Meet Our Team
- Directors
Meg Wolitzer’s novels include The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among others. Wolitzer, who has also written books for young readers, was guest
editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017. She is host of the literary radio show and podcast Selected Shorts.
Susan Scarf Merrell is the author of Shirley: A Novel, now a major motion picture starring Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg. She is also the author of A Member of the Family, and The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships. She co-directs the Southampton Writers Conference, is program director (along with Meg Wolitzer) of the novel incubator program, BookEnds, and teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook Southampton. She served as fiction editor of The Southampton Review. Essays, book reviews and short fiction appear most recently in The New York Times, Newsday, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common Online, The Washington Post, and East Magazine.
JP Solheim's stories and essays have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Pinch, and Poets & Writers. As a writer and literary scholar, they have taught at University of Michigan, Université de Paris VII, and University of Illinois—Chicago, in addition to creative writing workshops at the Northwestern Summer Writers’ Conference and StoryStudio Chicago. They were a BookEnds Fellow in 2020, working with mentor Christina Baker Kline, and as Associate Director of the program their work focuses on community development, recruitment, and social media.
- Mentors for Fellowship Seven
Karen E. Bender is the author of two story collections: Refund, a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, a shortlist selection for the
Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize, a longlist selection for the Story
Prize, and a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and The New Order, a longlist selection for the Story prize. A new collection, The Words of Dr. L and other stories, is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press. She is also the author of two novels: Like Normal People, a Los Angeles Times bestseller, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection,
and A Town of Empty Rooms. Her fiction has appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, The Harvard Review,
Guernica and others, and has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories, Best American
Mystery Stories, and won three Pushcart prizes. She has won grants from the National
Endowment for the Arts and the Rona Jaffe foundation. She is fiction editor of the
literary journal Scoundrel Time. Karen has taught creative writing at universities including Hollins University, the
University of Iowa, Warren Wilson College, Chatham University, and Tunghai University,
and is currently Core faculty at the MFA program at Alma College.Vanessa Cuti's fiction has appeared in The Best American ShortStories 2021, The Kenyon Review, AGNI, West Branch, andothers. She received her MFA from Stony Brook University and was part of the first BookEnds cohort in 2018, where she worked with mentor Amy Hempel. She lives in the suburbs of New York. The Tip Line (Crooked Lane, 2023) is her debut novel.
Daisy Alpert Florin is the author of My Last Innocent Year (Holt, 2023),which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, an Amazon Editors’ Pick, a Washington Post Staff Pick and an Indie Next pick. Daisy attended Dartmouth College and received graduate degrees from Columbia University and Bank Street Graduate School of Education. She was a recipient of the 2016 Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship at Sarah Lawrence College and was a 2019–20 fellow in the BookEnds novel revision fellowship where she worked with founding director Susan Scarf Merrell. A native New Yorker, she lives in Connecticut with her family.
Stephanie Gangi is a poet, novelist, short story writer and essayist living and writing in New York City. Her debut novel, The Next, was published by St. Martin’s Press and her second, Carry the Dog, comes from Algonquin in November 2021. Gangi’s work has appeared in, among others, Arts & Letters, Catapult, LitHub, Hippocrates Poetry Anthology, McSweeney’s, New Ohio Review, Next Tribe, and The Woolfer. She’s working on her third novel, The Good Provider.
Eve Gleichman's short fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, BOMB, and elsewhere. Their first novel, The Very Nice Box, was co-authored and published
by Mariner in July 2021. Their next novel, Trust & Safety, also co-authored, is forthcoming
in May 2024 from Dutton. Eve is a graduate of Brooklyn College's Fiction MFA program,
and lives in Brooklyn.
A #1 New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including The Exiles, Orphan Train, and A Piece of the World, Christina Baker Kline is published in 40 countries. Her novels have received the
New England Prize for Fiction, the Maine Literary Award, and a Barnes & Noble Discover
Award, among other prizes, and have been chosen by hundreds of communities, universities
and schools as “One Book, One Read” selections. Her essays, articles, and reviews
have appeared in publications such as The New York Times and the NYT Book Review, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Psychology Today, and Slate.
Matthew Klam is the author of the novel, Who Is Rich?, a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book, nominated for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, and Sam the Cat, winner of the PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for a Debut Short Story Collection, and a finalist
for The Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, First Fiction. He's a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting
Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts. His writing has been featured in such
places as The New Yorker, Harper's, GQ, The New York Times, Esquire, The O' Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction. He's currently a Visiting Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Stony Brook
University.
Lincoln Michel is the author of the novel The Body Scout (Orbit, 2021) and the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press, 2015), and the forthcoming novel My Metallic Realms (Atria, 2025). His fiction appears in The Paris Review, Granta, F&SF, NOON, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. His essays and criticism have been published by The New York Times, GQ, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian. He is the former editor-in-chief of the website Electric Literature and is the co-editor of the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated anthologies Tiny Crimes (Catapult, 2018) and Tiny Nightmares (Catapult, 2020). You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com and @thelincoln.
Matthew Thomas's New York Times-bestselling novel We Are Not Ourselves was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Folio Prize; named a Notable Book of the year by the New York Times; named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Apple, and others; and named one of Janet Maslin’s ten favorite books of the year in the New York Times. We Are Not Ourselves is being translated into nineteen languages. Matthew has a BA from the University of Chicago, an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine.
Rachel Pastan is the author of four novels, most recently In the Field (2021), based on the life of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock. Her 2014 novel, Alena—a recasting of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca set in the contemporary art world—was named an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review. In 2014, she edited Seven Writers, a chapbook of writing inspired by exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, where she served as Editor-at-Large for several years and developed the popular blog Miranda. Pastan was a long-time core faculty member at the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program and has taught fiction writing at Swarthmore College, Villanova University, and elsewhere.
Dawnie Walton is the author of The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, winner of the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the Audie Award for Fiction. Her debut novel was also longlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was named one of the best books of 2021 by The Washington Post, NPR, Esquire, and former U.S. President Barack Obama. She is the cofounder and editorial director of Ursa, an audio production company celebrating short fiction from underrepresented voices, and is the cohost of its accompanying podcast. Formerly an editor at Essence and Entertainment Weekly, she has received fellowships from MacDowell and Tin House, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where she has taught a fiction seminar). Born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband.
Meg Wolitzer’s novels include The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among others. Wolitzer, who has also written books for young readers, was guest
editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017. She is host of the literary radio show and podcast Selected Shorts. - Agents
Sarah Bedingfield
Sarah has been an agent with Levine Greenberg Rostan since 2016. She represents high-concept,
genre-busting literary novels, domestic and psychological suspense, upmarket, big-hearted
family epics, historical fiction, and international, diverse voices. She loves most types of literary and upmarket commercial fiction, especially novels that show powerful imagination, compulsive plotting and unique points of view that say something important. Family dramas, cross-genre narratives with notes of magical realism, darkly Gothic stories that may lead to nightmares and twisty psychological suspense are among her favorite things to read. A southerner at heart, she can't help but love books set in the south, but she’s a die-hard for any world immersive enough to make her miss her stop on the train or cry in public.
Hailing from North Carolina, Sarah graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with a double major in Psychology and English. She spent her first three years in New York teaching 11th-grade English in the Bronx and getting her masters at Hunter College. She began her publishing career in trade fiction editorial at Crown and Hogarth, where she worked for almost five years before becoming an agent.
Sarah Bowlin
Sarah Bowlin joined Aevitas Creative Management as an agent in 2017. Before becoming an agent, she spent a decade as an editor of literary fiction and nonfiction, first at Riverhead Books and most recently at Henry Holt & Company.
She is interested in work that simultaneously captivates and challenges and in her time as an editor she worked with many acclaimed and award-winning writers including Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Sheila Heti, Salvatore Scibona, Helen Phillips, Rachel Khong, and Julie Buntin. As an agent, she works with emerging and established voices including the Giller Prize-winning Souvankham Thammavongsa, PEN Bingham Award-winning novelist Vanessa Veselka, and acclaimed voices in fiction and nonfiction including Aysegul Savas, Lynn Steger Strong, Gene Kwak, Ashley Nelson Levy, Jasmin Hakes, R.K. Russell, Sabrina Orah Mark, Elisa Albert, Ismail Muhammad, Janika Oza, and Kevin Nguyen, among others. She is interested in bold voices and work that bends genre or forms—specifically stories of strong or difficult women and unexpected narratives of place, identity, and the shifting ways we see ourselves and each other. Originally from the South, she now lives in Los Angeles.
Jade Wong-Baxter
Jade Wong-Baxter joined the Frances Goldin Literary Agency in 2021. She previously worked for three years at Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents. Her clients include Delia Cai (Central Places, Ballantine, 2023); Hannah Matthews (You or Someone You Love, Atria, 2023); and Courtney Preiss (Welcome Home Caroline Kline, Putnam, 2024). Jade is looking for adult literary/upmarket fiction and narrative nonfiction, with an emphasis on narratives by and about people of color, as well as the perspectives of marginalized identities. Her other areas of interest include grounded speculative, memoir, cultural criticism, and Asian-American history.
Sabrina Taitz
Sabrina Taitz is a literary agent at WME, where she's worked since 2015. Sabrina represents upmarket and commercial fiction, as well as a broad swath of nonfiction, ranging from memoir to lifestyle to cookbooks. Her list includes New York Times bestsellers, B&N Book Club selections, Amazon Book of the Month selections, an ALA Award winner, a William C. Morris Award winner, and a Best American Writing selectee. Sabrina is looking for propulsive and dynamic writing that keeps her turning the pages. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and daughter.
