board and literary council

literary council

Jason Allen Ashlock

President of Movable Type Management, Jason Allen Ashlock founded the company in the spring of 2009, after completing graduate studies in Religion and in American literature. In its first two and a half years, he inked 70 deals with major publishers, and grew the company to manage more than 150 authors across categories. His client list is populated by non-fiction authors in history, biography, memoir, current affairs, politics, and pop culture. Advocating for radical mediation as an agent philosophy, Jason leads Movable Type to partnerships with an array of digital developers and marketing specialists and oversees the development of new books and digital properties by the company’s authors. He teaches Digital Publishing at CUNY, City College.

Steve Almond

Steve Almond is the author of seven books of fiction and non-fiction, most recently the story collection God Bless America. Read more at stevealmondjoy.com.

Julie Barer

Julie Barer established her own agency in 2004 after six years at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. Barer Literary is a full-service boutique agency that represents a variety of writers across a literary spectrum, with an emphasis on fiction. Clients include National Book Award finalist Joshua Ferris, award winning short story writer Gina Ochsner, bestselling novelists Paula McLain, Helen Simonson and Kevin Wilson, and prize winning crime writer Zoe Ferraris. Writing by her clients has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Best American Non-Required Reading, New Stories From the South, Best New American Voices, Tin House, Granta, and various other publications, and has received numerous awards and honors, including grants from The National Endowment of the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, the Los Angeles Times First Book Award, and the Flannery O'Connor Award. Before becoming an agent Julie was a bookseller at Shakespeare & Company in New York.

Jenna Blum

Jenna Blum is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of The Stormchasers and Those Who Save Us, which is also a Dutch bestseller and in 2011 was the # 1 bestselling book in Holland. Jenna is one of Oprah’s Top Thirty Women Writers. Jenna has taught fiction at Grub Street Writers for fifteen years and is proud to be one of Grub’s longest-standing instructors. Jenna contributes to Grub’s Friday Five-0 advice blog and writes the monthly column Writer On The Road. Jenna is currently researching Book 3 in Wichita, Kansas and writing the screenplay for Those Who Save Us. She is based in Boston and has a house in rural Minnesota, in the town where her mother and grandmother were born. For more information, please visit Jenna at www.jennablum.com.

Jaime Clarke

Jaime Clarke is a graduate of the University of Arizona and holds and MFA from Bennington College. He is the author of the novel We're So Famous (Bloomsbury USA), editor of Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Huges (Simon & Schuster), Conversations with Jonathan Lethem (University Press of Mississippi), and co-editor of No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work from Post Road Magazine (Dzanc) as well as Boston Noir 2: The Classics (Akashic) with Dennis Lehane. He is a founding editor of the literary magazine Post Road and has taught creative writing at UMass-Boston and Emerson College. He is co-owner of Newtonville Books.

Mary Cotton

Mary Cotton is a graduate of Williams College and holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine and an MA in English Literature from Boston University. She is the pseudonymous author of nine novels for young adults, six of them New York Times bestsellers. She's also a fiction editor for the literary magazine, Post Road, and is co-editor of No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work From Post Road Magazine (Dzanc) as well as Boston Noir 2: The Classics (Akashic) with Dennis Lehane. She is co-owner of Newtonville Books.

Andre Dubus III

Andre Dubus III grew up in mill towns on the Merrimack River along the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border. He began writing fiction at age 22 just a few months after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelors Degree in Sociology. He is the author of a collection of short fiction, The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, the novels Bluesman, House of Sand and Fog and The Garden of Last Days, and memoir Townie. He is a New York Times bestselling author and his work has been included in The Best American Essays of 1994, The Best Spiritual Writing of 1999, and The Best of Hope Magazine. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for fiction, The Pushcart Prize, and was a Finalist for the Rome Prize Fellowship from the Academy of Arts and Letters. An Academy Award-nominated motion picture and published in twenty languages, his novel House of Sand and Fog was a fiction finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Booksense Book of the Year, and was an Oprah Book Club Selection and #1 New York Times bestseller. A member of PEN American Center, Andre Dubus III has served as a panelist for The National Book Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, and has taught writing at Harvard University, Tufts University, Emerson College, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell where he is a full-time faculty member.

