While this can be dangerous I love reading a book while walking through a city--there's something incantatory and ritualized about it. Some books I first read while walking (Slow Lightning by Eduardo Corral, Gabriel by Edward Hirsch, In the Mecca by Gwendolyn Brooks)--be careful and duly aware--when you are finished you and the city will be different.

Cara Blue Adams suggests Into the Weeds by Lydia Davis, adapted from her Windham-Campbell Lecture about the writing life, “to be read in little snippets while wandering from place to place in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.”

Zeina Hashem Beck recommends reading Tareq Baconi’s memoir, Fire in Every Direction, any place in the direction of the Mediterranean.

Work Room instructor Swan Huntley advocates for cracking open How to Win Friends and Influence People in your therapist's waiting room. On July 15, Swan will be teaching a master class on how to plan out your novel. Read more and register here!

Our founder Leslie Shipman recommends Maggie O’Farrell’s gorgeous historical novel, Land, set in Ireland in the decade after the famine. “The story of a father and son mapping a remote area of Ireland for the British - a deep dive into Irish identity and struggle, the language is lush and powerfully evocative. I’m lucky to have a private backyard here in Queens NYC - it’s my favorite summer reading spot.”

KB Brookins recommends reading Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Fat Swim near a swimming pool in your most body-affirming swim suit.

Paul Tran proposes reading Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays at the Burger King.

Work Room manager Kate Mabus says:

For whatever reason, the Argentine really know how to capture the languid, claustrophobic feeling of summer (see Lucretia Martel’s film La Ciénaga or Ariana Harwicz’s Mátate, Amor). My favorite in this category is Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream. It’s about pollution, culpability, desperation—and best read in a single, entranced sitting.

Nina McConigley can’t wait to read Téa Obreht’s newest, Sunrise, at sunrise in the mountains of Wyoming!

Ellen Bass

Years ago I reread War and Peace on a beach in Mallorca with my beloved mentor, Florence Howe. Day after day, we’d each read our books under a beach umbrella and then I’d help Florence down to the water and we’d snorkel a little and then come back, lie down on our loungers and keep reading. Heaven on earth.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee

When I’m between sets at (the) Muscle Beach in Venice, CA I’m reading Slanting Towards the Sea by Lidija Hilje because I really like working out and reading at the beach. Thx for the lift @IkeCatcher.

Shipman’s senior agent Katie McDonough says, “Read In Universes by Emet North, anywhere in the multiverse, when you want to ponder what your alternate selves are up to in their parallel worlds.”

Work Room instructor Diana Arterian says:

Same locale, two books possible: After a solitary walk in the woods, ideally nursing a deep longing (amorous, existential), you find a luxurious patch of moss by fresh running water upon which to sprawl with the small volume you brought along. If it’s fiction: Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child (tr. Martin Aiken); poetry: Safa Khatib’s A Dress of Locusts.

At the end of August, Diana will be teaching a craft seminar on tackling the book-length poem. Read more and register here!

Vincent Toro recommends Loca by Alejandro Heredia at Fort Tryon Park. “This literary jewel about the power of Afro-Latinx queer feminist friendship is a perfect companion for a trip to this unsung treasure of New York City’s parks system.”

D/Annie Liontas recommends Andrew Sean Greer’s Villa Coco in Lake Como, where they’ll be at the Hawthornden residency.

Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson

Jung Yun’s new novel All the World Can Hold is the perfect book for seaport towns (like Baltimore where I live.) It’s set on an aging cruise ship in the days after 9/11, and intertwines the story of three vastly different people confronting the truth of their lives as they steam towards Bermuda. It’s funny and poignant and great to read from the safety of the shore as you look out over the harbor and thank god you’re not on that boat!

Fatima Bhutto

Bassem Khandaqji’s novel - written entirely from within an Israeli prison - A Mask The Color of the Sky is my recommendation for this year. We are fortunate this prize winning book has been translated into English. Read it inside, away from the heatwaves, share it with everyone you know.

Work Room instructor Ryan Chapman says:

I recommend Ed Park's Same Bed, Different Dreams, near a pool and without distractions. Not only is it sneakily propulsive, but Park's subtle patterning becomes apparent during extended reading spells. And a truly killer last sentence.

On August 22, Ryan will be teaching a craft seminar on the rules of comic voice ( and their infinite exceptions). Read more and register here!

Rachel Kolb suggests reading Richard Powers's The Overstory in a quiet grove of trees near home, or right after a long hiking trip through the trails in a national forest.

