Words & Music 2012: Critiques & Consultations

Many of the nation's best-known and best-loved authors, agents and editors will be in The Big Easy this year to review and consult with you. Enjoy this closer look at our agent and editor faculty. Important: Please Note that Elise Capron is dropping out for 2012 as her best friend has decided to get married the same weekend as Words & Music, 2012. Jill Marr of the same agency and whose interests are the same, is replacing Elise. All authors who requested Elise are being re-assigned to Jill. See Jill's bio below. Elise says she'll be chomping at the bit to return in 2013. (For author bios, Click Here! )

Deborah Grosvenor has worked in book publishing for more than 20 years as an editor and literary agent. During her career, Grosvenor has edited or represented several hundred fiction and nonfiction books in the areas of history, biography, politics, current affairs, memoir, the environment, the military, the South, and science, among others. Her best-known acquisition as an editor was a first novel, The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy. Deborah also signed up the debut work of bestselling author Homer Hickham, Torpedo Junction, and helped launch bestselling author Stephen Coonts's first novel, Flight of the Intruder. After running her own agency, the Grosvenor Literary Agency, for ten years, Deborah merged her company for a time with the Kneerim and Williams Agency. She and her colleagues there represented a range of authors, from New York Times best-sellers to Pulitzer prize winners, among them Brad Meltzer, James Fenton, Stephen Greenblatt, Joseph Ellis, Christopher Hitchens, Caroline Elkins, Juan Cole, Dr. Susan Love, E.O. Wilson, Robert Pinsky, Howard Gardner, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Edward M. Hallowell, Graham Allison, Elizabeth Pryor, Henry Allen, Tom Oliphant, Eleanor Clift, Curtis Wilkie, Aaron Miller, and Mort Kondracke.In January, 2011, Deborah announced that she was re-establishing her own firm, the Grosvenor Literary Agency."While I have loved working with my wonderful colleagues at K&W, I have missed the challenges and independence of running my own agency." As part of the move, she added a new associate, attorney Berta Treitl.

April Eberhardt, after 25 years as a corporate strategist and consultant, joined the literary world as head reader for Zoetrope: All-Story, a literary magazine, followed by five years as an agent with two San Francisco-based literary agencies. She holds an MBA from Boston University in Marketing and Finance, a BA from Hamilton (Kirkland) College in Anthropology and French, and a CPLF degree from the University of Paris. She represents clients worldwide, and divides her time between San Francisco, New York and Paris. A self-described "literary change agent," April founded her own agency in order to assist and advise authors as they navigate the increasingly complex world of publishing. As readers and publishers choose among the many ways literature is being delivered in the new millennium, authors need a literary agent who understands both the traditional and electronic marketplaces, along with the evolving options for agent-assisted independent publishing. April works with serious authors who recognize the need for professional support, and the importance of publishing in the highest-quality way, be it traditionally or independently. Agent-vetted manuscripts help independently-published authors stand out from the millions of others, and contribute to raising the bar for independent publishing, garnering recognition and sales for those authors who understand and commit to "self-publishing, done right." April will be discussing new age publishing during Words & Music, 2012. She also will be critiquing manuscripts. While the agency isn't accepting unsolicited submissions just now, manuscripts presented at literary conferences will be considered.

Jeff Kleinman is a literary agent, intellectual property attorney, and founding partner of Folio Literary Management, LLC, a New York literary agency which works with all of the major U.S. publishers (and, through subagents) with most international publishers.  He’s 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 incredibly 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 Garth Stein, Robert Hicks, Charles Shields, Bruce Watson, Neil White, Philip Gerard, and the late Dean Faulkner Wells. His interestes include nonfiction: especially narrative nonfiction with a historical bent, but also memoir, health, parenting, aging, nature, pets, how-to, nature, science, politics, military, espionage, equestrian, biography. His fiction interests include very well-written, character-driven novels; some suspense, thrillers; otherwise mainstream commercial and literary fiction. He is not interested in fiction for children, romance, mysteries, westerns, poetry, or screenplays and novels about serial killers, suicide, or children in peril (kidnapped, killed, raped, etc.)

