Miriam Altshuler began her career at Russell & Volkening and in 1994 established her own agency, which she ran for twenty-one years until she joined DeFiore in 2016. She focuses primarily on literary and book club fiction, narrative nonfiction, and children’s literature. Among the novelists she represents are Jill Santopolo, (bestselling author of The Light We Lost), Elizabeth Rosner, Jenny Fran Davis (Dykette), Donna Freitas (The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano and memoir, Consent), Jennifer Murphy, and the late Robb Forman Dew. Her nonfiction authors include Leila Philip (author of Beaverland), Maya Lang (author of the New York Times Editors’ Pick What We Carry: A Memoir), Andrew Carroll (bestselling author of War Letters), Adina Hoffman (winner of an inaugural Windham Campbell prize), Dr. Sue Johnson (clinical psychologist and bestselling author of Hold Me Tight and Love Sense), Harriet Brown, and Phil Zuckerman. Miriam also represents authors of middle grade and young adult literature, including National Book Award Finalist Leslie Connor, Lambda Award winner Alex Sanchez, and the late Walter Dean Myers, who served as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Miriam is particularly interested in finding emerging and underrepresented voices, and she loves reading and representing books that focus on diversity and explore the experiences of people of color.
2017 Writers Workshops Editors & Agents
Michael Carlisle began his career as a secretary in the literary department at William Morris Agency. Eighteen years later he left as a vice-president to start Carlisle & Company. Born in Paris, of Russian heritage, he graduated with honors from Yale College and holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School. The son of two writers, he brings a background of international law to his career. His best-selling authors have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pulitzer Prizes, The Man Booker Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award (fiction and non-fiction), the Templeton Prize, the British Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, the PEN Award for first non-fiction, the NAACP Image Award for Literary Fiction, and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award; one even has an asteroid named for her. A former director of the AAR, a not-for-profit organization of independent literary and dramatic agents, and a member of PEN, and the Council on Foreign Relations, Michael headed the non-fiction program at the Community of Writers until 2023, and serves on its Board of Directors.
Ann Close has been a senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf Publishers for almost fifty years, where she publishes fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry. Writers she has worked with include Alice Munro, Norman Rush, Mona Simpson, Jayne Anne Phillips, Philip Levine, Brad Leithauser, Gish Jen, Lawrence Wright, and Tony Hiss.
Ben George is a former executive editor at Little, Brown, where he acquired and edited national bestsellers by authors including Adam Haslett, Leslie Jamison, Nathan Harris, Rick Bass, Rutger Bregman, Edith Pearlman, and Luis Alberto Urrea. Books he has published have been winners of or nominees for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Story Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the PEN/E. O. Wilson Award, among others. Before joining Little, Brown, he was an editor at Viking Penguin, prior to which he was an editor at the literary magazines Tin House and Ecotone, where he edited writers including Emma Cline, Anthony Doerr, Lauren Groff, Denis Johnson, Jonathan Lethem, Yiyun Li, Rebecca Makkai, Ron Rash, Jim Shepard, Maggie Shipstead, and Kevin Wilson, among many others. While at Ecotone, he co-founded Lookout Books, whose debut publication, Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a National Book Award finalist. Debut novels he has published include the Oprah’s Book Club selection The Sweetness of Water, by Nathan Harris; the Carnegie Medal winner The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, by Tom Lin; the #1 Indie Next selection The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, by Nathaniel Ian Miller; and Jaroslav Kalfař’s Spaceman of Bohemia, from which the Netflix film Spaceman, starring Adam Sandler and Carey Mulligan, was adapted.
Susan Golomb has been an agent of literary and upmarket fiction and non-fiction for over 30 years both with her own agency and now with Writers House. Her clients include National Book Award Winners Jonathan Franzen and William T. Vollmann; New York Times bestsellers Rachel Kushner (also a NBA and Booker nominee), Imbolo Mbue (winner of the Penn Faulkner award), Edgar Award winning author Angie Kim, Danielle Trussoni, Brando Skyhorse (winner of the Penn Hemingway Award), Noah Hawley, Janelle Brown and Harry S. Dent Jr., among others. She also represents Community of Writers alums Glen David Gold, Krys Lee and Wayétu Moore. Susan graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania and is always looking for excellent literary or commercial fiction, memoir, and narrative nonfiction.
Photo Credit: David Walter Banks
Cindy is Co-CEO of Spiegel & Grau, an independent publisher. She was a founding editor of Riverhead Books and later became Co-Publisher of Riverhead with Julie Grau, with whom she went on to co-found Spiegel & Grau at Random House. She has launched the literary careers of writers including James McBride, Khaled Hosseini, Bryan Stevenson, Chang-rae Lee, Gary Shteyngart, Alex Garland, Sana Krasikov, Philipp Meyer, Kathleen Norris, ZZ Packer, Domenica Ruta, Danzy Senna, The Three Doctors (Sampson Davis, Rameck Hunt, and George Jenkins), and Catherine Raven. She has also edited bestselling books by Yuval Noah Harari, Harold Bloom, Steven Rinella, Dan Pink, Sara Gruen, Yann Martel, and Anne Lamott, among many others. She sits on the board of Archangel Ancient Tree Archive and on the advisory board of Columbia Global Reports.
Photo credit: Eric Boman
Peter Steinberg is a literary agent now at United Talent Agency (UTA) after he joined Fletcher & Company in 2021 from Foundry Literary + Media. He’s represented numerous New York Times bestsellers (including three #1 New York Times bestsellers) and clients have been nominated for or awarded Edgars, Pulitzer Prize, Story Prize, The Paris Review Discovery Prize, PEN/Faulkner and National Book Awards. Most recently, The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont was selected for Reese’s Book Club, and The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was a finalist for the National Book Award. His list includes commercial and literary fiction, sci-fi and fantasy, narrative non-fiction, memoir, self-help, history, true crime, pop culture, humor, and sports. Steinberg is a graduate of NYU film school and worked briefly in the film business prior to becoming a literary agent.
Oscar Villalon is the editor of the award-winning literary journal ZYZZYVA, which celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2025. His writing has been published in The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, Alta, Lit Hub, and other publications. He lives in San Francisco with his family.