Paul Lisicky

I always associate Joy Williams’ novel Breaking and Entering with water—even the structure and the characters feel fluid—and I think it would be interesting to read it on rocky terrain, far from the sea or even a lake.

Ruth Franklin

I just devoured Amity Gaige's Heartwood, which hits all the right notes for summer. A woman goes missing on the Appalachian Trail and an ensemble novel ensues, seen through the eyes of the forest warden directing the search (a blunt-speaking six-foot-tall wallflower), the family members and friends processing their rage and grief, and an uncommonly perceptive senior citizen following online from her assisted living residence. Stick it in your backpack to enjoy on a hike, obviously, or save it till you're safely back home, soaking your tired feet.

On July 25, Ruth will be teaching a master class on finding your voice after becoming a parent. Read more and register here!

Tao Leigh Goffe

Jean Rhys’ 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea (a Caribbean remix of Jane Eyre, a novel about a governess) on Governors Island (Paggank). My climate organization Dark Lab has a new location here along this several other arts nonprofits and it has my imagination alive with the haunted architectures of islands and Great Houses of the colonial plantation era.

Work Room instructor Javier Sinay tells us:

There’s a hotel on a beach here in Argentina that was quite elegant back in the 1940s. People like Adolfo Bioy Casares (Borges’s closest friend, a writer like him, and a very good one) used to spend their summers there. I visited recently and found it to have a wonderful atmosphere for reading. Any book seems to read well there, at the Viejo Hotel Ostende. If you happen to be traveling through these parts, I highly recommend giving it a try.

David McLoghlin, who teaches on memoir and essay in the Work Room, says:

To turn off my brain, my summer read would have to be a Wallander detective novel (by Henning Mankell), where the middle-aged overweight Wallander trudges through snow, in Nordic noir fashion, to solve the crime. The perfect place to read it: a beach near Malaga, Spain, where my family has been going since the early 1970s.

Kate Mabus: The novel’s narrator, Aaron Touissant, and the star at its center, Xavier C. Barlow, are both Black gay men navigating the prejudices and social strictures of 1950’s Los Angeles. What do you hope this novel will add to conversations around representation in Hollywood?

Rasheed Newson: I hope the novel leads readers to think more deeply about the multitude of queer lives and of Black lives and of queer Black lives throughout the entire history of Hollywood. I am Black, homosexual, and a longstanding member of the Writers Guild of America, and I want to point out that not only have queers of color been part of Hollywood’s lifeblood, we have done it using different and, at times, conflicting approaches. We have known loves and tragedies a plenty. We have so many stories to tell. We are an emerging wing of literature.

KM: Xavier is meant to be a rival to the iconic actor Sidney Poitier. “Xavier struck a chord that resonated differently from Sidney’s,” Aaron tells the reader. “Sidney was aspirational. Xavier tapped into present frustrations.” What motivated you to write a foil for Poitier, instead of a facsimile?

RN: I needed Xavier to be a legitimate threat to Sidney, and so Xavier is ten years younger and he connects with the audience precisely because the second-tier characters that he plays aren’t often triumphant. He gets dumped, double-crossed, and even killed on screen. Whereas Sidney is a star and comes out on top by the end of the picture.

Xavier’s setbacks on screen mirror the challenges that Black movie goers his age were facing in life. The type of stars that audiences clamour for changes with the times, and Xavier is meant to be the natural evolution that follows Sidney’s rather idealized image. If Sidney were Laurence Olivier, Xavier would be Marlon Brando.

KM: Aaron has an eye for “star power.” However, the first time he recognizes it is not on the silver screen, but on a Navy ship. Why did you decide to weave this early romance with a fellow sailor into the story of Aaron’s relationship with Xavier?

RN: Aaron doesn’t believe that he’s the kind of man who can be a hero or a star, but he is convinced that he can be of essential service to heroes and stars. He comes to that conclusion while serving in the Navy. He’s invisible and miserable on the destroyer until he conspires to become the aide-de-camp to a Black ace fighter pilot. That relationship turns romantic and it ultimately brings Aaron to Hollywood. Yet, beyond propelling the plot, Aaron’s time in the Navy shapes his worldview and gives him an unshakable sense of mission. It’s that sense of mission that leads to several downfalls.

KM: Much of the novel takes place behind the curtain of the film industry, in backlots and projectionist’s booths. You paint the fixers and studio managers just as vividly as the celebrities. How did the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike, which you were active in, shape the course of this book?

