TWC Live! Literary Agents on Publishing in a Time of Unrest

TWC Live! returns November 13, and this time literary agents will be expanding on June’s Big Conversation in the magazine: “Publishing in a Time of Unrest.” Maggie Cooper of Aevitas Creative Management, Danya Kukafka of Trellis Literary Management, and Eric Smith of Neighborhood Literary will discuss how publishing is responding, or not responding, to social, political, and economic changes in America. What are some positive and negative developments agents have noticed? How has the publishing landscape changed since their careers began? What can authors expect from publishing in the future?

This online event on YouTube is free and open to all. It begins at 7:00 p.m. ET and will last around an hour, with the final fifteen to twenty minutes made up of live questions from virtual attendees.

About the Agents

Maggie Cooper is an agent with Aevitas Creative Management, representing adult fiction and select nonfiction projects, with an emphasis on writing by queer and trans writers and work that makes our world weirder, kinder, more joyful, or all three. Since she joined Aevitas in 2018, her authors’ projects have been Indie Next picks, Library Reads selections, and Lambda Award winners. Based in Boston, Cooper holds a degree in English from Yale University, attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, and earned her MFA in fiction from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she served as an editor for The Greensboro Review. Cooper is also a writer, and her fiction has appeared in The Rumpus, Ninth Letter, The Best Small Fictions, and elsewhere. Her prose chapbook, The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies, was published by Bull City Press in 2024.

Danya Kukafka is the author of the bestselling novels Notes on an Execution and Girl in Snow and works as a literary agent with Trellis Literary Management. Kukafka’s most recent novel, Notes on an Execution, won the 2023 Edgar Award for Best Novel and was chosen as the New York Times Best Overall Crime Novel of the Year. Her debut, Girl in Snow, was released in 2017—it was also a national bestseller, an Indie Next pick, and a B&N Discover pick and received favorable reviews from The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) and The Wall Street Journal, among others. Her fiction has been translated into over a dozen languages worldwide. At Trellis, Kukafka is interested in representing literary fiction with particularly propulsive storylines. She is seeking literary suspense, sophisticated thrillers, book club fiction, speculative fiction, experimental fiction, and upmarket fiction you can read in one gulp. She lives in Seattle.

Eric Smith is a literary agent and young adult author from Elizabeth, New Jersey. As an agent, he’s the founder of Neighborhood Literary and has worked on New York Times bestselling and award-winning books. In his author life, his recent novels include the YALSA Best Books for Young Readers selection Don’t Read the Comments (Inkyard Press, 2020), You Can Go Your Own Way (Inkyard Press, 2021), and the anthologies Battle of the Bands (Candlewick, 2021) and First-Year Orientation (Candlewick, 2023), both coedited with award-winning author Lauren Gibaldi. In 2022 Abrams published Jagged Little Pill: The Novel, which was written in collaboration with Alanis Morissette, Academy Award winner Diablo Cody, and Glen Ballard, and is an adaptation of the Grammy and Tony Award–winning musical. His latest novel, With or Without You, a rom-com about two teens working in rival cheesesteak trucks, was published in 2023 and was a Junior Library Guild selection, as well as the Pennsylvania selection in the Library of Congress’s Great Reads from Great Places program.