Jill Marr is an acquiring associate agent at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.
She was graduated from San Diego State University with a B.A. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing and a minor in History. She has a strong Internet and media background as well as more than ten years of publishing experience. She wrote features and ads for Pages, the literary magazine for people who love books, and continues to write book ads for publishing houses, magazine pieces and promotional features for television. After writing ad copy and features for published books for years she knows how to find the “hook” and sell it. Jill is interested in commercial fiction, with an emphasis on mysteries, thrillers and horror, women’s commercial fiction and historical fiction. She also is looking for non-fiction by authors who are getting their work published regularly and who have a realistic sense of the market and their audience. Jill is looking for non-fiction projects in the areas of history, sports, politics, current events, self-help, inspirational, cookbooks, memoir (she especially loves travel and foodie memoirs), health & nutrition, pop culture, humor and music. Some of Jill’s recent and soon-to-be-published non-fiction include the Travel Channel’s Nick Groff’s Chasing Spirits (NAL); Nancy L. Cohen's Delirium: The Shadow Movement That FuelsOur Political Wars(Counterpoint); Martha Biondi’s Black Revolution on Campus: 1968 and its Legacy (UC Press); Doulas A. Wissing’s Funding Our Enemy(Prometheus Books); Rick’s Café: How I Brought a Screen Legend to Life in Casablanca (Lyons Press) by Kathy Kriger; William Jones’ More than the Dream: The Untold Story of the March on Washington(Norton); Rocking the Pink(Seal Press) by singer-songwriter, Laura Roppé; Maybe We’ll Have You Back(Skyhorse) by comedian Fred Stoller; Drunks: America’s Search for Sobriety (Beacon) by Christopher Finan;and Argyle Armada: Life with America’s Top Pro Cycling Team (VeloPress) by Mark Johnson. New fiction includes the psychological thriller, Bloodman(Thomas & Mercer), by Robert Pobi, The Dead Man’s Wife (St. Martin’s Press) by columnist, Solomon Jones; Fangs Out (The Permanent Press), a thriller from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Freed; Corrupt Practices (Seventh Street Books) by entertainment attorney Robert Rotstein; and the Jaden Terrell’s series that includes Racing the Devil and A Cup Full of Midnight (The Permanent Press).Jill is not looking for YA, children’s books, sci-fi, romance or anything involving unicorns. http://www.dijkstraagency.com/

Brandy Rivers is currently a television literary agent working at the Gersh Agency, Hollywood's oldest talent agency. In that capacity, she is responsible for representing authors, television writers, and directors as well as packaging underlying intellectual property including novels, articles, blogs, video games and life rights for production and development in film and television. As an agent, Brandy has packaged many projects for film and television including Breath Deeply, which sold to Universal in one of the largest book to film deals of the past year. Prior to her agency career, Brandy was a manager/producer with Magnet Management. While at Magnet, she packaged numerous projects that she is attached to produce including the upcoming Lifetime pilot Dear Hailey based on  the book Shattered Silence and the Fox feature Hourglass based on Myra McEntire's debut novel. Before moving into representation, Brandy worked in development, most recently at Underground Films, a production/management company whose credits include, Remember Me, a film she helped oversee from development through post production. Previously, she was at Summit Entertainment where she worked on such projects as the Twilight Franchise, Sex Driver, and Knowing. She began her career at Jerry Bruckheimer Television where she worked on over 450 hours of primetime network television including the CSI Franchise, Without a Trace, Cold Case, E Ring, and Close to Home among many others. Brandy is a proud graduate of the University of North Carolina, where she received a BA in Psychology and played Division One Soccer.