RN: At the risk of sounding naive, what the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes made painfully clear to me was that despite years of working relationships and seemingly genuine friendships with studio executives, the great majority of them set those warm feelings aside to take a cold hard line against writers and actors. Our industry remains quite tight knit. Talent and execs cross paths picking up their kids from school or run into each other at birthday parties for mutual friends. It was hugs and kisses in private, and then during the negotiations there were execs arguing to hold out on making a deal until writers and actors were too poor to pay their rent. The experience led to a theme I wanted to explore in the book: how does one hold admiration for an artist’s talent and contempt for the artist’s disobedience?

Maggie Millner

When I was eleven and had just gotten my first Walkman, my college-age older brother burned me an Ani DiFranco mix CD that changed my life. For the rest of middle and high school, Ani was everything to me; I studied her poetry, went to her concerts, quoted her lyrics in all my AIM away messages. For an artsy nerd with queer yearnings and literary ambitions growing up in a town of six hundred, Ani was a lodestar, the provocative role model I hadn't known I needed. Though our sexual identities and politics have diverged since then, there's a secret pocket of my brain where I still keep the lyrics to almost every song.

Oliver Radclyffe

In the 1990s my motorbike was my transference object. I had no idea that trans was a thing you could be, I just knew I wanted to be one of the boys, and I only felt like myself when my female body was hidden beneath my biking leathers and a full-face motorcycle helmet. After decades of trying to live a motorcycle-free, cis-het life, I took my children to a motorcycle rally to give them a glimpse of my old life. The longing I experienced to be back on my bike—and to return to being the person I’d been back then—made it impossible for me to continue denying who I was. I wrote the opening scene of my memoir, Frighten the Horses, the day after the rally, and haven’t stopped writing since.

Fariha Róisín

There are two films that share the same kind of resonance in my mind. In my memory, they are films I found near one another so their influence is enmeshed and indistinguishable from one another. I think the first depiction of queerness that I ever encountered and understood was The Hours, I was maybe twelve. Soon after, or around the same time, I heard about Fire by Deepa Mehta, a film made in the 90s in India, causing a deeply homophobic rupture throughout the country. When I heard about it, I also found out about the antagonistic violence by several Hindutva gangs across India that burned down screenings due to the lesbianism of the film's contents. To a kid, barely understanding my own sexuality, I was allured by this rather than repulsed. Something inside of me felt alive at the idea of women loving women. The same thing was felt when seeing generations of queer women documented in The Hours. It had such an impact on me and its imprint, as well as Mrs. Dalloway, is entirely on my first novel, Like A Bird. I owe a lot to these early imaginations and representations of queerness.

D/Annie Liontas

Whenever I doubt, I call on the pop-soul icon and patron saint of queers, George Michael. His father did not want him to be a musician; his mother did not want him to be gay. When iconic record producer Jerry Wexler put out "Careless Whisper," George felt it was all wrong--the sax too soft, the drums not limber enough--and decided to release his own version, freeing himself from the nostalgia and sonic iconography of the musical past, creating something new and truer to himself. George Michael not only influenced my gender expression of “delicate man,” he also taught me to choose freedom over safety in art.

Paul Lisicky

Though there are no overt signals that Linus from Peanuts is queer, I always loved it when he came on the screen. In part, it was the sound of his voice: gentle, rounded, mature, wise. He didn’t seem interested in stereotypes of how boys should behave and had no qualms about sucking his thumb and dragging his blanket, which must have been dirty, around. He made himself up on his own terms without making a show of it. He taught Charlie Brown how to rethink Christmas without belittling or dominating him.

KB Brookins

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg holds a special place in my heart because it was the first book that I'd ever read that starred lesbians and trans people! It also was the first book I'd ever read that reflected back to me issues that I was still thinking through and seeing in my local sapphic community. It's a heavy, necessary book that's still a must-read for everyone -- queer folks especially. I try to reach for the level of honesty, craft, and unapologetic centering of my people that Feinberg does in Stone Butch Blues in my own writing.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Definitely the movies The Incredibly True Story of Two Girls in Love and Fried Green Tomatoes. I mean, Idgie Threadgood?! The queer free spirit? She was so affirming. I feel like both films showed a kind of queerness through the ages, even if Idgie wasn't 'out' in the modern sense. Two Girls in Love hit my teen self hard. It was like "Oh ok, I don't have to be a teenager like everyone else is a teenager. I am definitely not the same as other girls I know but there's this much more fun and expansive way I could be.”

