Reagan Arthur was named Publisher of Knopf Pantheon Schocken, a division of Penguin Random House, in February of 2020. In her previous position as an editor and publisher at Little, Brown, writers she worked with included Kate Atkinson, Joshua Ferris, George Pelecanos, Tina Fey, and Attica Locke. She grew up in Southern California and now lives with her family outside of New York City.
2022 Writers Workshops Agents & Editors
Michael Carlisle, a founder of InkWell Management, has been involved with the Community of Writers for many years. His fiction and nonfiction client list includes prize-winning as well as debut authors. A former director of the Association of Author’s Representatives, a not-for-profit organization of independent literary and dramatic agents, Michael is an active member of PEN. He directs the Nonfiction Program of the Community of Writers and serves on the Board of Directors. http://inkwellmanagement.com/staff/michael-v.-carlisle
“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 a literary agent at Ayesha Pande Literary where she represents voice-driven literary fiction and select nonfiction. In particular, she gravitates toward subversive and irreverent literary fiction and impactful mission-driven narrative nonfiction that grapples with the complexities of our world. As a former journalist, Annie brings a hands-on editorial approach to agenting, taking an active role in the careers of her clients including John Paul Brammer, Franny Choi, Lilly Dancyger, and Sequoia Nagamatsu. A fierce champion of underrepresented voices, Annie is always on the hunt for gifted storytelling that stretches its genre to new heights.
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 multi-faceted career in book publishing in NY, first in publicity at Simon & Schuster and later as Marketing Director and then Senior Editor at Harcourt. Her agency represents fiction and nonfiction and clients include award-winning and NY Times bestselling authors such as Stephen Graham Jones, Via Bleidner, Max Byrd, James Donovan, Nafisa Haji, John Hough, Jr., Tom Lutz, Renee Swindle, J. Maarten Troost, Mary Volmer, and the late James D. Houston. www.bjrobbinsliterary.com
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 edits the West Coast literary magazine Santa Monica Review. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, OC Weekly, Ecotone, Fautline, Juked, ZYZZYVA and Best American Nonrequired Reading. With Lisa Alvarez he edited Orange County: A Literary Field Guide, and is the author of the fiction collections The Dairy of Anne Frank and More Wish Fulfillment in the Noughties and Keeping Tahoe Blue and Other Provocations. He is the founding editor of the Community of Writers’ online journal The OG Quarterly.
Photo Credit: Brett Hall Jones
David L. Ulin is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, which was shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times, he is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he edits the literary journal Air/Light. Most recently, he has edited Didion: The 1980s and 90s, for the Library of America.
Oscar Villalon is the managing editor at ZYZZYVA, a recipient of the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize in 2022. His writing has been published in Stranger’s Guide, Freeman’s, The Believer, Literary Hub, and other publications. He lives with his family in San Francisco.
