Authors Lunch

Karissa Chen is a Fulbright fellow, Kundiman Fiction fellow, and a VONA/Voices fellow whose fiction and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Eater, The Cut, Longreads, PEN America, Gulf Coast, and Guernica, among others. She was awarded an artist fellowship from the NJ Council on the Arts as well as residences at Millay Colony where she was a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the Ragdale Foundation, and Willapa Bay AiR. She was formerly the senior fiction editor at The Rumpus and currently serves as the editor-in-chief at Hyphen […]

Lyndsey Blessing started her career in publishing while in college, interning in the subsidiary rights department of Grove/Atlantic. She then worked for several years at the literary scouting agency Maria B. Campbell Associates, recommending American books to publishers around the world. She also lived in Europe for a number of years, working freelance in publishing in Paris and Berlin and teaching English in Berlin. Lyndsey is a graduate of the University of Virginia where she received a BA in English and American Studies. She joined InkWell Management in 2009 as co-director of foreign rights. Could you give a little foreign […]

City of Night Birds (Ecco, November 26, 2024.) Editor: Deborah Ghim. Agent: Jody Kahn. Juhea Kim is the author of the novel Beasts of a Little Land, a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and shortlisted for the Yasyana Polyana Prize. A graduate of Princeton University, her writing has been published in Granta, Times Literary Supplement, The Independent, Zyzzyva, Guernica and elsewhere. Born in Korea and raised in Portland, Oregon, Kim now lives in London. How did you find your agent? I worked in publishing in the early 2010s as an editorial assistant. After I wrote a short story for […]

Pamela Dorman is senior vice president and publisher of Pamela Dorman Books/Viking. In her more than thirty years at Viking Penguin, Dorman has published multimillion-copy, #1 New York Times bestsellers by Kim Edwards, Helen Fielding, Gail Honeyman, Sue Monk Kidd, Jacquelyn Mitchard, and Jojo Moyes. She began her publishing career at St. Martin’s Press and is a summa cum laude graduate of Wesleyan University. Is there one problem you see in books that you wish writers knew before their manuscripts made it to your desk? There are many! A couple off the top of my head: Try reading some of your […]

Entitlement (Riverhead, September 17, 2024. Editor: Sarah McGrath. Agent: Julie Barer at The Book Group.) Rumaan Alam is the author of the New York Times-bestselling novel Leave the World Behind, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and became a major motion picture, as well as two other novels. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn. How did you find your agent? I have a long working relationship with the superb Julie Barer. A friend suggested I contact her when I was about to enter a […]

Retha Powers is VP, executive editor at Holt, acquiring fiction and nonfiction. She is passionate about books by authors—especially people of color and LGBTQIA—who write inventively about the intersections of race, identity, gender, history, and current events. She is particularly interested in working with writers who challenge the status quo, build community, and create compulsively readable works that connect readers from varying backgrounds and experiences. Her acquisitions include Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s award-winning debut, My Monticello; José Olivarez’s Promises of Gold, which was longlisted for a National Book Award for Poetry; The Talk, an award-winning graphic memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist […]