Visitors

Anna Lena Phillips Bell (Ecotone and Lookout Books)

Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry; Smaller Songs, a chapbook from St Brigid Press; and A Pocket Book of Forms, a travel-sized poetry guide. Formerly senior editor at American Scientist, she teaches in the creative writing department at UNC Wilmington, where she is the editor of Ecotone, the literary magazine that seeks to reimagine place, and Lookout Books. During her time as editor, work from Ecotone has been reprinted in anthologies including Best American Poetry, Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best American Short Stories, and the Pushcart Prize anthology; has received Best Original Fiction in the Stack Magazine Awards; and has been a finalist for the ASME Award for Fiction and CLMP’s Firecracker Awards. The recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship in literature, Bell lives with her family near the Cape Fear River and calls ungendered Appalachian square dances in North Carolina and beyond.

Millicent Bennett (Harper)

Millicent Bennett (she/her) is an Executive Editor acquiring literary fiction, memoir, and narrative nonfiction at Harper. Formerly, she was Editorial Director at HMH. Her authors have won or been shortlisted for major prizes including the National Book Award, Man Booker Prize, the Whiting Award, LA Times Book Prize, the Rona Jaffe Award, and others.

Cortney Lamar Charleston (The Rumpus)

Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017) and Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books, 2021). He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, Granta and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor at The Rumpus and on the editorial board at Alice James Books.

George David Clark (32 Poems)

George David Clark has served as editor-in-chief and executive director of 32 Poems since 2011. Over that time, work first printed in the journal has regularly appeared in the Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, and Pushcart Prize anthology series, among others. David’s Reveille won the Miller Williams Prize, and a second collection, Newly Not Eternal, is forthcoming from LSU. He teaches creative writing and literary editing as an associate professor at Washington & Jefferson College.

Leigh Anne Couch (Swing)

Leigh Anne Couch, formerly at Duke University Press and the Sewanee Review, is a freelance editor of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and miscellany. She is also the founder and editor of Swing, a print literary magazine in partnership with The Porch, a nonprofit writers’ collective in Nashville. Her books of poetry include Every Lash (2020 Vassar Miller Prize winner) and Houses Fly Away (Zone 3 Press). She lives in Sewanee, Tennessee with writer Kevin Wilson and their sons, Griff and Patch. www.leighannecouch.com

Jessica Faust (The Southern Review)

Jessica Faust is the coeditor and poetry editor of The Southern Review. She taught for many years before joining The Southern Review in 2004 as assistant editor, and in 2011 became the journal’s poetry editor and coeditor. Poems from the journal perennially are selected for Best American Poetry, Best Small Fictions, and the Pushcart Prize anthology.

Mary Flinn (Blackbird)

Mary Flinn began her tenure as the director of the New Virginia Review, Inc. in 1985 and is a founder and senior editor of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts. She is co-editor, with George Garrett, of Elvis in Oz: New Stories and Poems from the Hollins Creative Writing Program.

Sally Kim (Putnam)

Sally Kim is SVP, Publisher of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Random House, where she also edits her own list of fiction, including New York Times bestsellers by Megan Abbott (The Turnout), Robert Jones, Jr. (The Prophets, National Book Award finalist), Kiley Reid (Such a Fun Age), Chloe Benjamin (The Immortalists), and Cristina Alger (Girls Like Us). Recent publications include novels by Karen Joy Fowler, Sarah Winman, Alma Katsu, Steven Rowley, M. O. Walsh, and Leah Stewart. In 2022, Poets & Writers honored her with The Editor’s Award.

Alane Salierno Mason (W.W. Norton & Company)

Alane Salierno Mason is an executive editor and vice president at the independent, employee-owned W.W. Norton & Company. For over 30 years, she has acquired and edited both fiction and nonfiction, including bestsellers and prizewinners by Diana Abu-Jaber (Fencing with the King), Diane Ackerman (The Zookeepers Wife), Jessica Bruder (Nomadland), Andre Dubus III (House of Sand and Fog, Townie) Stephen Greenblatt (The Swerve, Will in the World), David Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars); Dara Horn (People Love Dead Jews, The World to Come), Pam Houston (Deep Creek), Randall Kenan (Black Folk Could Fly), Don Lee (Yellow, The Collective), Maggie Nelson (The Art of Cruelty), Janice Nimura (Daughters of the Samurai, The Doctors Blackwell) and Brad Watson (The Heaven of Mercury, Miss Jane). She translated Elio Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily (a New Directions Classic) and has published reviews and essays in Vanity Fair, The Boston Review, the New York Times, and the Daily News, and most recently, reminiscences of writers Randall Kenan and Brad Watson in Literary Hub.