Arthur Golden

Arthur Golden was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and was educated at Harvard College, where he received a degree in art history, specializing in Japanese art. In 1980 he earned an M.A. in Japanese history from Columbia University, where he also learned Mandarin Chinese. Following a summer at Beijing University, he worked in Tokyo, and, after returning to the United States, earned an M.A. in English from Boston University. He resides in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children. Memoirs of a Geisha, Golden's brilliant debut novel and sensational bestseller, tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a novelist and philosopher. She was educated at Barnard College and Princeton University (Ph.D. in philosophy). She has received many prizes for her fiction and scholarship, including a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Her first novel was the critically acclaimed bestseller The Mind-Body Problem, and there have been six more works of fiction since, including The Dark Sister, Mazel (winner of the National Jewish Book Award), and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics. She is also the author of Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, which was chosen as one of the best science books of the year by Discover Magazine, and of Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, which won the Koret International Award for Jewish Thought. She has been awarded several honorary doctorates, Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been chosen as the Humanist of the Year 2011 by the American Humanist Association. Her latest novel, entitled 36 Arguments for The Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, was published in January, 2010. She is currently a research associate at Harvard University.

Jennifer Haigh

Jennifer Haigh is the author of four novels – Faith, The Condition, Baker Towers, and Mrs. Kimble. She has won both the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction and the PEN/L.L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England writer. Her short stories have been published in The Atlantic, Granta, and many other magazines.

Esmond Harmsworth

Esmond Harmsworth is a founding partner of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency. Born in London, he was educated in England before graduating magna cum laude from Brown University and cum laude from Harvard Law School. As a literary agent, Harmsworth represents fiction and nonfiction.

Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island. She received her BA from Adelphi University and the Mirrellees Fellowship and subsequently her MA in Creative Writing from the Stanford University Creative Writing Center. She wrote her first novel, Property Of, at the age of 21 while studying at Stanford. Hoffman has published a total of 21 novels, three books of short fiction, and eight books for children and young adults. Her novel Here on Earth is an Oprah Book Club choice, her novel Practical Magic was made into a Warner film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, and money from her novel Local Girls was donated to help create the Hoffman Breast Center at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA. Her recent books include New York Times bestsellers The River King, Blue Diary, The Probable Future, and The Ice Queen. Publishers Weekly chose her 2007 novel Incantation as one of the best books of the year. Hoffman’s work has been published in more than twenty translations and more than one hundred foreign editions. Her novels have received mention as notable books of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, and People Magazine. She has also worked as a screenwriter and is the author of the original screenplay “Independence Day,” a film starring Kathleen Quinlan and Diane Wiest. Her teen novel Aquamarine was made into a film starring Emma Roberts. Her short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Times, Architectural Digest, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and other magazines.

Ann Hood

Ann Hood is the author of eleven books, most recently the national bestsellers The Red Thread and The Knitting Circle; the memoir Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, which was selected as one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly and was a New York Times Editor's Choice. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times Op-Ed page in the series, “Home Economics”. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, Bon Appetit, The Atlantic Monthly, Glimmertrain, O, and other publications. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Tim Huggins

Tim Huggins is originally from Clarksdale, Mississippi, a place and area known famously as “The Delta.” Most significantly, he is the founder and former owner of Newtonville Books & the Lizard’s Tale, an award-winning independent bookstore in Newton, Massachusetts (now owned by Mary Cotton and run with her husband Jaime Clarke). While running Newtonville Books, Huggins founded the award-winning events programs Books & Brews, Earfull (with Jen Trynin and Mike Denneen), and Cover2Cover (with Steve Almond). Huggins has a BA in Finance and earned an MBA with high honors from Boston University. Huggins’ latest venture is Samurai for Hire where he consults people and organizations on such areas as book projects, feasibility studies, business plans, product development, marketing guidance, and strategic thinking. He currently lives in Watertown, Massachusetts with his partner Eliza, her son Aidan, and his daughter Ilana.