Lucy Corin

My first true moment of this kind was late: the song “Les and Ray” by Kathleen Hanna and Johanna Fateman. It’s not about seeing your queerness in another body. It’s about the entanglement (though that is not quite the right word) of queerness and art that can make you feel the potential for freedom. That space of real connection and impact happened for me as it happens in this song, through walls and across distances and in an essentially deeply private way.

Meredith Talusan

The first class I took in college was with the legendary literary critic D.A. Miller called “Topics in Gay Male Representation.” The first thing he did in class was pass around a trifold brochure for Provincetown, which as I recall was thick and white with green lettering, just this seemingly innocuous piece of paper promoting a tourist destination. Then he started to decode the language: “dunes offering privacy” as code for “great gay cruising spots” and “bohemian” meaning “queer” and I can’t remember but something meant “glory holes are available”! It was one of my early exposures to how queer people can use levels of language to speak to different audiences, which provoked a fascination that still permeates my work today.

Ahead of the novel’s release, Work Room manager Kate Mabus spoke with ‘Pemi about creation, liminality, and folklore. Read the full Q&A below!

Kate Mabus: This is your debut novel, but you’ve been publishing short stories for years, including the collection Ghostroots (W.W. Norton & Co, 2024), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. When did you feel ready to take on a new form?

‘Pemi Aguda: Oh, I didn’t go into this ready at all! At my MFA program, I was cajoled into giving a novel-writing class a try, even though I only considered myself a short story writer. In the class, we had to submit a 50,000 word novel at the end of the semester, and so, I took a longer short story of mine and through sheer will or foolishness, I was able to submit a pile of words that ended up being the zero draft of this novel.

KM: The novel’s inciting action is a pregnant woman throwing herself into the water “like a child jumping into the arms of a beloved parent.” This becomes something of an epidemic among the mothers-to-be in Lagos, but I wouldn’t call this a novel about parenthood. What else does pregnancy represent to you?

PA: I imagine pregnancy to be a disorienting liminal time. The title of the novel comes from the Yoruba saying “⁠ẹsẹ̀ kan ayé, ẹsẹ̀ kan ọ̀run,” which translates to “one leg/foot on earth, one leg in heaven.” The idea is that because a pregnant woman is transitioning/guiding a soul from the realm of heaven to the realm of earth, that she’s both vulnerable and charged—she’s straddling spiritual and physical worlds. I’ve also been thinking about Matthew Salesses’ definition of setting as “an awareness of the world,” and I think being pregnant, with the awareness of bringing new life into it, might scrape back what’s on top to reveal sharper and scarier layers of reality.

KM: You paint a picture of a rapidly developing Lagos that’s being redefined by private overseas investors subsidized by the state government. Much of the novel is set in the “Omi City,” a gated community being built on land reclaimed from the ocean’s eroding coastline. What sort of research went into creating this hyperreal depiction of Lagos?

PA: For Omi City itself, most of my research came from researching Lagos State’s Eko Atlantic. My background in architecture helped. I also met with the elders and leaders of one of the waterfront settlements evicted by the Lagos State government. They shared their history and griefs with me.

KM: Like the novel’s narrator, Yosoye, you were trained as an architect. One of my favorite stories of yours, “The Hollow,” is also narrated by a young architect tasked with “fixing” someone’s house, which you write is a “prison, a house is a supplication, a house is a justification.” What similarities do you see between writing and architecture?

PA: It’s all creation work, as Architect Jegede in the novel says. No matter how often I get this question, it flummoxes me. Perhaps because I think the true answer is a murky unknowable thing, something about all these interests emerging from inside the same consciousness. But, I do find that my considerations of scale and scope, of composition: what stays in frame, white space: what stays out of frame, and of structure: how what comes on top is buttressed by what came before, are parallel between both disciplines.

KM: You often incorporate folklore in your writing. I’m curious to what extent real traditions inspire these tales? Do you see folklore and contemporary storytelling as serving the same function?

PA: Growing up, I got the sense that a lot of the folklore we heard was with the aim to warn, to scare us off bad behaviour, to protect us from tricky situations or to frame the way we thought about the world. I don’t write stories with this aim—I write to explore ideas, to entertain, to rejoice in the sentence, to wrestle with what I don’t understand. But I find these myths and folklore to be excellent places to start fiction from. For example, the tortoise is a selfish trickster in many stories it appears in. If I were to commit to that baseline of reality and place the talking tortoise in a contemporary setting, what else might come up about the relationship Nigerians have to community and individualism? This is what I enjoy: how these modes of storytelling enrich each other, pointing to, and paying respect to history, culture, and the stories that taught me how to tell stories.

