. Visit her online at ayadeleon.com, on Twitter at @ayadeleon, Facebook or Instagram at @ayadeleonwrites, where she writes about race, class, gender, sexuality, colonization, culture and climate.

Devi S. Laskar is the author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, winner of 7th annual Crook’s Corner Book Prize (2020) for best debut novel set in the South, winner of the 2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature sponsored by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association; selected by The Georgia Center for the Book as a 2019 book “All Georgians Should Read,” long-listed for the 9th annual DSC Prize in South Asian Literature and long-listed for the 2019 Golden Poppy Award sponsored by the NCIBA. The novel was named by The Washington Post as one of the 50 best books of 2019, and has garnered praise in Booklist, Chicago Review of Books, The Guardian and elsewhere. Laskar holds an MFA from Columbia University and an MA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  She is an alumna of both TheOpEdProject and VONA, among others. In 2017, Finishing Line Press published two poetry chapbooks. A native of Chapel Hill, N.C., she now lives in California with her family.

Meliza Bañales

Professor Meliza Bañales aka Missy Fuego is an award-winning author, performer, filmmaker, educator, and cultural critic. Originally from Los Angeles, she was a fixture in the spoken-word and slam communities in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1996-2010 where she was Grand Slam Champion in 2002 and the winner of the People Before Profits Poetry Prize in 2003. She has toured with Sister Spit & Body Heat, gained national recognition for her appearances on NPR, and her short film with J Aguilar entitled “Getting Off” won the Jury Award at TG Fest: The Los Angeles Transgender Film Festival in 2011. Her writing has been anthologized for over two decades, most notably in Without A Net: The Female Experience of Growing-Up Working-Class, Baby Remember My Name: New Queer Girl Writing, Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders of the Spoken-Word Revolution, The Encyclopedia Britannica of Activism & Social Change, and Jot@: A Queer Latinx Anthology and she is the author of three books: Say It With Your Whole Mouth: Poems (Monkey Press, 2003), 51 Poems About Nothing At All: Chapbook, Poems (Ladybox Books, 2016), and a novel Life Is Wonderful, People Are Terrific (Ladybox Books, 2015) which was a 2016 Lambda Literary Finalist for Best LGBT Debut Fiction and named one of the top ten books with a POC protagonist by Bustle Magazine and Buzzfeed in 2016. She received her MFA & MA from San Francisco State University in 2003 as well as a BA with High Honors from UC Santa Cruz in 2000 and is currently a professor of Literature & Counterculture at UC San Diego.

Rhona Berens

In her talk, Rhona Berens, PhD, PCC will introduce the four primary styles of toxic communication–a.k.a., ways to fight “wrong”–as guidelines for crafting riveting conflicts and developing complex characters. While mastering dramatic conflict enriches writing, it undermines relationships and self-esteem. In the second part of her talk, Rhona will explore how common challenges faced by writers–e.g., procrastination, over-writing–often result from internalizing toxic conflict styles.  She will share ways to turn those toxins into tools.  Get ready to learn more about writing fights in service of your art and fighting right in service of your life.

Rhona is a professional coach who works with creatives, leaders and parents. She helps clients stay sane, stay real, and stay the course to their dreams. For those who seek coaching as a quick path to happiness, Rhona provides great referrals. For those who yearn to live their complex, paradoxical lives with courage, creativity and humor, Rhona’s the coach of choice. She offers empowering tools, tales and touchstones to shift self-criticism to self-acceptance, and turn obstacles into opportunities. Rhona studied at The Coaches Training Institute and The Center for Right Relationship, is accredited by The International Coach Federation, and holds a PhD in Film & Media Studies from UCLA. When she’s not coaching, or parenting her two fabulous, obstinate children, she writes slam poetry and compulsively rewrites a biographical memoir entitled, Piggyback with a Madman.

Venita Blackburn

Venita Blackburn received the Prairie Schooner book prize for fiction, which resulted in the publication of her collectedstories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes, in 2017. In 2018 she was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham award for debut fiction, a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions award, and the recipient of the PEN America Los Angeles literary prize in fiction. Her hometown is Compton, California, and she is an assistant professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

Lucy Jane Bledsoe

Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s new novel, A THIN BRIGHT LINE, which the NEW YORK TIMES says “triumphs as an intimate and humane evocation of day-to-day life under inhumane circumstances,” was published in October. She’s the author of five other novels, a collection of narrative nonfiction, and a collection of short stories. Her fiction has won a Yaddo Fellowship, the 2013 Saturday Evening Post Fiction Award, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, the Sherwood Anderson Prize for Fiction, a Pushcart nomination, a California Arts Council Fellowship, an American Library Association Stonewall Award, and two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships. Her stories have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Chinese. Her next novel, THE EVOLUTION OF LOVE, will be published in 2018.

Sylvia Brownrigg

Sylvia Brownrigg grew up in Silicon Valley and in England. She is the author of seven works of fiction, including the short stories Ten Women Who Shook the World and the novel for children, Kepler’s Dream (published under the name Juliet Bell), which was recently turned into an independent film. Sylvia has written reviews for a wide range of publications including the NY Times, the LA Times, the Guardian and the TLS. Brownrigg’s most recent novel, Pages for Her, described as “audacious, confident, smart, seductive,” is a sequel to her Lambda award-winning love story published in 2001, Pages for You. She lives in Berkeley with her family.

Kristen Chen

Kirstin Chen’s second novel, Bury What We Cannot Take (Little A, March 2018), was named a best book of the year by Entropy, Popsugar, and Book Bub, and a top pick of the season by Electric Literature, The Millions, The Rumpus, Harper’s Bazaar, and InStyle. She is also the author of Soy Sauce for Beginners. She has received awards from the Steinbeck Fellows Program, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, among others. Born and raised in Singapore, she currently resides in San Francisco.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree (Doubleday) is anIndie Next selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, Nylon, and Guernica, among others. Rojas Contreras has received awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, The Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. She teaches writing at the University of San Francisco, and works with immigrant high school students as part of a San Francisco Arts Commission initiative bringing writers into public schools. She is working on a family memoir about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia who it was said had the power to move clouds.

David Corbett

David Corbett is the award-winning author of the writing guide The Art of Character (“A writer’s bible” – Elizabeth Brundage) and six novels, including The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday (August 2018). His short fiction has been selected twice for Best American Mystery Stories, and his non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, Narrative, Bright Ideas, and Writer’s Digest, where he is a contributing editor. www.davidcorbett.com

Peter Coyote

PETER COYOTE has performed as an actor for some of the world’s most distinguished filmmakers, including: Barry Levinson, Roman Polanski, Pedro Almodovar, Steven Spielberg, Martin Ritt, Steven Soderberg, Sidney and Jean Paul Rappeneau. He is an Emmy-Award winning narrator of over 120 documentary films, including Ken Burns, National Parks, Prohibition, The West, the Dust Bowl and this year’s acclaimed The Roosevelts for which he received his second Emmy in 2015. Mr. Coyote has written a memoir of the 1960’s counter-culture called Sleeping Where I Fall which received universally excellent reviews, and is new book, The Rainman’s Third Cure: An Irregular Education, about mentors and the search for wisdom, was nominated for one of the top five books in Northern California in 2015.

Jeanne DuPrau

Jeanne DuPrau is the New York Times best-selling author of The City of Ember and its three companion books. She has also written a memoir, The Earth House, as well as various magazine articles, essays, book reviews, and stories. The City of Ember was made into a movie starring Bill Murray and Saoirse Ronan in 2008.

Grant Faulkner

Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including Tin House, The Southwest Review, and The Gettysburg Review. His essays on creativity have been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. He has published a collection of one hundred 100-word stories, Fissures, and his book of essays on creativity, Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Prompts to Boost Your Creative Mojo, was recently published by Chronicle Books.

Brian Hurley

Dorothy Hearst

Dorothy Hearst has over twenty years of experience in the publishing industry as a published novelist, nonfiction editor and writer, acquiring editor, marketing professional, and proposal writer. She specializes in finding, crafting, and sharing ideas and stories that can change the way people live, work, and see the world.

Dorothy is the author of The Wolf Chronicles trilogy, published by Simon & Schuster. The series tells the story of how the wolf evolved into the dog from the wolf’s point of view. She is an editor-at-large for Sounds True, publishing books on personal transformation and spirituality, and a freelance proposal writer, co-writer, and editor. Previously she acquired books for Jossey-Bass/Wiley, publishing books for nonprofit, public, and social changes leaders.