She is the founder and president of WordsWithoutBorders.org, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the translation, publication, and promotion of international literature, earning a Distinguished Alumna Award from UNC-CH “for outstanding contributions to humanity in the field of world literature.” In 2014, she was awarded the first ever “Editorial Achievement Award” from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, “for broadening the world of American letters to include global and diasporic narratives.”

Speer Morgan (The Missouri Review)

Speer Morgan is the editor of The Missouri Review and teaches fiction writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the author of a collection of short stories, Frog Gig and Other Stories (University of Missouri Press), and five novels; Belle Starr: A Novel (Little Brown), Brother Enemy (Little Brown), The Assemblers (Dutton), The Whipping Boy (Houghton Mifflin), and The Freshour Cylinders (Macmurray and Beck, winner of the American Book Award). He is also the co-editor of The Best of the Missouri Review (University of Missouri Press) and For Our Beloved Country: Diaries of Americans in War (Atlantic Monthly Press).

Eric Smith (The Sewanee Review)

Eric Smith is the author of Black Hole Factory, which won the 2017 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. He is the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship and currently lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he works as the managing editor for the Sewanee Review.

Maggie Su (The Georgia Review)

Maggie Su currently serves as the associate prose editor for The Georgia Review. She holds an MFA in fiction from Indiana University and a PhD in creative writing from University of Cincinnati. Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Juked, DIAGRAM, Mid-American Review, The Offing, and elsewhere. She previously served as assistant editor for Cincinnati Review and Acre Books. She lives in Athens, Georgia with her partner, cat, and turtle.

Liz Van Hoose (5E)

For more than a decade, Liz Van Hoose served the editorial departments of Alfred A. Knopf and Viking Penguin before hanging a shingle as an independent editor in 2013. The range of fiction and narrative nonfiction she has edited includes work by Marcia Butler, Ron Currie, Jr., Fiona Davis, Kim Edwards, Alex Gilvarry, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Garrison Keillor, William Kittredge, Robert Love, Dan Morrison, Haruki Murakami, Beth Minh Nguyen, Alix Ohlin, Douglas Preston, Alice Randall, Jim Shepard, Prabhjot Singh, Amor Towles, and Danielle Trussoni. A member of the independent editors collective 5E, she has spoken at various writers conferences across the country, including Aspen Summer Words, Bread Loaf, Miami Writers Institute, and Sewanee.

Adam Vines (Birmingham Poetry Review. BPR)

Adam Vines is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of five collections—the latest, Lures (LSU P, 2022), and his poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and Poetry, among others. He is the Editor of Birmingham Poetry Review, which celebrates its 50^th issue this year. BPR received AWP’s 2020 Small Press Publisher Award, and poems from BPR are reprinted regularly on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and appeared in the Best American Poetry anthology in 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2023 and in the Pushcart anthology in 2020.

Ginny Smith Younce (The Penguin Press)

Ginny Smith Younce is an Executive Editor at Penguin Press/Penguin Random House. A native of Macon, GA, she lives with her family in Nashville. Ginny is a graduate of Yale and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), and she has also worked at Ecco/HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. She has worked with authors including Celeste Ng, Nate Silver, Clarissa Ward, Sanjena Sathian, Emily Oster, Jonathan Haidt, and Sen. Raphael G. Warnock.

Felicia Zamora (Colorado Review)

Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry, including I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press, 2021); Quotient (forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions, 2022); Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (Red Hen Press, 2020); and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (University of Notre Dame Press). A CantoMundo and Ragdale Foundation fellow, she won the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Wabash Prize for Poetry and the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Georgia Review, Guernica, Missouri Review Poem-of-the-Week, Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.

Jin Auh (The Wylie Agency)

Jin Auh is a literary agent at The Wylie Agency, which has offices in New York and London. She serves on the Board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Born in Seoul, she lives in Brooklyn.

Sarah Bowlin (Aevitas Creative Management)

Sarah Bowlin joined Aevitas Creative Management in 2017. Before becoming an agent, she spent a decade as an editor of literary fiction and nonfiction, first at Riverhead Books and most recently at Henry Holt & Company. In her time as an agent, she has worked with both emerging and established voices including the Giller Prize-winning writer Souvankham Thammavongsa, National Book award long-listed novelist Vanessa Veselka, as well as acclaimed writers Aysegul Savas, Lynn Steger Strong, Gene Kwak, Ashley Nelson Levy, Jasmin Hakes, R.K. Russell, Sabrina Orah Mark, Elisa Albert, Ismail Muhammad and Janika Oza. She is interested in bold voices and experiments in form—specifically stories of strong or difficult women and unexpected narratives of place, identity, and the shifting ways we see ourselves and each other. Originally from the South, she now lives in Los Angeles.

