Words & Music 2011: 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. (For author bios, Click Here! )

Elise Capron works for the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency, an agency known for guiding the careers of many best-selling authors including Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Kate White, Diane Mott Davidson, and Janell Cannon. She is Sandra Dijkstra's assistant, manages the agency's book sales, handles first serial rights, and works with both unsolicited and solicited project submissions. She specializes in literary fiction, women's fiction, and short stories. Elise received a BFA in Writing, Literature and Publishing from Emerson College, where she was on the editorial staff of the Emerson Review.  She also worked at Harcourt. The Sandra Dijkstra Agency represents more than 100 authors around the world and was proclaimed "the most powerful literary agency on the West Coast" by the Los Angeles Times. Sandra Dijkstra has a client list which mixes quality and commerce with style. That's why Newsweek  dubbed her "the best agent in the West" and Esquire chose her as one of the nation's top five literary agents. In her 20-plus years as an agent, she has developed a reputation for discovering new talent and representing quality work with great commercial potential.

Dan Conaway of Writers House was, before becoming an agent, Executive Editor at Putnam, Executive Editor at HarperCollins, and Director of Literary Acquisitions at PolyGram Films.  He was also wrote under the pseudonym “Mad Max Perkins” at BookAngst 101, the blog that started out as a way to candidly discuss the industry with other editors and publishing types but emerged as a resource for writers. He joined Writers House four years ago.  As a literary agent he is looking for fiction—literary, upmarket-commercial, historical, and crime—and nonfiction—narrative, memoir, true crime, and investigative journalism.  One example of the kind of books he likes a lot:
The End of Everything by Megan Abbott, recently published by Reagan Arthur for her eponymous imprint at Little, Brown.  Does he take on new clients?  Yes, when the writing is good. He said in recent interview with Guide to Literary Agents, “I'm never interested in anything but beautiful writing; engaging, urgent storytelling; characters you fall in love with—above all, voice.”

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.

Robert Guinsler has been with Sterling Lord Literistic since 2000. His primary interests include literary and commercial fiction (including YA), journalism, narrative nonfiction with an emphasis on pop culture, science and current events, memoirs and biographies. Guinsler's clients include Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, novelists and academics. With a journalism background, he interested in all kinds of nonfiction subjects and he has represented such authors as New York Times bestselling author and Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein, Adam Bradley, Mark Kurzem, NPR Baghdad bureau chief Quil Lawrence, and Charles London. Robertís interest in fiction includes literary and commercial fiction, as well as young adult and middle grade. His fiction writers include Samantha Peale, Vanina Marsot, Barnes and Noble Discover pick Doug Crandell, and Grant Jerkins. Additionally, Robert represents the Estate of Jack Kerouac and the Estate of Anne Sexton.

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, and Philip Gerard. 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. Fiction: very well-written, character-driven novels; some suspense, thrillers; otherwise mainstream commercial and literary fiction.  No: children’s, romance, mysteries, westerns, poetry, or screenplays, novels about serial killers, suicide, or children in peril (kidnapped, killed, raped, etc.).

Michael Murphy has been in book publishing for 28 years, his first 13 years were with Random House, where he was a Vice President. Later, he ran William Morrow as their Publisher.  In September, 2007, he formed his own agency, Max & Co. A Literary Agency & Social Club. One of his authors, who attended Words & Music, 2008 is New York Times best selling Tony O'Neill, who has been tabbed by Esquire magazine as the IT writer of the current decade, joining their other choices, Jack Kerouac (1960s), Hunter S Thompson (1970s), Bret Easton Ellis (1980s), and Irvine Welsh (1990s).  His forthcoming novel,  Sick City, branches into the Noir category and has been described as "Unmistakably Tony O'Neill, but as though he's been snorting high grade Jim Thompson & mainlining Elmore Leonard."  Two of his authors attending in 2009 were New Orleans residents, Andrea Young and Barb Johnson. Barb was Glimmer Train's Best New Voice 2007, and won the Washington Square competition the same year. She was recipient of A Room of Her Own grant for 2009. Her first book, More of This World or Maybe Another was just published by HarperCollins. Andy Young is an accomplished poet who is now writing both fiction and non-fiction prose. Michael will conduct three Limited Registration Workshops during Words & Music, 2011, one on grabbing the reader quickly, one on how to give a tired subject new life, and one on character development For information on these workshops, Click Here!