Vanessa Hua

Vanessa Hua is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and author of DECEIT AND OTHER POSSIBILITIES, which received the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award, a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as honors from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Asian American Journalists’ Association. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, FRONTLINE/World, Washington Post, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. She has filed stories from China, South Korea, Panama, Burma and Ecuador. Her novel, A RIVER OF STARS, is forthcoming (Ballantine, Spring 2018).

Yang Huang

Yang Huang grew up in China and came to the U.S. to study computer science. While working as an engineer, she studied literature and pursued writing. Her collection of linked family stories My Old Faithful won the Juniper Prize for Fiction. Her debutnovel Living Treasures won the Nautilus Book Award silver medal in fiction. Her essays and stories have appeared in Poets & Writers, TASTE, Literary Hub, The Margins, Eleven Eleven, Asian Pacific American Journal, and others. Yang lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and works for the University of California at Berkeley.

Lydia Kiesling

 Lydia Kiesling is the author of The Golden State and a 2018 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree. Her writing has appeared at outlets including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker online, The Guardian, and Slate.

Devi Laskar

Devi S. Laskar’s debut novel, The Atlas of Reds and Blues (Counterpoint Press 2019) has garnered praise in The Washington Post, Chicago Review of Books, Booklist and elsewhere, and has appeared on most anticipated lists in TIME, Cosmopolitan (UK), Marie Claire, Nylon & The Millions. Laskar holds an MFA from Columbia University and an MA from The University of Illinois. A former newspaper reporter, she is now a poet, photographer and novelist. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from such journals as Rattle, Tin House and Crab Orchard Review. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is an alumna of both TheOpEdProject and VONA, among others. In 2017, Finishing Line Press published two poetry chapbooks. A native of Chapel Hill, N.C., she now lives in California.

Rebecca Lawton

Rebecca Lawton is a writer, fluvial geologist, and former Colorado River guide who has published in Aeon, Brevity, Hakai, Orion, Shenandoah, Sierra, THEMA, Undark, and many other journals. She is the author and co-author of eight books, including the San Francisco Chronicle Bay Area Bestseller Reading Water: Lessons from the River. Her writing honors include the Ellen Meloy Award for Desert Writers, a WILLA for original softcover fiction, the Waterston Desert Writing Prize, three Pushcart nominations, a Best American Science and Nature Writing nomination, and residencies at Hedgebrook, The Island Institute, and Playa. Rebecca recently completed her second novel, drafted while she was a 2014/15 Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at the University of Alberta.

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee

Born in New York City, Christine Hyung-Oak Lee is the author of the memoir Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Guernica, the Rumpus, and BuzzFeed, among other publications.
She has been awarded a residency at Hedgebrook, and her pieces have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and placed in competitions such as the Poets and Writers’ Magazine Writers Exchange Contest, Glimmer Train Fiction Open, and others. She is Deputy Managing Editor at The Rumpus. Her novel, The Golem of Seoul, is forthcoming from Ecco / Harper Collins.

Shobha Rao

Shobha Rao moved to the United States from India at the age of seven. She is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, and her story “Kavitha and Mustafa” was chosen by T.C. Boyle for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2015. She is the author of the short story collection, An Unrestored Woman, and the novel, Girls Burn Brighter. She lives in San Francisco. 

Shanthi Sekaran

Shanthi Sekaran lives in Berkeley and is the author of two novels. Of her latest novel, Lucky Boy, the San Francisco Chronicle says, “With wit, empathy and a page-turning plot, the novel stirs ethical questions in the reader that the author rightly refuses to answer”. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New York Times, Canteen Magazine, Huffington Post and Best New American Voices. She’s a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, and teaches writing and literature at California College of the Arts. You can find out more about her writing and events at www.shanthisekaran.com.

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for women writers in 2011 and was selected for the Africa39, a 2014 Hay Festival project to identify the best African writers under 40. The Old Drift is her first novel.

Cynthia Silver

NYC-based stage & film director and acting teacher Cynthia Silver’s award-winning short films, Sleep Training and Sibs, produced by Made With Sass, have screened at Brooklyn Women’s Film Festival, San Jose Int’l Short Film Festival, USA Film Festival, and the Oscar- qualifying Edmonton Film Festival, among others. She is currently in post-production for the web series, Adult, and her third short, Chemistry, while in development for a short film adaptation of Wendy MacLeod’s one-act play, The Shallow End. Stage directing credits include The Rules, by Dipika Guha; Reckless, by Craig Lucas; Uncommon Women and Others, by Wendy Wasserstein; and Melancholy Play, by Sarah Ruhl. Cynthia has been on faculty at Atlantic Acting School since 1998, where she previously trained as an actor while earning her BFA from NYU, and currently teaches acting by way of the Practical Aesthetics technique, developed by David Mamet and William H. Macy. Visit her at CynSilver.com.

Heather Young

After a decade practicing law and another raising children, Heather Young decided to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a novelist. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is an alumnus of the Squaw Valley Writers’ Workshop, both of which helped her stop writing like a lawyer. Originally from Maryland, she now lives in Northern California with her husband and two teenagers.

Industry Experts

Lisa Abellera

Lisa Abellera joined Kimberley Cameron and Associates in 2013 with a background
in management, marketing, and finance. After earning her MFA in Creative Writing from University of San Francisco, Lisa now follows her true passion for books and writing. She enjoys stories with high personal stakes, characters with deep inner lives, and lush world-building. She is seeking upmarket and literary fiction, women’s fiction, historical fiction, mystery, suspense, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, literary horror, most speculative fiction except paranormal (no demons, angels, vampires, zombies, werewolves, etc.), romance if an element or sub-genre, and all YA and middle grade fiction genres. She is especially looking for stories by #ownvoices authors and writers from marginalized or underrepresented backgrounds. You can find out more at: lisaabellera.com and kimberleycameron.com/lisa-abellera

Jennifer Alton

Jennifer Alton is an editor at Counterpoint Press, where her projects have included Nell Irvin Painter’s Old in Art School, a finalist for the NBCC Award in Autobiography; Sands Hall’s Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology; Marion Winik’s The Baltimore Book of the Dead; Devi S. Laskar’s The Atlas of Reds and Blues; Matt Sheehan’s The Transpacific Experiment; and Amanda Goldblatt’s Hard Mouth, among others. She holds an MFA from San Francisco State University, where she was Assistant Fiction Editor of Fourteen Hills, co-curator of the Velvet Revolution Reading Series, and taught undergraduate creative writing. A returned Peace Corps volunteer (Ukraine 2011-2013), she lives in the Bay Area.

Elise Capron

Elise Capron is an agent at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency, which was established 40 years ago and represents a wide range of award-winning and best-selling fiction and non-fiction authors, including Amy Tan, Lisa See, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chitra Divakaruni, Diane Mott Davidson, and many more. Elise has been with SDLA for 15 years.

On the fiction side, Elise focuses on serious adult literary fiction. She loves family sagas, coming-of-age, magical realism, and multicultural fiction, and looks for unique narrative voices and memorable characters. A few of her representative fiction titles include Tiphanie Yanique’s The Land of Love and Drowning (Riverhead), Courtney Brkic’s The First Rule of Swimming (Little, Brown), Maureen McHugh’s After the Apocalypse (Small Beer Press), which was picked as a “Top 10 Best of the Year” by Publishers Weekly, and Howard Rodman’s upcoming The Great Eastern (Melville House).

On the non-fiction side, Elise is most interested in narrative histories in the realm of science, medicine, the environment, and interesting slices of culture. Her non-fiction client list is primarily composed of historians and journalists. Some of Elise’s representative non-fiction titles include Cynthia Barnett’s Rain: A Natural and Cultural History (Crown), which was long-listed for the National Book Award and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, Meera Subramanian’s A River Runs Again (Public Affairs), Jack Shuler’s The Thirteenth Turn: A History of the Noose (Public Affairs), Jonathon Keats’s You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future (Oxford University Press), and more.

Michael Carr

Michael Carr is a literary agent with a background in editing and writing, working from a home base in San Francisco. He represents writers in a variety of genres, with a special emphasis on historical fiction, mystery and suspense, and science fiction and fantasy. Michael works carefully with clients to produce the cleanest, most professional manuscripts and enjoys teaching at workshops and conferences to help develop emerging writers. He speaks Spanish and conversational French and before joining Veritas had professions as diverse as programming simulators for nuclear submarines and owning an inn in Vermont.

