Books have always been my favorite form of travel. It sounds like a cliche, I know! But when you’re just a kid in midwestern Illinois, headed to school armed with a fanny pack of epipens, Benadryl, special wipes, and a list of allergies honed into rote memorization (someone knows what I’m talking about), hopping on a plane is low on the list of priorities. Without many options to safely explore and savor experiences the way others might growing up, I turned to books to whet my endless appetite for the world around me.
Life got a whole lot bigger when I could swim 20,000 leagues under the sea, sail my way across the Atlantic in a fishing boat, and go to battle for a kingdom that hasn’t existed for hundreds of years. My culinary education started with my first taste of dorayaki in Japan—that earthy sweet red bean, cushioned by soft-sponge pancake!—handed to me by a man desperate to move on, and most recently continues with an all-too-close lesson in whale decomposition on a beach off the coast of Wales. Somewhere along the way, I also picked up an English degree from the University of Illinois and moved to Boston for a master’s at Emerson College.
After interning at The Friedrich Agency for a year and wearing many hats in other positions—teacher’s assistant, proofreader at Penguin, freelance typesetter—I’m now assisting Lucy Carson and Molly Friedrich full-time, learning how to be an advocate for writers and world-builders in the place where my alarmingly broad tastes snugly fit in. I’m all for WHALE FALL by Elizabeth O’Connor as much as the new Ali Hazelwood. Throw in a dash of speculative—that indulgent industry word—or a complex set of characters that makes you feel for them no matter where they sit on a likeability scale, and I’m a sucker. Comedy with a dry wit (The Romantics by Curtis Sittenfeld!), tragedy (with a lesson, not just for the sake of it), advocacy for people and places who have long gone unwritten (think Split Tooth, or maybe The Island of Sea Women), messaging that speaks to current or evergreen topics that plague our communities, or just a beautifully written piece of art that explores the people we are (as of writing this, my choice must be The Wedding People), are what I want to read and eventually represent.
I’m currently assisting the amazing agents you’ll see above me on the About page, and am not building my own list yet, but I’m thrilled to develop my literary palate and work with our current authors and the future authors yet to arrive (to you future authors, hi and welcome!).
Five non-agency books I loved: TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW, A YEAR IN PROVENCE, THE LITTLE BOOK OF HYGGE, NOTHING TO SEE HERE, LIGHT FROM OTHER STARS