Michelle Brower (Trellis Literary Management)

Michelle Brower has spent over fifteen years as an agent, first at Wendy Sherman Associates and most recently as a partner at Aevitas Creative Management. She co-founded Trellis Literary Management in 2021 in order to better serve and support her authors and create an agency with a lasting positive impact in the world of publishing. She earned her BA from The College of New Jersey and her MA in English literature from New York University. Michelle represents fiction that seeks to make the world a bigger place, combines a strong voice and a strong story, and explores the many ways in which people connect to each other. She has a weakness for literary suspense of any kind. She also represents select narrative non-fiction projects. Authors include Erika Swyler, Tara Conklin, Clare Beams, Viet Dinh and Sarah Domet, among others.

Sarah Burnes (The Gernert Company)

Sarah Burnes became a literary agent in 2001 after stints in the editorial departments of Houghton Mifflin, the Knopf group, and Little, Brown. Joining The Gernert Company in 2005, she now represents adult fiction writers (Sewanee’s Alice McDermott and Tony Earley among them); children’s fiction writers (New York Times bestsellers Pseudonymous Bosch and Margaret Stohl); and journalists and critics (The Ice At the End of the World’s Jon Gertner and Freeman's editor John Freeman). Her writers have either won or been shortlisted for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Story Prize, the Los Angeles Times First Book Prize, the Whiting Writer’s Award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, and they have received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. Sarah sits on the board of the non-profit progressive publisher The New Press. She lives with her husband and three children in Brooklyn, NY.

Sophie Cudd (The Book Group)

Sophie Cudd is a literary agent at The Book Group, where she represents all areas of fiction, and various narrative nonfiction. In particular, Sophie gravitates towards compelling, high-stakes stories; accessible and deeply resonant characters; and plot-driven stories with a strong sense of time and place. Sophie has an English Degree from Southern Methodist University and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Emily Forland (Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents)

Emily Forland is an agent at Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents in NYC. She represents both established and debut authors of literary fiction and nonfiction. Among the books she represents have been bestsellers and winners or nominees for the National Book Award, the Women’s Prize, the Booker, the Pulitzer, the Edgar, the Story Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, the PEN/Hemingway, the Story Prize, the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award and selections of Oprah’s Book Club and Reese’s Book Club. She has a special place in her heart for original writing that jumps off the page.

Erin Harris (Folio Literary Management)

Erin Harris is a Senior Vice President at Folio Literary Management, where she represents literary and upmarket fiction and narrative nonfiction. Her clients include NYT bestsellers, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalists, winners of the Lambda Literary Award, Indie Next Pick authors, and Reese Witherspoon’s “Hello Sunshine,” Good Morning America, and Read with Jenna book club selections.

Gail Hochman (Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents)

Gail Hochman is the president of Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, LLC. Her authors’ works have become bestselling novels, successful films and television series, and international publishing phenomena, and have earned their authors prizes ranging from the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and PEN/Faulkner Award to the Guggenheim Fellowship, Lambda Literary Award, and the Caldecott and Newbery Medals. Gail is active in numerous charities and foundations which support the needs of women and children in New York City and the writing community.

Annie Hwang (Ayesha Pande Literary)

Annie Hwang is a literary agent at Ayesha Pande Literary where she represents voice-driven literary fiction and select nonfiction. In particular, she gravitates toward subversive and irreverent literary fiction and impactful mission-driven narrative nonfiction that grapples with the complexities of our world. A fierce champion of underrepresented voices, Annie is always on the hunt for gifted storytelling that stretches its genre to new heights.

Margaret Riley King (William Morris Endeavor)

Margaret Riley King is a partner and literary agent in WME’s global book division representing a roster of bestselling and award-winning authors in all areas of fiction and nonfiction. She is looking for material that centers around compelling storytelling and emotional connection. She believes that the greatest books not only teach you something about yourself and the world around you, but make you think critically and feel deeply. Some of her clients include Glennon Doyle, Sue Monk Kidd, Jeannette Walls, Dani Shapiro, Chloe Benjamin, Austin Channing Brown, Sarah Pekkanen, Greer Hendricks, Jen Hatmaker, Ann Leary, Meg Waite Clayton, Laura Lynne Jackson and others. She splits her time between her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, and New York City.

Anjali Singh (Ayesha Pande Literary)

Anjali Singh is an agent at Ayesha Pande Literary, a Harlem-based boutique literary agency. She represents Bridgett Davis, The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers; Susan Abulhawa, bestselling author of Mornings in Jenin and Against the Loveless World which won the 2021 Palestine Book Award, the Arab Book Award and was an Aspen Words Prize finalist; Nawaaz Ahmed, author of Radiant Fugitives, a 2021 PEN/Faulkner finalist. In addition, she represents Rachel Harper, whose novel The Other Mother centers love, race and queer identity and Mai Al-Nakib, whose multigenerational debut An Unlasting Home is set in Kuwait; both were recently released in paperback. She is on the lookout for character-driven fiction or non-fiction works that reflect an engagement with the world around us and graphic novels for all ages.

