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.
2021 Fiction Agents & Editors
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.
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
BJ Robbins established her Los Angeles-based agency in 1992 after a multifaceted career in book publishing, from publicity at Simon & Schuster to Marketing Director and later Senior Editor at Harcourt. She represents commercial and literary fiction, as well as a wide array of nonfiction, including memoir, history, pop culture, and science. Her client list includes award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones, Renee Swindle, Nafisa Haji, Max Byrd, J. Maarten Troost, James Donovan, John Hough, Via Bleidner,, Mary Volmer, Mel Watkins, Adam Nimoy, and the late James D. Houston.
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
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
David L. Ulin is the author, most recently, of the novel Thirteen Question Method. His other books include Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay; The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time; and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. He is the books editor of Alta and the former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and The Best American Essays 2020. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and Ucross Foundation, as well as a COLA Individual Master Artist Grant from the City of Los Angeles, he is a Professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he edits the journal Air/Light. [F/NF] theshipmanagency.com
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.