F239. Instructor, Agent, Editor: Mentors in Service of the Emerging Writer

Florida Salon 1, 2, & 3, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
Friday, March 9, 2018
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

 

This panel brings together the three most important types of mentors in the emerging writer's career: the instructor, the agent, and the editor. Panelists from these three fields will discuss how they see their distinct roles and how they see opportunities for collaboration to serve emerging writers. They will also discuss how their roles complement and sometimes contradict each other, and what they see are the best approaches and strategies for the emerging writer to get the most out of them.


Participants

Moderator:

Fred Leebron has graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins and Iowa. He has published essays, stories, and novels, coedited anthologies, and cowritten a textbook. He directs low-residency MFA and summer programs, and is an English professor at Gettysburg College.

Jeff Kleinman is a founding partner of Folio Literary Management. He serves on the boards for Writer House and the Southern NH University MFA program. Clients include bestselling authors Garth Stein, Elizabeth Letts, Charles Shields, and Mollie Katzen, and Pulitzer Prize–finalist Eowyn Ivey.

Barbara Jones is an executive editor at Henry Holt & Company, where she acquires and edits fiction, memoir, and narrative nonfiction. She was previously the editorial director at Hyperion Books, and previous to that, a longtime magazine editor at Harper’s, Vogue, Real Simple, and elsewhere.

Rob Spillman is editor and cofounder of Tin House. He is the 2015 recipient of the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing and is currently a lecturer at Columbia University. His memoir, All Tomorrow’s Parties, is out from Grove Press.

Anna deVries is an Executive Editor at Picador. She acquires and edits literary fiction and nonfiction. She has worked with authors including Jeff Chang, Meghan Daum, Keith Donohue, Scaachi Koul, Harriet Lane, Amy Grace Loyd, Chris McCormick, Katha Pollitt, Rakesh Satyal, and Damon Tweedy.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center