Elizabeth Winick Rubinstein, senior agent at McIntosh & Otis, has degrees from New York University and Manhattan School of Music. She began her book publishing career in subsidiary rights and then took on the responsibilities of acquisitions editor at a major audio publishing imprint. Initially, she joined McIntosh & Otis to manage all subsidiary rights but began working as an agent shortly thereafter. Her primary interests include literary fiction, women's fiction, historical fiction, urban fantasy, romance, and mystery/suspense, along with narrative non-fiction, spiritual/self-help, history and current affairs. Elizabeth represents numerous New York Times bestsellers, and both Agatha and Edgar Award winners and nominees. She is the agent for the recent New York Times bestselling debut novel, The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown.  She also manages such estates as the prolific historical writer, Eleanor Hibbert, who wrote as Jean Plaidy, Victoria Holt, and Phllipa Car, as well as the Estates of John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, and Upton Sinclair.  Additionally, she manages the ancillary writes for University of Nebraska Press and Louisiana State University Press.  Elizabeth’s tastes are wide ranging, but she is most interested in fiction and nonfiction titles with a captivating voice, fast pacing, and strong characters.

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.

 

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; and DeWitt Henry and James Alan McPherson's Fathering DaughtersShe serves on the board of PEN-New England and the National Coalition against Censorship (NCAC) and has lectured on publishing at the New York University, Radcliffe College.

Christopher Chambers, Editor of New Orleans Review, was born in Madison, WI, and has since lived in North Carolina, Michigan, Minnesota, Florida, Alabama, Texas, and Louisiana. After receiving a degree in English at the University of Wisconsin—River Falls, he worked as a carpenter, a bartender, a dockworker, and a lifeguard. He has taught martial arts in Minneapolis, high school in south Florida, and writing in Alabama. He received an MFA degree from the University of Alabama, where he was editor of the Black Warrior Review. He has written for television, and has published fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews in The Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, Quarterly West, Carolina Quarterly, Indiana Review, Exquisite Corpse, Copper Nickel, Louisiana Literature, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Georgetown Review, Notre Dame Review, Washington Square, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Lit, BOMB Magazine, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. His work has received four Pushcart Prize nominations, and has been anthologized in French Quarter Fiction, Knoxville Bound, Maple Street Rag, and Best American Mystery Stories 2003. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for creative writing in 2008. He teaches courses in creative writing, screenwriting, and editing & publishing, and is editor of New Orleans Review. Chris will join literary agent Michael Murphy again in 2011 to teach a limited registration workshop. The subject this year will be the issue so critical to authors seeking an agent and publication: How to Grab the Reader in the First Five Pages. For more on this workshop, Click Here!

Sarah Crichton is Publisher of Sarah Crichton Books, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux which began publishing titles in March 2006. An eclectic mix of smart and vervy books, fiction and nonfiction both, the imprint has already had marked success with Ishmael Beah’s bestselling memoir, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, which reached Number One on the New York Times Bestseller list, and also made bookselling history when it was heavily promoted by Starbucks in stores around the U.S. and U.K.  Thus far, A Long Way Gone has been sold to 32 countries.  Other recent successes include David Finkel’s bestselling account of the surge in Iraq, The Good Soldiers, which recently won the prestigious J. Anthony Lukas, Overseas Press Club, and New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein book awards. The book appeared on countless 2009 Top Ten lists, including the New York Times Book Review’s list.    Recent fiction from the imprint includes Cathleen Schine’s national bestseller, The Three Weismanns of Westport and Michelle Huneven’s Blame, which was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle and L.A. Times book awards. Other notable titles include Jason Goodwin’s Edgar Award winning mystery; The Janissary Tree; Colin Harrison’s award-winning thriller, The Finder, and Roy Blount Jr.’s idiosyncratic dictionary, Alphabet Juice.  Before joining FSG, Crichton was Mariane Pearl’s coauthor on
A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of Danny Pearl (Scribner), published in 2003, which was released in June 2007 and was a feature film, starring Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl.  She also worked with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on her memoir, Madam Secretary(Miramax Books).  From 1996 to 2001, Crichton was V.P./Publisher of Little, Brown, where she had the good fortune to sign up, among other titles, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.  There, she published David Sedaris, George Stephanopoulos, David Foster Wallace, George Pelecanos, Anita Shreve, Rick Moody, and Michael Connelly.  In 2000, the house boasted an unprecedented three Oprah Book Club selections over a four-month period.  Before Little, Brown, Crichton was in magazines.  She was one of the managing editors of  Newsweek magazine (1988-96), and the editor of Seventeen magazine (1984-88).  She’s been widely published in magazines and newspapers, and she is married to the writer Guy Martin, a contributing editor at Conde Nast Traveler, who is at work on a book about the Cold War for Knopf.  The couple has a 20-year-old daughter, Eliza. 

