Helen Atsma (she/her) joined Ecco in December of 2019 as VP, Editorial Director. She oversees the Ecco editorial team and primarily acquires literary and book club fiction, along with memoir and some narrative nonfiction. The writers she works with include Rumaan Alam, Nicole Chung, Patrick deWitt, Andrew J. Graff, Juliet Grames, Elizabeth McCracken, Ivy Pochoda, Anthony Veasna So, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Kevin Wilson, and Laura Zigman, among others. Previously, she was Editorial Director at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and she has also worked at Grand Central Publishing, Henry Holt, and Little, Brown.
2021 Memoir & Nonfiction 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.
John Parsley oversees the editorial department of Dutton and its imprints Plume, Caliber, and Tiny Reparations Books, as Editor in Chief/VP, while acquiring a focused list of titles. He serves on the advisory board of the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference and has edited many New York Times bestsellers and prize winners. Forthcoming titles include nonfiction by Oded Galor, Denise Kiernan, Ken Mack, Alan Weisman, and Elizabeth Williamson, and fiction by Jonathan Evison, Jeff Lindsay, and Jason Mott.