Here’s a list of some clients’ recent work to get you started:

Sandy Ernest Allen’s recently published “A Queer Accounting of the NY Times Book Review, 2013-2022” on LitHub

Cameron Awkward-Rich’s book The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment

KB Brookins’s memoir Pretty

P. Carl’s memoir Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition

Jos Charles’s most recent collection A Year & other Poems

D/Annie Liontas’s memoir Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery

Megan Milks’s recently released essay collection Mega Milk

Oliver Radclyffe’s personal essay in The Guardian on David Bowie and gender identity

Jordy Rosenberg’s new and acclaimed novel Night Night Fawn

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s novel Terry Dactyl

Meredith Talusan’s memoir Fairest

Yanyi’s poetry collection Dream of the Divided Field

Lambda Literary has released the finalists for the 2026 Lammy Awards!

Since 1989, the Lammys have brought national visibility to LGBTQ books. Today, they celebrate more than 150 LGBTQ writers across 26 categories.

We are proud to have 7 clients recognized this year across 7 categories!

Transgender Poetry

Congratulations to Rickey Laurentiis who was nominated for the collection Death of the First Idea: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf)!

Rickey is teaching a craft seminar in The Work Room this quarter on Trends in American Poetry Today. How lucky to study the topic with one of today’s leading poets!

Bisexual Poetry

Congratulations to Chet’la Sebree who was nominated for her collection Blue Opening (Zando/Tin House)!

Bisexual Nonfiction

Congratulations to Lidia Yuknavitch whose memoir Reading the Waves (Riverhead Books) was nominated!

Just in time, Lidia is teaching a master class on innovative story structures designed around the book. Join us on April 4th!

Transgender Nonfiction

Congratulations to Denne Michele Norris, editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, who was nominated for the essay collection Both/And (HarperOne)!

Transgender Fiction

Congratulations to Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, nominated for her novel Terry Dactyl (Coffee House Press)!

Gay Fiction

Congratulations to Adam Haslett whose novel Mothers and Sons (Little, Brown) is a finalist!

LGBTQ+ Comics

Congratulations to Kayla E. who was nominated for her graphic novel Precious Rubbish (Fantagraphics)!

- The Combahee River Collective Statement

In January, Haymarket Books released an updated edition of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, edited by client Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.

In celebration of Women’s History this month and Black History last month, we are featuring this essential collection from Black feminists who have transformed the struggle for liberation with their writings on intersectionality and identity politics.

The expanded second edition includes a new introduction by Taylor and an exclusive interview with Angela Y. Davis, as well as essays from founders of the Combahee River Collective, a pathbreaking group of radical Black feminists and one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and ‘70s.

In our March newsletter, Starboard editor Kira Tucker wrote, “Amid the rampant injustices we’re up against, this collection reminds us that the Black feminist liberation struggle is a fight for all of our freedoms.”

As Taylor puts it in the collection, “Let us end the economic system that devours the people we love.”

To read the new edition of How We Get Free, visit our Bookshop!

Leslie with client Sonia Shah

Leslie with client Katie Peterson

Katie, Leslie, and Ruth Dickey, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation

Leslie with BOMB Magazine’s Associate Publisher Libby Flores and Poetry Editor Monica de la Torres.

Katie, client Denne Michele Norris, and Leslie

Leslie and new client 'Pemi Aguda. Her novel One Leg on Earth will be released in May.

Katie with client Sumita Chakraborty

Leslie with client Isle McElroy, who’s teaching a workshop on novel openings and another workshop on using real life in fiction this Spring for the Work Room.

Katie with client Ilya Kaminsky

Leslie and Katie with client Joe Osmundson. His book Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood is forthcoming in May.

Clients Chet’la Sebree and D/Annie Liontas

What a joy to be surrounded by so many writers, editors, and professionals who share a commitment to literature. We need you now more than ever!

Kristi Coulter, the author of two acclaimed memoirs, along with many essays and short stories, has a trick for transforming free writing into a cohesive narrative. She told us a bit about her writing process and how she came to this technique:

“I'm leery of outlining a writing project in advance, because being pointed too firmly in one direction at the outset can blind me to interesting detours and possibilities. I also just find it less fun. Which means, of course, that instead I tend to produce hundreds of pages of very interesting chaos and then stare at it in despair, wondering how to find the actual book in it.” The trick for breaking through that despair is a technique called reverse outlining, which Kristi is teaching in a craft seminar on January 31.