Eric Liebetrau is the Managing Editor and Nonfiction Editor of Kirkus Reviews, the premier destination for pre-publication book reviews. In addition to his duties at Kirkus, he provides freelance editing services and contributes book reviews, music reviews and other literary and cultural features to a variety of national publications, including People, the New Yorker, the Boston Globe and Charleston City Paper. Eric lives and works in Charleston, SC, with his wife, memoirist Signe Pike, author of the new book, Faery Tale. Signe will be joining Eric and other editors participating in
Words & Music who will be critiquing manuscripts submitted by registered writers.

Will Murphy is Executive Editor at Random House, where he has worked for six years. Previously, he was a senior editor at the University of Minnesota Press and the literary editor at the University of California Press in Berkeley. Will was recently was named one of "50 Under 40," who matter in publishing by Publishers Weekly. Murphy has become known for editing books that matter, such as the powerful Finn by Jon Clinch and the beautiful new work by Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence; as well as The Second World: Enemies and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna. Also on his list are How Success Happens by David Brooks and The Battle of the Crater by Richard Slotkin. Other authors include include Jeff Shaara, Bernard-Henri Levy, Philip Zimbardo, and Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, which was on the New York Times Bestseller List for 16 weeks. In addition to critiquing work of registered writers this year, Will is judging the novel category of the 2011 William Faulkner - William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.

John Oakes, publisher of the new concept press, OR Books, will be participating in Words & Music, 2011 with two of OR's authors, Chris Ruen, author of the debut novel Freeloading, and Louisiana native Lee Papa, author of The Rude Pundit's Alamanack. Oakes is the co-founder of OR, an alternative publishing company that embraces e-books and other new technologies. Oakes started in publishing with Barney Rosset’s legendary Grove Press. In 1987 he co-founded Four Walls Eight Windows, which he first ran as co-publisher for seven years, and then directed for another ten years before selling it to the Avalon Publishing Group. Among the authors he has published are Louis Begley, Andrei Codrescu, Sue Coe, R. Crumb, Cory Doctorow, Andrea Dworkin, Abbie Hoffman, Ross King, Gordon Lish, Harvey Pekar, Rudy Rucker, John Waters, and Edmund White. Oakes is a member of PEN American Center’s board of trustees and is on the U.S. board of Alfanar, an Arab-run foundation promoting democratic values in the Mideast. He has written for the Review of Contemporary Fiction, the Associated Press (including a stint with AP in New Orleans), the International Herald Tribune, and most recently The Huffington Post.

Signe Pike, left a good career in publishing after her father's death to begin a journey in search of "something more," a journey which culminated with publication of her new memoir Faery Tale: One Woman's Search for Enchantment in the Modern World . Ms. Pike worked for Random House, Ballantine Books, and then Penguin/Plume before leaving New York City to write Faery Tale. Some of her most magical acquisitions include Me and Mr. Darcy, by internationally bestselling author Alexandra Potter, Ice Land by Betsy Tobin, and the New York Times bestselling memoir Some Girls by Jillian Lauren.Signe works as a freelance editor and writes full time in Charleston, SC, where she is at work on her next non-fiction memoir. She lives with her husband, Eric Liebetrau, the managing and non-fiction editor of Kirkus Reviews, a mischievous black cat named Willoughby, and of course, their resident faeries. For more on Signe and Faery Tale, Click Here!

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 JD 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.