Renée Zuckerbrot (Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents)

Renée Zuckerbrot worked as an editor at Doubleday before becoming a literary agent. Her clients include Jonathan Escoffery, Kelly Link, Dan Chaon, Shawn Vestal, SWC alums M.O. Walsh and Polly Rosenwaike, and ‘Pemi Aguda among others. Her authors have won or been nominated for a number of awards including the MacArthur Fellowship, National Book Award, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, B&N Discover Great New Writers Award, the Story Prize, and the PEN/O. Henry Prize.

Beth Blickers (APA)

Beth Blickers is an agent at APA, where she represents artists who work in theatre, television, and film. She started her career at the William Morris Agency, where she began work after graduating from NYU. She is the Past President of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas.

Omalolu Fiki (Actor)

Omalolu Fiki is an LA based actor and writer. She just graduated with her MFA from UCSD in 2019. Her most recent work can be seen as part of Milwaukee Rep’s Stay At Home Series “__Told Me.” Regional credits include: An Octoroon (Chautauqua), Into the Breeches (Chautauqua). UCSD credits include: UC San Diego credits: Everybody Black, (w)holeness (Wagner New Play Festival), Mothers (Wagner New Play Festival), Duchess! Duchess! Duchess! (Wagner New Play Festival), A Raisin in the Sun, What of the Night?, Eurydice, Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika, Taming of the Shrew(d), and Mother Courage and her Children.

Katie Gamelli (Paladin Artists)

Katie Gamelli is a Literary Agent at Paladin Artists representing playwrights, composers, lyricists, directors, and designers. Named by the Broadway Women’s Fund as one of the 2020 Women to Watch on Broadway, she spent the first decade of her career at A3 Artists Agency (formerly Abrams), where she became known for her diverse roster of multi-hyphenate clients. A passionate advocate for new play and musical development, she has worked for The Kleban Foundation, served on the Encores! Off-Center Artist's Board (led by Jeanine Tesori and the late Michael Friedman) and the Musical Theatre Factory Advisory Board. She is a CT native and graduate of Marymount Manhattan College.

Sean McIntyre (Actor)

Sean McIntyre is a New York based actor and educator. His recent work includes Broadway, Film, Television, Voiceover, Motion Capture and VR. He is a co-founder and instructor at Performing Prose and has an MFA from UCSD and a BA from James Madison University. He is also a proud lifetime member of The Ensemble Studio Theatre.

Naysan Mojgani (Round House Theatre)

Naysan Mojgani is the Associate Artist--Literary and New Plays at Round House Theater in Washington, DC. As a theatre scholar, director, and dramaturg, Naysan has worked on new and classic work with theatres in San Diego and Minnesota, including MOXIE, Theatre de la Jeune Lune, and Malashock Dance, and has taught at UC San Diego and George Mason University. Naysan holds a PhD in Theatre & Drama from UC San Diego and a BA from Carleton College.

Emily Shain (Actor)

Emily Shain is a professional actor, teacher, and coach based in New York City. She has been on stages across the US as well as on the small screen. She is a partner with the Back Room Shakespeare project and co-founder of Performing Prose. MFA: UCSD

Jesús I. Valles (Actor)

Jesús I. Valles (they/them) is a queer Mexican immigrant, educator, writer-performer from Cd. Juarez/El Paso. Jesús is the winner of the 2023 Yale Drama Series selected by Jeremy O. Harris (Bathhouse.pptx), the winner of the 2022 Kernodle Playwriting Prize (a river, its mouths), and was named the 2022 Emerging Theatre Professional by the National Theatre Conference. As a playwright, Jesús received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Kennedy Center, The Flea, Teatro Vivo, and Outsider Festival. For their work as a poet, Jesús’ received fellowships from CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, Community of Writers, Idyllwild Arts, Undocupoets, and Tin House.

Alexis Williams (The Playwrights Realm)

Alexis Williams is the Associate Artistic Director of The Playwrights Realm in NY where her focus is providing support and mentorship to early career playwrights. Previously, she was an agent with Bret Adams Artists’ Agency where she represented playwrights, directors, composers, designers and choreographers. Before joining the Bret Adams Team, Alexis worked at McCarter Theatre Center, Contemporary Stage Company, and served as Literary Manager for Detroit’s Planet Ant Theatre. In her time in the theatre she has worked as a director, a producer, a dramaturg, a teaching artist, and has assumed multiple other roles in the industry. She has appeared on panels for the National New Play Network, the League Of Professional Theatre Women, the NUEA, and the Musical Theatre Factory; has conducted roundtable discussions with the New School for Drama, InterAct's Core Writer's Group and Paragraph NY. In Fall of 2017 Alexis was named one of the Interval's "Women To Watch". Alexis is on the advisory board of SPACE on Ryder Farm, is an alumnus of the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab and is a graduate of Northwestern University.