“I was in such a state with my second book, the memoir Exit Interview, when a novelist friend introduced me to the idea of outlining a draft in reverse. Using her basic method, I quickly saw not only my book's organic structure, but where I still had work to do to buttress it. The reverse outline allowed me to make a concrete, realistic plan for turning my beautiful mess into something I could actually hand in to my publisher while still honoring its quirks and playful form. I now use my own version of reverse outlining on nearly all my writing projects, from a long essay to the novel I'm currently revising.”

The book critic and author Ruth Franklin is teaching a master class on how to use Scrivener to manage longterm projects in any genre. “All my students know I’m an evangelist for Scrivener,” Ruth told us. “I started using it while working on my first book; now, it’s my go-to for everything, from a 3,000-word magazine piece to my two full-length biographies, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life and The Many Lives of Anne Frank.”

“Scrivener is unique in giving you a scaffold to structure your book as you draft it. It also allows you conveniently to refer to your research and notes as you write, since everything is in the same file and easily searchable. And to make sure you stay on track, you can plug in your deadline and word target and it will tell you how many words you need to write per day. When I posted online the celebratory picture I took after reaching my manuscript target for Shirley Jackson (below), the nice folks who created the program even congratulated me.”

For our nonfiction writers, the journalist Tricia Romano is teaching a master class on the crucial and unavoidable art of interviewing. Tricia told us, “Over my many years of interviewing, I’ve come to learn that the best interview is a conversation—one where you are present and listening to what the person is saying, not just hitting all the questions you have written down.”

“In time, a good conversation will naturally navigate to everything you wanted to know, and what’s more, what you didn’t know you needed to know about the subject. For my oral history, The Freaks Came Out To Write, I found that letting people talk and seeing where the conversation takes you is a more successful than forcing them down a predetermined path.”

In the workshop “Tips and Tricks for Engaging Grant Applications,” writer and drug historian Emily Dufton is demystifying the grant writing experience. While working on her forthcoming book, Addiction, Inc.: Medication-Assisted Treatment and America’s Forgotten War on Drugs, she won several awards that helped finance the writing, including a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant in 2022. After walking you through a typical grant application and discussing the many varieties available, she will share her recipe for a successful grant application and guide you through transforming the concept of your book into a successful pitch.

Emily spoke to us about her decision to host this workshop in response to the changing world of grant giving. “Many of the country's most prestigious and creative awards no longer exist after major federal funding cuts last year, which makes the remaining prizes that much more important. A writing grant can mark the difference between finishing a book and leaving the work undone -- it certainly did for me -- and I want to prepare students to submit the richest, most complete, and most professional applications possible. We can navigate the shifting terrain together if we understand what these organizations require and how to make our own work shine."

Additionally, Jonathan Escoffery is offering a master class on “How to Get In: Applying to Fellowships, Residencies, Conferences, and Creative Writing Programs.” He’ll take you through the key components of a personal statement and statement of purpose so you can have the best chances in a competitive application process. Students will receive resources like sample statements, strategies, and tips that will ensure your applications are taken seriously.

To see up for these classes and read more about our offerings, please visit the Work Room website!

The Hour of the Wolf is a moving meditation on loneliness and longing, motherhood and the natural world, family—blood and chosen, human and beyond—and so much more. What were you surprised to discover while writing?

That I had so much to say about love, friendship, and the lessons I had gleaned from the wild world around us that we often don’t notice at all. At least, I hadn’t noticed it until very late in life. It was loneliness that pushed me into thinking about animals, because I looked to them for a sort of companionship that was safe and nurturing, some sort of care that was warm and forgiving, especially because I was in a controlling and unhappy relationship. In an emotionally abusive dynamic, you lose so quickly the structure that defends you against harm. I had willingly lowered - destroyed, even - the defensives I had built over a lifetime to protect myself. And I had lowered them voluntarily because I was in love.

Following a tender moment with newborn puppies, you write, “I didn’t expect to learn this much about love or God or grace from any of this. I didn’t expect to be so moved by the simple act of care.” How else did this work defy your expectations?

I wanted so much to be a mother. I spent my thirties longing to have children and suffering because I could not. When my dog, Coco, had a litter of puppies, I thought I would view the whole experience as a little adventure and ordinary exercise. Something new. But I was broken open by it. It sounds funny to say, but I was struck by a constant awe watching her deliver and care for her young. It was so beautiful and so moving and so understandable - it taught me so much and touched me deeply as someone who was grappling with my own sadnesses and longings. My dog, a tiny creature, also looked after me with such unconditional care and such tenderness at a time that was totally isolated in a bad relationship that she helped me survive and returned me to some semblance of strength. She reminded me that that’s what love does - it doesn’t diminish us - it illuminates us and makes the impossible possible.

