Jennifer Alton is an editor at Counterpoint Press, where her projects have included books by Sands Hall, Nell Irvin Painter, Alton Logan with Berl Falbaum, and Ismail Kadare. 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. She will be joining us as a Special Guest.
2018 Agents & Editor
Reagan Arthur is Vice President and Editorial Director of Reagan Arthur Books, an imprint of Little, Brown. She began her publishing career at St. Martin’s Press, and also worked for Picador USA. Writers she has worked with since arriving at Little, Brown include Kate Atkinson, Kate Braestrup, Tony Earley, Joshua Ferris, Elin Hilderbrand, Elizabeth Kostova, Denise Mina, George Pelecanos, Josh Bazell, Kathleen Kent, and Joanna Scott. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Community of Writers.
Photo credit: Brett Hall Jones
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, Carlisle headed the nonfiction program at the Community of Writers until 2023, and serves on its Board of Directors.
Lucy Carson joined The Friedrich Agency in 2008, and she has since cultivated a list of fiction and narrative nonfiction for the adult trade audience. In addition to brokering domestic publishing deals for her own clients, Lucy also oversees all Film, Television & Dramatic business for the wider agency list. During her 17 years with The Friedrich Agency, Lucy has worked with established bestselling authors such as Sue Grafton, Elizabeth Strout, Ruth Ozeki, Terry McMillan, and Karen Joy Fowler, while launching many debut authors as well, including Leila Mottley, Alison Espach, Rachel Harrison, Silvia Park, and Daria Lavelle.
Joy Harris established her own literary agency in 1990. She works primarily with literary fiction, strongly-written commercial fiction, narrative nonfiction across a broad range of topics, memoir and biography, and is drawn to a clear, original voice, an engaging point of view, and strong characters. She takes great pleasure in finding new literary voices, and over the course of her career has had the joy of representing many bestselling and acclaimed authors from the time of their first published work. www.joyharrisliterary.com.
Joy Johannessen has been an editor at Chelsea House, Grove Press, and Oxford University Press; a senior editor at HarperCollins Publishers; and the executive editor of Delphinium Books. She has worked with hundreds of writers, among them Rabih Alameddine, Dorothy Allison, Amy Bloom, Harold Bloom, Michael Cunningham, Larry Kramer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Arthur Miller, Ralph Nader, and Héctor Tobar. She is the co-editor, with Roxanne Coady, of The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them. She currently freelances.
Photo Credit: Brett Hall Jones
Cal Morgan is an executive editor at Riverhead Books. His authors include Akwaeke Emezi, Eula Biss, Lidia Yuknavitch, Kristen Arnett, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Edward Carey. Previously with HarperCollins and St. Martin’s Press, he also serves on the board of the Center for Fiction, the only organization in the country devoted exclusively to the promotion of fiction.
Photo credit: Cassie Jones Morgan
BJ Robbins established her Los Angeles-based agency in 1992 after a multi-faceted career in book publishing in New York, in publicity at Simon & Schuster and later as Marketing Director and Senior Editor at Harcourt. Her clients include many bestselling and award-winning writers in both fiction and nonfiction including Stephen Graham Jones, J. Maarten Troost, James Donovan, Via Bleidner, Max Byrd, Nafisa Haji, Renee Swindle, and John Hough, Jr.
Andrew Tonkovich is the longtime editor of the West Coast literary arts journal the Santa Monica Review and founding editor of Citric Acid, an online Orange County, California quarterly. He hosts a weekly books show, Bibliocracy Radio, on Pacifica’s KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California. He co-edited the landmark anthology Orange County: A Literary Field Guide with Lisa Alvarez and is the author of two collections, The Dairy of Anne Frank and More Wish Fulfillment in the Noughties and Keeping Tahoe Blue and Other Provocations. His short stories, book reviews, essays, and journalism have appeared in Ecotone, ZYZZYVA, Faultline, Solstice, Journal of the Plague Years, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Best American Nonrequired Reading. For many years he was a regular contributor to the OC Weekly. [F]
Photo Credit: Brett Hall Jones
Oscar Villalon is the Editor of ZYZZYVA, the award-winning California literary journal. His writing has been published in Stranger’s Guide, Freeman’s, The Believer, The Approach, Virginia Quarterly Review, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. A former book editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, he has served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction three times, including once as jury chair, and has served as a judge for the National Book Awards. He lives with his family in San Francisco, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Community of Writers.