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.
2022 Writers Workshops 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.
“Laura Cogan is the Editor and Executive Director of ZYZZYVA. In 2011, she moved from her role as ZYZZYVA’s Managing Editor to take on stewardship of the journal. Since then, she has spearheaded a significant redesign of the print journal and two website redesigns; championed the continued excellence of its content; and expanded the journal’s live programming. She has been an invited panelist at a number of conferences, including The Community of Writers, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Litquake, and LA Times Festival of Books. She holds a B.A. and an M.A. from New York University. In 2022, ZYZZYVA was awarded a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize.”
Photo Credit: Alix Klingenberg
Annie Hwang is an agent at Ayesha Pande Literary where she represents what she likes to think of as “literary fiction with teeth.” She also takes on nonfiction and poetry on occasion. Her authors include John Paul Brammer, Franny Choi, Lilly Dancyger, Carson Faust, Sequoia Nagamatsu, and Jihyun Yun. The daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, she grew up in Los Angeles and now lives in New York.
Rebekah Jett is an Associate Editor at Scribner. She was previously a bookseller at Books Are Magic and is a graduate of Columbia University, where she specialized in African American literature. She lives in Brooklyn.
Bonnie is President of the Hill Nadell Literary Agency based in Los Angeles and represent writers of both fiction and nonfiction. The nonfiction ranges from books of current affairs like Pulitzer Prize winner Sonia Nazario’s Enrique’s Journey and Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things To Me to memoirs such as Firoozeh Dumas’ bestselling Funny In Farsi, Caroline Van Hemert’s The Sun is a Compass and David Lebovitz’ The Sweet Life in Paris and natural science writers Rebecca Giggs author of Fathoms and Robert Moor’s On Trails. The fiction ranges from Kate Racculia’s novel, Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts to Kayla Rae Whitaker’s The Animators and all the books by David Foster Wallace.
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.