Praised by Sonia Faleiro for its “unflinching honesty and intellectual curiosity,” The Hour of the Wolf dives into topics ranging from the evolutionary origins of dogs and divine deer to celestial cartography and the Gaza bombings’ impact on climate change. How did you decide on the book’s scope and focus?

Everything is connected and at the time, I didn’t always know how. These seemingly disparate things are part of a story, I needed to follow them to see how they connected. So I followed a train of thought that led me to all these places with a blind trust and openness. Some of it were things that haunted me, like the Gaza bombardment and how it is destroying the earth, and other things were talismans that appeared to me as though they were trying to teach me something - like the appearance of deer and celestial cartography. None of them were planned or constructed, they just alighted in front of me and I went with them.

What did you learn about grief—and life—while writing this memoir?

That grief rests on the foundations of so much beauty and love. I had spent a lifetime understanding grief as mourning and loss and while writing this book something switched for me - it wasn’t this solemn, morose thing I had always understood it to be. It was a celebration, if you chose to see it that way, of those we loved. To see grief in this new light, as an affirmation and recognition of how much we adore and cherish those who we have loved, was a revelation.

Daniel Kovacs said The Hour of the Wolf felt like “an unburdening.” Alexander Chee called it “a memoir that is the song you sing to make yourself brave.” Did you share these sentiments when writing the book? How did it feel for you?

The opposite - I felt very vulnerable and afraid and often ashamed. At the time that I was writing the beginnings of this book, the world was totally in flux (it was the year after the covid lockdowns) and my own life had been turned upside down. I was deeply unhappy in a coercive relationship and it had never occurred to me that someone like me - independent, tough, etc - could be in such a toxic dynamic. But I was. Being gaslit constantly left me totally unsure of who I was though I knew that I didn’t feel good. I felt very isolated and confused and didn’t feel I could say any of what I felt outloud. So I wrote it down.

What do you hope is the impact of this memoir?

I truly hope anyone who has been in a similar situation, but I’m thinking particularly of women, will have some alarms go off. And I hope it will make them feel less alone and less ashamed.

An abbreviated version of this Q&A appeared in our January newsletter. We’ll be publishing more extended interviews like this one on Substack, so be sure to follow along!

We asked a few of our consultants what books they borrowed that they later bought copies of for their personal libraries! Find our full consultation offerings on the Work Room page.

Jonathan Escoffery

After borrowing Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, I knew I had to have it for my personal collection, and I immediately bought several of his other works along with it. I was taken by that gripping combination of tenderness and humor, and the freewheeling narrative style that accommodates Vonnegut’s seemingly limitless imagination.

Jonathan offers extensive global feedback on short fiction, personal essays, and novels. He’s also teaching a class this quarter on how to get into your dream fellowships, residencies, conferences, and MFAs.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

Scientific and poetic, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer is a book about the environmental crisis that is both original and optimistic. I wanted a copy because I knew I’d be quoting it in my own work, and returning to it for inspiration.

Jennifer offers consultations on both poetry projects and nonfiction, including memoir, journalism, creative nonfiction, and academic manuscripts. She is also teaching a master class on how to get your nonfiction placed with agents, editors, and publishers.

Kavita Das

A few months ago I checked out of my local library a book of poetry entitled The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang. Pretty soon, I had filled so many of its pages with post it notes, so I knew I needed my own copy. I especially love the last section of short Love Letter poems including this one:

Let me tell you a story
about hope: it always starts
and ends with bandages.

Kavita helps her clients balance the craft of writing with the substance of conscience, the personal and the political.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

I distinctly remember buying a few books I used to check out from the library religiously when I was younger: The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County Babylon: Five Years of Basic Naughtiness. Yes—comic books! I loved settling in with 80s and 90s comic strips. Another book I bought recently that I also checked out all the time was Redwall, from that series about valiant mice! I saw it on a bookshelf at a bookstore and all the memories came flooding back and I absolutely had to have it. I loved loved loved that book, and the entire series. It reminds me so much of the hours I would spend just existing in my imagination and the worlds created by books.

Lillian provides poetry consultations that include comments on overall themes, collection arrangement, and line edits on individual poems.