Bret Anthony Johnston

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of internationally acclaimed Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. Named a best book of the year by The Independent of London and The Irish Times, Corpus Christi has received numerous awards. Johnston’s work appears in magazines such as The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The Oxford American, and Tin House, and in anthologies such as New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best for 2003, 2004, and 2005. He is a graduate of Miami University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He has written essays for Slate.com and is a regular contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered. In 2006, the National Book Foundation honored him with a new National Book Award for writers under thirty-five. A skateboarder for almost twenty years, Johnston is currently the director of the Creative Writing Program at Harvard University.

Pagan Kennedy

Pagan Kennedy is the author of ten books and has won numerous literary prizes. Her publishers include Viking Press, Simon & Schuster, and Bloomsbury. Pagan has been a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The NYT Book Review, The Village Voice, Dwell, Details, Ms., Playboy, The Nation, Boston Magazine, and The Boston Globe Magazine. In 2009, Pagan was Dartmouth College’s visiting writer of nonfiction. She has also taught writing — both fiction and nonfiction — at the Warren Wilson MFA program, Boston College, Johns Hopkins, and many conferences and residencies.

Elinor Lipman

Elinor Lipman is the author of ten works of fiction, including The Family Man, The Inn at Lake Devine, Isabel's Bed, and Then She Found Me, which was adapted into a 2008 feature film. Her essays, book reviews and op-ed columns have appeared in The Boston Globe, Gourmet, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Salon, The Huffington Post, The New York Times' “Writers on Writing” series and its "Modern Love" column. Her honors include the 2001 New England Book Award and the Poetry Center’s 2007 Paterson Fiction Prize. A fiction judge for the 2008 National Book Awards, the 2006 National Endowment for the Arts and the 2001 PEN Hemingway Award, she has taught at Simmons, Hampshire and Smith colleges, and currently holds the Elizabeth Drew Chair in Creative Writing at Smith. Her next two books, a novel and a collection of personal essays, will be published in 2013. She is an Officer Trustee of PEN American Center and a mentor with "Visible Ink," a one-on-one writing program for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center patients.

Margot Livesey

Margot Livesey was born and grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. She has taught in numerous writing programs including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Boston University, and the Warren Wilson MFA program, and is the author of a collection of stories and six novels, including Eva Moves The Furniture and most recently The House On Fortune Street which won the LL Winship/PEN New England award. She lives in Cambridge and is a distinguished writer-in-residence at Emerson College in Boston. Her novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, was published early in 2012.

Stephen McCauley

Stephen McCauley is the author of five previous novels, including The Object of My Affection, True Enough, and Alternatives to Sex. Two of his novels have been made into feature films. He teaches at Brandeis University and can be visited online at stephenmccauley.com.

Mameve Medwed

Mameve Medwed (named for two grandmothers, Mamie and Eva) is the author of the novels, Mail, Host Family, The End of an Error, How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (2007 Massachusetts Book Awards Fiction Honor), and Of Men and Their Mothers. Her stories, essays, and book reviews have appeared in, among others, The New York Times, Gourmet, The Boston Globe, The Hartford Courant, The Missouri Review, Newsday, Yankee, Redbook, Playgirl, and The Washington Post. Born in Bangor, Maine (and claiming the title: “Bangor’s other novelist”), she and her husband have two grown sons and live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her website is mamevemedwed.com.

Sue Miller

Sue Miller is the best-selling author of the novels The Senator's Wife, Lost in the Forest, The World Below, While I Was Gone, The Distinguished Guest, For Love, Family Pictures, and The Good Mother; the story collection Inventing the Abbots; and the memoir The Story of My Father. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Asya Muchnick

Asya Muchnick is an Executive Editor and has been at Little, Brown since 2001. She acquires literary and upmarket crime fiction, as well as narrative nonfiction, including history, biography, cultural history, and popular science. Among the authors she has worked with are Jo Ann Beard, Mark Childress, Michael Connelly, Zoë Ferraris, Janet Fitch, Pete Hamill, Alice Hoffman, Richard Lange, James E. McWilliams, Stephenie Meyer, Robert Mrazek, Carolyn Parkhurst, Sebastian Rotella, Alice Sebold, Åsne Seierstad, David Sedaris, Anita Shreve, and Peter Trachtenberg.