Howard Yoon is the Vice President and Editorial Director of the Ross-Yoon Literary Agency. Howard began his publishing career 15 years ago as Gail’s literary assistant. He has served as an agent, writer, and editor on numerous fiction and non-fiction book projects. In 2000, he was the founder and president of an online venture, Authors Online, and in 2003 he co-authored a business book, Begging for Change (HarperCollins) with Robert Egger, which won the McAdams Award for Best Book on the Nonprofit Sector. As a literary agent, he is interested in nonfiction topics ranging from current events and politics to culture to religion and history, to smart business. He is also looking for commercial fiction by published authors. An avid foodie, he is a featured columnist for NPR.org's Kitchen Window series. Currently he also is teaching a narrative nonfiction writing class in the Masters of Journalism Program at Georgetown University.

Al Zuckerman, who for lack of an office began counseling authors in a bank lobby in 1973, founded Writers House in 1974.  A former teacher of playwriting at the Yale Drama School, co-producer of a Broadway hit, author of a prize-winning play, two novels, and a hundred or so TV scripts, he decided to try agenting when he lost his job with the mystery soap opera, The Edge of Night.  He hoped that he might be able to help writers more than the agents who had represented him. He soon found a closet-like office over a porno store on West 42nd Street, and by 1979 with the success of Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett, he moved with a staff of five into the former Astor counting house at 21 West 26th Street where the agency, now in two adjacent buildings, is still headquartered.  Its staff has grown to 43 with offices in New York, San Diego, and London.  In the early 1980s, he became President of the Independent Literary Agents Association and also obtained a then record advance for a first novel, Women’s Work by Anne Tolstoi Wallach.  In 1994 his Writing the Blockbuser Novel, introduced by Ken Follett, was published here and in eight languages.  In addition to Ken Follett, Zuckerman has represented such notable writers as Stephen Hawking, Michael Lewis, Bradley Trevor Greive, F. Paul Wilson, Tim Willocks, Dennis Smith, Lucy Ferriss, Antoinette Van Heugten, Barbara Kyle, Trish MacGregor, and the Estates of Hermann Hesse, Christina Stead and Gabriella Mistral.  Writers House authors have won every major literary award, including the Nobel, National Book, Pulitzer, Oprah, MacArthur, Rita, Edgar, Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, James Beard, Newberry, and Caldecott. 

Helene Atwan, born in Paris in 1953, has been director of Beacon Press since 1995. She began her career in publishing at Alfred A. Knopf and has worked at The Viking Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Simon and Schuster. She specializes in non-fiction and her acquisitions at Beacon include Gayl Jones's The Healing, a National Book Award Finalist; Lillian Faderman's I Begin My Life All Over; DeWitt Henry and James Alan McPherson's Fathering Daughters; Wendy Kaminer’s Worst Instincts, Danielle Ofri’s Singular Intimacies, Rashid Khalidi’s Resurrecting Empire and The Iron Cage, Meredith Hall’s Without A Map, as well as books by journalists Mitchell Zuckoff, Philip Winslow, Mark Hyman, and Beth Whitehouse, and ten volumes of poetry by Pulitzer-prize winner Mary Oliver. She served for eight years on the board of PEN-New England; has served on the National Coalition against Censorship (NCAC), and has lectured on publishing at the New York University, Radcliffe College. Currently, she is the Administrator of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

Jackie Cantor is an Executive Editor at The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin. Prior to joining Berkley in August 2005, she was a Vice President and Executive Editor at Bantam Dell, where her list included a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction titles in all formats. She is proud to have discovered the New York Times bestselling authors Diana Gabaldon and Eloisa James. Other major authors whose work she has acquired include John Grisham, John Lescroart, and Hope Edelman (Motherless Daughters). At Berkley, her list includes the national bestselling authors Kate Furnivall (The Russian Concubine, The White Pearl), Kate Quinn (Mistress of Rome, Empress of the Seven Hills), Laura Brodie (The Widow’s Season, All the Truth), Lucy Dillon (Lost Dogs and Lonely Hearts, Walking Back to Happiness) and Lucy Ferriss (The Lost Daughter). Two of Ms. Cantor's current clients—Laura Brodie (Novella) and Lucy Ferris (Novel)—are former winners of the Faulkner Society's gold medals for literature. Ms. Cantor will lead this year's Menage à Trois discussion with Lucy and Lucy's agent, Al Zuckerman.