Meredith Talusan

One of my professors mentioned Paul Monette's memoir Becoming a Man freshman year of college so I took it out of the library, and soon got myself my own copy so I could underline and write in it. Though we were different in a lot of ways, we were united by queerness and the struggle to emerge from Catholic backgrounds as well as the expectations of our loved ones. Monette became a guiding force in my own coming out process and he even sent me a postcard once after I wrote to him. He died shortly after from AIDS-related complications; I continue to re-read his books.

Meredith accepts clients on an ongoing basis for private editorial and writing career consultations.

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto

After several years attending to my novel draft, I recently felt myself pulled by the orbit of short stories; specifically, Tessa Hadley’s world of short fiction. Hadley plays with time and perspective in a way that feels unique, to me, inside the short form. In Hadley’s work, constraints surprisingly effect capaciousness, lending her short fiction a deeply impactful quality and sweeping scope. The opening story alone awoke my scribbling and underlining impulses, so I knew it was fitting to grab a copy of my own.

Megan offers prose manuscript consultations that center energy, joy, and deep intentionality.

Ira Silverberg

In the fall of 2013, I moderated a panel for the Asian American Writers Association's Page Turner Festival with Sergio de la Pava, Miguel Syjuco, and Eugene Lim. Too close to the event for my comfort, I had yet to receive a copy of de la Pava's just published paperback of Personae, which would have been the book we'd be talking about, nor did my local library. But they said a nearby branch had his previous novel A Naked Singularity—the branch in Mastic, NY. If you know Long Island, the idea that the Mastic public library had a copy—a novel about the hopelessness of the American justice system whose metaphoric title might have appealed to students of physics, a legal thriller that reads a lot more like Gaddis or Pynchon than Turow or Patterson—was chuckle-worthy. But an inter-library loan got it to me in a day. It is a stunning book that, as soon as I was done reading, I knew I had to have in my library, so I ordered one. Personae eventually showed up—also a brilliant book, but far more cryptic than A Naked Singularity. I just looked on the shelves and I must have lent it out. Time to buy another one.

Ira is a prose consultant with deep respect for the integrity of work that is formally challenging, based in vernacular, or otherwise considered non-traditional.

David Shields

Todd McGowan’s Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution, because it elucidates everything I care about, from psychology to philosophy to politics.

David welcomes the opportunity to consult on various fiction and nonfiction works, whether it’s a sequence of brief essays, a long collage, a screenplay, a book-length work-in-progress, or anything in between.

January 30, 1985 - November 29, 2025

A few words on the loss of our cherished client from Leslie Shipman:

Where to start? You were the reason I started this crazy ass business. Remember sitting at the bar at 282 Burger on Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn? I was miserable in my employment at the time, and you said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world, “What’s stopping you from starting your own business?” That question changed everything for me. Your courage gave me courage.

You were my first client, but our friendship went back to my days at the National Book Foundation, and you were the development person at Weeksville. And somehow we just became friends after that, because sometimes you just click with people. You were already a prize-winning poet, and then came your stunning fiction. Redwood Court, the first in a planned multi-volume series recounting the story of one “ordinary” Black family in South Carolina through the 20th century. The next volume, Fairfield County, is due to be published in June 2026.

So many memories, so many great talks, so much tea spilled, laughs, and more laughs. My friend, I will miss you forever, and never forget how you changed my life. The Ancestors are with you now.

Yesterday, the New York Times published a beautiful obituary for DeLana, excerpted below:

Ms. Dameron wanted her cycle to encompass a variety of forms: poetry, novels, even children’s literature. (She wrote a picture book about her horse Shadrach, which is in currently in production.)

“I believe my project as a writer who is also Black and Southern is to document the experience of Black, Southern folks across multiple generations,” she said in an interview last year with the website Indyweek.

[…]

“Her intention was to make sure that Black people felt comfortable in nature and were connected to the land,” Renée Watson, a writer and friend of Ms. Dameron’s, said in an interview. “She was very good at gathering folks and making sure that everyone felt welcomed.”

Watch Rabih’s acceptance speech:

Watch Patricia’s acceptance speech:

Congratulations to all of this year’s winners! And to the other finalists, especially our clients Cathy Linh Che and Richard Siken, who were also nominated for the Poetry prize. What a privilege to root for three clients at once!

Our founder Leslie Shipman with senior agent Katie McDonough and agent-editor extraordinaire Ira Silverberg, who we are lucky enough to have share his 30-plus years of literary expertise in The Work Room.

When you’ve seen a client climb from the early stages of their career to the very pinnacle of literary achievement, it makes a win that much sweeter.

Patricia and Rabih, your words inspire us all. We’re so proud to be on your team and can’t wait to see what comes next!