Susan Orlean

Susan Orlean is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of several acclaimed books, including the best selling Orchid Thief, which was made into the film “Adaptation.” Her article “Life’s Swell” was the basis for the film “Blue Crush.” A prolific journalist, Susan has written for and worked for countless publications, including two local favorites, The Boston Globe and the Boston Phoenix. Her most recent book, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, traces the life of the canine star from his humble roots in Europe through international stardom.

Pamela Painter

Pamela Painter's first collection of stories, Getting to Know the Weather, won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and was reissued as A Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary in 2008. Her second collection of stories, also from Carnegie Mellon, is titled The Long and Short of It. Painter is co-author, with Anne Bernays, of the widely-used textbook What If? Fiction Exercises for Fiction Writers. Painter's individual stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Kenyon Review, North American Review, and Ploughshares, and in numerous anthologies, including Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, Flash Fiction Forward, and Microfiction. The winner of three Pushcart Prizes and Agni's John Cheever Award for Fiction, Painter has received grants from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her stories have been produced by Word Theatre, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre, and Stage Turner. Additionally, her story titled "Reading in His Wake" was recorded for the CD Love Hurts, by W.W. Norton. Her newest book is a collection of "very short stories," published by Carnegie Mellon, titled Wouldn't You Like to Know.

Tom Perrotta

Tom Perrotta is the author of seven books, including The Leftovers, The Abstinence Teacher, Joe College, Bad Haircut, and the The Wishbones. His novels, Election and Little Children, were turned into acclaimed movies, and Perrotta was nominated for an Academy Award, along with director Todd Field, for their screenplay for Little Children. Perrotta's work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, GQ, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Best American Short Stories 2005. He lives with his family outside of Boston.

Heidi Pitlor

Heidi Pitlor was born and raised in Concord, Massachusetts. She received her BA in Political Science from McGill University in Montreal in 1992, and her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College in Boston in 1997. Her fiction has been published in Ploughshares. Heidi is a former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston, where she worked for ten years. Starting with the 2007 volume, guest edited by Stephen King, she became the new series editor for The Best American Short Stories. Since then, she has worked alongside Salman Rushdie, Alice Sebold, and is currently working with Richard Russo.

Ayanna Pressley

Ayanna Pressley is a Boston City Councilor At-Large whose career has been marked by history-making campaigns and a relentless determination to advance a political agenda focused on breaking cycles of poverty and violence. Pressley was first elected to the Boston City Council on November 3, 2009. In doing so, Pressley became the first woman of color ever elected to that position. During her time in office, Pressley created and is chairing a new standing committee, the Committee on Women & Healthy Communities. The committee is devoted to the causes that she has always been most devoted to: stabilizing families and communities, reducing and preventing violence and trauma, combating poverty and addressing issues which disproportionately impact women and girls. The Boston Globe Magazine named Pressley one of its 2011 Bostonians of the Year. BET recognized her with its 2011 Leading Woman Award. The Urban League honored Pressley as a Woman of Power at its 2011 national convention.

Ladette Randolph

Ladette Randolph is editor-in-chief of Ploughshares and the author of three books of fiction, two novels Haven’s Wake (forthcoming, spring 2013) and A Sandhills Ballad and the award-winning short story collection This Is Not the Tropics. In addition, she is the editor of two anthologies: A Different Plain and The Big Empty. Dr. Randolph is on the faculty of the Writing, Literature, and Publishing department at Emerson College in Boston. Prior to joining the staff at Ploughshares she was an acquiring editor and associate director at University of Nebraska Press. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jaffe grant, the Virginia Faulkner Award, a Best New American Voices citation, and four Nebraska Book Awards.