Michele Crim

Michele Crim is the west coast literary agent for Miller Bowers Griffin Literary Management, a boutique agency based in New York City. They represent authors such as Mark Bittman and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Cal Peternell and Mads Refslund, co-founder of Noma, and MBG recently signed Moby to do a cookbook for his new award-winning restaurant, Little Pine. They work with chefs, food, and lifestyle writers such as Deborah Madison, Sarah Britton, Tess Masters and many others. They also represent fiction and narrative nonfiction writers, worldwide. Most recently, Michele was at the helm of Ten Speed Press (an imprint of Penguin Random House) marketing for eleven years. After launching books for cultural luminaries such as Marie Kondo, Deborah Madison, Yotam Ottolenghi, Heidi Swanson, and the Food52 team, it seemed like a natural transition to become a book agent in January of 2018. Among others, she now represents Yumiko Sekine, founder of the beloved international brand Fog Linen Work; Allison Arevalo, best-selling cookbook author with a new book, The Pasta Friday Cookbook, coming out in September of 2019; and Charleen Badman, James Beard nominee and celebrated chef-owner of FnB Restaurant and Bar in Scottsdale. Prior to her Ten Speed assignment, she represented the University of California Press and Princeton University Press as sales manager for the western territory; she directed the sales and marketing program for Nolo Press; and she was a marketing director for Publishers Group West.

Amy Cloughley

Amy Cloughley is an agent with Kimberley Cameron & Associates. Keeping with the agency’s unique legacy of The Reece Halsey Agency, she strives to represent the highest quality writing. Amy came to the agency with a background in editing, writing, and marketing. You can also find her coaching writers via a Writer’s Digest course designed to help authors craft and strengthen their submission materials. She is looking for literary and commercial fiction and has a special interest in mystery/suspense, near historical, and upmarket women’s fiction. She also seeks narrative nonfiction projects. You can visit her agency website at Kimberleycameron.com or follow her on Twitter @amycloughley.

Laura Cogan

Laura Cogan is the editor of ZYZZYVA. She holds a B.A. and an M.A. from New York University.

Vicki DeArmon

Vicki DeArmon has been in the publishing business for 30 years. She started her career by founding Foghorn Press in San Francisco in 1985 at the age of 25 and, as its publisher, growing it to a multi-million dollar enterprise publishing 20 titles a year before selling in it in 2001. From 2008 to 2016, she served as the Marketing & Events Director for Copperfield’s Books eight stores, developing its nationally recognized events program. She’s produced thousands of author events, specializing in creating large collaborations which she continues to do through her new company All Things Book. She also consults to the book trade. And occasionally, she pop-ups as a bookseller at events that interest her such as the Sonoma County Writers Camp. She’s a writer of short fiction that has won some acclaim but her interrupted MA from San Francisco State University (1985) is testimony to the tension between her two passions, entrepreneurship and writing.

April Eberhardt

April Eberhardt, Literary Change Agent and Author Advocate, is passionate about helping authors be published in the most effective and satisfying way. After 25 years as a corporate strategist and consultant, Ms. Eberhardt joined the literary world, where she saw strategic opportunity to play a role in the changing world of publishing. Ms. Eberhardt advises and assists authors worldwide, as they choose the best pathway to publication for their work, be it indie or traditional, digital or print, and serves as a consultant to new publishing startups. She divides her time between San Francisco, New York and Paris.

Brian Hurley

Brian Hurley is the Publisher at Fiction Advocate, a small press dedicated to expanding the cultural influence of the literary arts. He is also an Executive Editor at Callisto Media, a book publishing start-up in the Bay Area. Previously he was the Books Editor at The Rumpus and the linguistics editor at Oxford University Press. He holds an MA in Publishing & Writing from Emerson College. He has written for The Millions, Electric Literature, and Full Stop.

Mary C. Moore

Mary C. Moore is a literary agent with Kimberley Cameron & Associates based in the Bay Area. She is seeking fiction, primarily fantasy, science fiction, young adult, women’s fiction, and upmarket book club fiction. Find out more at marycmoore.com and kimberleycameron.com.

