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.
2019 Editors & Literary 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.
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
Christine Pride is a writer, editor and 15-year publishing veteran. She has held posts at various Big Five imprints, including Doubleday, Broadway, Crown, Hyperion, and, most recently, as a Senior Editor at Simon and Schuster. She also had a wonderful stint as a freelance editor and ghostwriter. In October 2018, Christine sold two novels, written with Jo Piazza, to Harper Collins/Morrow. She stepped away from a full-time role at S&S in order to focus on those projects, though she still serves as an editor at large. The first book, We Are Not Like Them, will be published in Spring 2020. As an editor, Christine has published a range of books, with a special emphasis on inspirational stories and memoirs, including Heaven is Here, A Reason to Believe, No One Tells You This, and Dear World. Christine attended the University of Missouri’s broadcast journalism program and worked in non-profit management before embarking on a career in book publishing. www.christinepride.com
Photo Credit: Brie Mulligan
Jack Shoemaker has been a bookseller and publisher for more than fifty years. Founder and editor of North Point Press, he is the Founding Editor and Editorial Director of Counterpoint Press in Berkeley, California.
Photo Credit: Jane Vandenburgh
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.
Jonah Straus founded Straus Literary, a boutique agency in San Francisco with an office in New York, in 2007. He specializes in literary fiction, often with an international or multicultural outlook, as well as journalism, history, narrative, and the culinary arts. Fiction clients include Achy Obejas (Days of Awe, Ballantine), Whiting Award-winner John Keene (Counternarratives, New Directions), David Hollander (L.I.E. Ballantine), Saramago Prize-winner Adriana Lisboa (Crow-Blue, Bloomsbury), and Clark Blaise (Lunar Attractions, Doubleday). Nonfiction writers include Drauzio Varella (Lockdown, Simon & Schuster), Sarah DiGregorio (Early, HarperCollins, forthcoming), Edward McClelland (Nothin But Blue Skies, Bloomsbury) and Gordon Weiss (The Cage, Random House).
Andrew Tonkovich is the longtime editor of the Santa Monica Review and founding editor of Citric Acid: An Online Orange County Literary Arts Quarterly of Imagination and Reimagination. His writing has appeared widely, including in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Orange County Register, ZYZZYVA, Ecotone, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Los Angeles Times, Faultline, and Juked. He was for many years a contributing writer to the OC Weekly on books and politics. He is the author of two fiction collections, The Dairy of Anne Frank and More Wish Fulfillment in the Noughties and Keeping Tahoe Blue and Other Provocations. With Lisa Alvarez, he co-edited the landmark anthology Orange County: A Literary Field Guide. He taught at UC Irvine for twenty-five years, serving as president and grievance steward of the union representing adjunct faculty. Tonkovich hosts a weekly books show and podcast, Bibliocracy Radio, which airs on Pacifica Radio KPFK 90.7 FM in Southern California, and edits the Community of Writers’ OGQ. [Fiction]
Photo Credit: Brett Hall Jones
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.