Hank Phillippi Ryan

Hank Phillippi Ryan is the investigative reporter for Boston's NBC affiliate. A television journalist since 1975, she has won 27 Emmys and ten Edward R. Murrow awards for her work. A best-selling author of four mystery novels, Ryan has won the Agatha, Anthony and Macavity awards for her crime fiction. She’s on the national board of directors of Mystery Writers of America (and an instructor at MWA-U) and vice president of National Sisters in Crime. Her newest suspense thriller, The Other Woman, is the first in a new series beginning in 2012 from Forge Books. Her website is www.HankPhillippiRyan.com.

Sebastian Stuart

Sebastian Stuart has written novels, plays, screenplays, and has ghostwritten in every genre imaginable. As a playwright, he was dubbed “the poet laureate of the Lower East Side” by Michael Musto in The Village Voice. His first novel, The Mentor, is a psychological thriller. 24-Karat Kids, written with Dr. Judy Goldstein, was published in eight countries. Charm! by Kendall Hart was a New York Times bestselling tie-in with the soap opera "All My Children." The Hour Between was a National Public Radio Season’s Reading pick and won the Ferro-Grumley Award as best LGBT novel of 2009. To the Manor Dead, the first in a mystery series set in the Hudson Valley, was published in 2010; the second book in the series, Dead by Any Other Name, was released in October 2011.

Christina Thompson

Christina Thompson is the editor of Harvard Review and the author of Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All, a memoir of her years in the South Pacific. She holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the NEA, NEH, Australia Council, and Arts Victoria. Her essays have appeared in Vogue, the American Scholar, the London Times, New Zealand Geographic, and other publications. She teaches in the writing program at Harvard University Extension.

Elisabeth Weed

Elisabeth Weed formed Weed Literary LLC in 2007. Elisabeth has worked in the publishing industry for 10 years, at Curtis Brown, Kneerim and Williams, and Trident Media Group, before opening her own agency. Elisabeth’s commitment to working with authors not just on individual titles, but for the long term—both in developing writing careers and in building platforms in their areas of expertise—continues. Weed Literary is a full service agency, representing a diverse list of authors. The agency is always on the lookout for both commercial and literary fiction with a focus on up-market women’s fiction as well as an eclectic mix of non-fiction, with an emphasis on narrative, memoir, investigative and women’s issues from the humor driven to the thought provoking. Most of all, we are looking for innovative ideas paired with excellent writing.

Ike Williams

Ike Williams is a founding Director of The Kneerim & Williams Agency, LLC, a literary and dramatic rights agency, with offices in Boston, New York and Washington, DC., where he specializes in biography, history, politics, natural science and anthropology. Authors he represents include Howard Gardner, Michael MacDonald, Joseph J. Ellis, the late David H. Donald, E.O. Wilson, Nicholas R. Burns, Richard Wilbur, Tim Berners-Lee, Charles Ogletree, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Nigel Hamilton, James MacGregor Burns, the late Rev. Peter J. Gomes, Michael Porter, Drew Gilpin Faust, and Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot.

He represents book to movie and screenplay and teleplay writers in the placement of their dramatic rights. Recent successful projects include Public Enemies based on the book The Vendetta: FBI Hero Melvin Purvis’s War Against Crime and J. Edgar Hoover’s War Against Him by Alston Purvis as a feature film produced by Misher Films and Universal Studios, starring Johnny Depp and Christian Bale, and Fox 2000’s feature series, Diary of a Wimpy Kid based on the books by Jeff Kinney. He has also worked with the late Howard Zinn to complete The People Speak, a dramatic series based on A People's History of the United States and co-produced by Chris Moore, starring Josh Brolin, Viggo Mortensen, Marisa Tomei, Danny Glover, etc., which aired on the History Channel in the late Fall of 2009 and its British spin-off produced by Colin Firth will air in October of 2010, and I.M. Pei: Building China Modern which premiered on American Masters in the early Spring of 2010.

Mr. Williams is admitted to the federal and state bars in Massachusetts and the United States Supreme Court and is a 1965 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a 1960 graduate of Harvard College.