Nicki Richesin

Nicki Richesin is a literary agent with Wendy Sherman Associates. She has worked as a freelance editor for over fifteen years with many talented writers, as well as publishers such as Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Seal Press, and Little, Brown. Nicki also edited four literary anthologies (The May Queen, Because I Love Her, What I Would Tell Her, and Crush) featuring essays by bestselling authors including Jennifer Weiner, Lauren Oliver, David Levithan, Karen Joy Fowler, Chris Bohjalian, and Kaui Hart Hemmings. She is especially interested in representing literary and upmarket fiction, young adult fiction, narrative nonfiction, and memoir.

Andy Ross

Andy Ross opened his literary agency in 2008.  Prior to becoming and agent, he was the owner of the legendary  Cody’s Books in Berkeley.  Andy  represents books in a  wide range of  non-fiction genres  including: narrative non-fiction, science, journalism, history, popular culture, memoir,  and  current events . He also represents literary, commercial, upmarket women’s fiction, and YA fiction. Authors Andy  represents include: Daniel Ellsberg, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Anjanette Delgado, Elisa Kleven, Tawni Waters, Randall Platt, Mary Jo McConahay,  Gerald Nachman,  Paul Krassner, Milton Viorst,  and Beth Hensperger. You can read more about Andy at his website at www.andyrossagency.com and on his popular blog “Ask the Agent” at www.andyrossagency.wordpress.com.

Bonnie Solow

A former journalist and film and publishing executive, Bonnie established Solow Literary Enterprises in 1997, home of 29 New York Times bestsellers. Acting as a creative midwife, she plays a hands-on editorial role shaping and developing proposals and manuscripts for sale to publishers. As a literary manager, she goes beyond procuring book deals for her clients, taking advantage of her background in intellectual property development by leveraging opportunities to migrate her clients’ content beyond the bookshelf. She has helped broaden her clients’ reach through PBS productions, film deals and speaking engagements. She is committed to representing projects that are fresh, well written, and marketable; ones for which she feels considerable passion and that make positive contributions by expanding how people see, feel and think. Among her most recent bestsellers (2016) are The Importance of Being Little by Erika Christakis (Viking), A Mind of Your Own by Kelly Brogan, MD (Harper), and Grain Brain Whole Life Plan by David Perlmutter, MD (Little, Brown). Bonnie is a member of the Association of Authors’ Representatives and The Authors Guild.

Anika Streitfeld

Anika Streitfeld was an acquisitions editor at Random House and MacAdam/Cage for over a decade. She edited bestselling and award-winning fiction including Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply and Amanda Eyre Ward’s How to Be Lost. Now an independent editor, Anika supports writers throughout book development and publication. She is an MFA candidate in fiction in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and lives with her husband, two children, and two giant dogs in Berkeley.

Jennifer Chen Tran

Jennifer Chen Tran is an agent at Bradford Literary, joining in September 2017. She represents both fiction and non-fiction. Originally from New York, Jennifer is a lifelong reader and experienced member of the publishing industry. Prior to joining Bradford Literary, she was an Associate Agent at Fuse Literary and served as Counsel at The New Press. She obtained her Juris Doctor from Northeastern School of Law in Boston, MA, and a Bachelors of Arts in English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. Select titles that Jennifer has represented: I WILL LOVE YOU FOREVER by Cori Salchert (Barbour/ Shiloh Run Press); BREAKING UP & BOUNCING BACK by Samantha Burns (Dover/ Ixia Press); THE ART OF ESCAPING by Erin Callahan (Amberjack); MATCH MADE IN MANHATTAN by Amanda Stauffer (Skyhorse); A CROWDFUNDER’S STRATEGY GUIDE by Jamey Stegmaier (Berrett-Koehler).

Brooke Warner

Brooke Warner is publisher of She Writes Press and SparkPress, president of Warner Coaching Inc., and author of Green-light Your Book, What’s Your Book?, and three books on memoir. Brooke is a TEDx speaker and the former Executive Editor of Seal Press. She currently sits on the boards of the Independent Book Publishers Association, the Bay Area Book Festival, and the National Association of Memoir Writers.  She writes a monthly column for Publishers Weekly.

Not Pictured:

Natalie Baszile

Laurie Fox

Kendra Lubalin

Caille Millner

BJ Robbins

Jennifer March Soloway