Susanna L. Porter, Vice President and Executive Editor in the Random House Publishing Group, is noted for her success in acquiring historical fiction, including several novels written from the perspective of women. Her most recent success is The Paris Wife, Paula McLain's bestselling novel released earlier this year about the first wife of American author Ernest Hemingway, Hadley Richardson, who was married to the writer during his 20s. Just after World War I, when Hemingway was still struggling to achieve recognition for his work, the couple lived in Paris as expatriates with other Lost Generation writers like Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Sherwood Anderson. Ms. Porter has recently acquired Ms. McLain's next book, which will focus on the life of another noted woman, Marie Curie. Similarly, Ms. Porter was the acquiring editor for Anne Fortier's novel
Juliet, which focuses on the heroine of Shakespeare's play Romeo & Juliet, and Nancy Horan's bestselling novel Loving Frank, which is about famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright as seen through the character of his mistress. In an interview last year after purchasing McLain's novel, Ms. Porter confessed to having a weak spot for books that depict famous men from history through the prism of the women in their lives. “I remember reading Nora, which was about Nora Joyce, and I preferred it so much to reading a biography of Joyce,” Ms. Porter said. “When you have the woman, you have the life.” Ms. Porter also acquires fiction with a contemporary setting (for example, the work of Dan Chaon), as well as nonfiction including recent works such as Alison Weir's The Lady in the Tower, Lynne Olson's Citizens of London, Kenneth Slawenski's
J.D. Salinger, A Life, and Amanda Foreman's A World on Fire—all of these national bestsellers. Ms. Porter lives in New York with her husband, investment banker James Mott Clark, Jr., and their daughters, Alexandra and Lansing.

Christen Thompson is the Commissioning Editor for Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas for The History Press, a publisher of non-fiction regional and local history. She is a graduate of the Publishing Institute at the University of Denver and received her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Creative Writing from Agnes Scott College.  Ms. Thompson has worked in many aspects of media and publishing, including writing and marketing for Atlanta’s alt-weekly Creative Loafing, working with the publicity and design for the 38th, 39th, and 41st Annual Agnes Scott Writers' Festivals as well as working in literary journals and periodicals before joining The History Press. As an editor, Ms. Thompson seeks to publish stories, to paraphrase Toni Morrison, from outside of the center. Anything with passion, voice, integrity, and that seeks to inform the world we live in--whether that world be a former boom town or a downtown neighborhood.  These are the stories she looks for. Specific personal interests include women's history, queer studies, the southern Gothic, American Ethnic histories, as well as whatever her latest fixation of the day may be. Ms. Thompson says, “The History Press brings a new way of thinking to history publishing—preserving and enriching community by empowering history enthusiasts to write local stories for local audiences. Our books are useful resources for research and preservation, but it is their value as touchstones for community identity that drives us to publish works that national houses and university presses too often have ignored. Infused with local color, our books are highly readable, often brief and aimed at a general readership. Since our creation in 2004, we have published more than a thousand of the highest quality local and regional history titles from coast to coast. We offer local authors a full-service, traditional publishing experience, from project inception and editorial assistance through design and printing and on to publicity and sales.”

Ginny Smith Younce is a native of Macon, GA. She is a Senior Editor at The Penguin Press and has worked with authors including Daniel Yergin, Pamela Druckerman, Gary Marcus, Rana Dasgupta, Emily Oster, Marja Mills, Ann Napolitano, Paula Broadwell, Gay Talese, Kenji Yoshino, Andrew Delbanco, Daniel J. Sharfstein, Jeet Thayil, Edward Behr, Mario Batali, Jessica Stern, Simon Schama, Thurston Clarke, Steven Solomon, Sue Roe, and Nate Silver. Prior to coming to Penguin, she worked at Ecco/HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. She has a degree in History with Honors from Yale University and a Two Year Acting Course Certificate from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA).