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.
2025 Agents & Editors
Jessica Case is the Deputy Publisher of Pegasus Books, where she has focused on acquiring across a wide array of genres, including history, biography, narrative nonfiction, science, arts & culture and sports. On the fiction side, she focuses on upmarket crime and suspense fiction as well as literary fiction. Her authors have included PEN, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Edgar nominees and finalists, Pulitzer-prize winning journalists, and New York Times and national bestsellers. She is a graduate of Princeton University with a degree in history and a minor in Russian, and before working in publishing she worked at think tanks in Washington DC.
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.
Maya Guthrie joined Little, Brown and Company in 2023 and is building her list with an eye for Black literary fiction that has a speculative bent: stories that celebrate the experiences of the Black diaspora, centering Black joy more so than Black trauma. She’s also interested in speculative LGBTQ+ fiction. In her time at Little, Brown, she’s had the pleasure of working with incredible authors, including Rickey Fayne, Nathaniel Ian Miller, Alejandro Puyana, Leslie Jamison, Joe Wilkins, Elin Hilderbrand, Michael Connelly, Dan Slater, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Adam Haslett. She lives in Queens.
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.
Mary Melton is an award-winning writer, editor, and podcaster based in Los Angeles who runs an editorial consultancy firm, Smakdab. She is Editor-at-Large for Alta Journal, the quarterly publication about California and the West, and she serves as Editorial Director at the design-strategy firm Godfrey Dadich Partners. During her long tenure as Editor-in-Chief of Los Angeles magazine, she led the team to 12 National Magazine Award nominations and three wins. She also served as Vice President/Editorial Director for the company’s publishing group, overseeing the editorial direction, redesigns, and digital relaunches of Texas Monthly, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Orange Coast magazines.
Photo: Bryan Derballa
Michael Mungiello is a literary agent at Inkwell Management who represents literary fiction as well as a broad spectrum of non-fiction. His authors’ works have been named Best Books of the Year by NPR and Bloomberg, selected as Editors’ Choice picks for The New York Times, and have received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He’s from New Jersey.
Maceo Montoya is an author, visual artist, and educator who has published books in a variety of genres, including four works of fiction: The Scoundrel and the Optimist, The Deportation of Wopper Barraza, You Must Fight Them: A Novella and Stories, and Preparatory Notes for Future Masterpieces. Montoya has also published two works of nonfiction: Letters to the Poet from His Brother, a hybrid book combining images, prose poems, and essays, and Chicano Movement for Beginners, which he both wrote and illustrated. Montoya is a professor of Chicana/o Studies and English at the University of California, Davis where he teaches courses on Chicanx culture, literature, and creative writing. He is the editor of the literary magazine Huizache and lives in Woodland, CA. [Fiction/Nonfiction]
Alex Star is executive editor at Farrar Straus Giroux, where he publishes nonfiction concerned with current events, history and ideas. He was previously deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine, founding editor of the Boston Globe Ideas section, and, from 1994 to 2001, editor of Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life. He was also assistant literary editor at The New Republic. Since 2013, he has edited three Pulitzer Prize winning books, as well as a National Book Award winner, and three of the last nine winners of the Society of American Historians’ Francis Parkman Prize. [Nonfiction]
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.
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.
Photo credit: Brett Hall Jones
Maya Ziv joined Dutton in 2015, focusing on upmarket and literary fiction and select narrative nonfiction. Recent and upcoming fiction include New York Times bestselling author Rileys Sager’s Middle of the Night, Ana Reyes’ New York Times bestseller The House in the Pines, Hank Green’s #1 New York Times bestseller, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing and A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, Adriana Trigiani’s New York Times bestseller, The Good Left Undone, The Sicilian Inheritance by award-winning journalist, Jo Piazza, and Jessica Soffer’s This Is A Love Story. Recent and upcoming nonfiction include Elinor Cleghorn’s Unwell Women, Nona Willis-Aronowitz’s Bad Sex, Joshua Leifer’s Tablets Shattered, and Bernice McFadden’s memoir, First Born Girls.