After working for a year after college at the St. Petersburg Times, I moved to New York and took a job assisting Atheneum’s three editors, Barbara Anderman, Judy Kern, and Neil Nyren. The first week I was there, I typed a hundred blurb letters about “A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney,” the first thing I learned from Neil Nyren, now the publisher and editor-in-chief of Putnam, about publishing a book in as specific a way possible. I acquired my first book, a biography of the Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor; Judy Kern, a genius editor, taught me how to edit it, and the late Harry Ford, the head of production and the poetry editor (at Atheneum and later at Knopf), designed the jacket. I’ll never forget the day he came upstairs, stopped in front of the receptionist’s desk I occupied, lifted the tissue cover off his design with a flourish, and said, “Well? What do you think?” I thought it was great.
I became an editor at Atheneum before leaving to join the Julian Bach Agency, which was like dying and going to heaven. Julian loves life and, more specifically, HIS life, which is pretty terrific (for a glimpse of it, read Jan Morris’s essay “Jewish Friends” in Pleasures of a Tangled Life). Everything was “great idea – try it!” He used to give me advice about being an agent. “What is the one quality an agent needs to be a success?” I couldn’t think: a nose for the new, a business head, an ability to extract large sums of money from people? “No. It’s SHEER ANIMAL ENERGY.” Sheer animal energy seemed to be the ability to be the last man standing, which Julian embodied until his untimely death, at age 97, in October 2011.
When Julian sold his agency in 1992, I went out and incorporated my own, starting the office in a sunroom in an apartment in Chicago, transplanting to a little room off the back garden of our house in Brooklyn, then moving to Manhattan in 2000. In 2011 we moved to a beautiful new office with a long lease in Maiden Lane, which we fell in love with partly because our address is also the title of an obscure noir film starring Claire Trevor, 15 Maiden Lane.
I married Paul Rittenberg the day Simon & Garfunkel had their reunion concert in Central Park. We live in Brooklyn, and we have three girls who love to read; their advice to writers can be found here.
After discovering that my B.A. in Poetry Writing from the University of Virginia didn’t exactly flood my mailbox with job offers, I moved to New York to pursue a career in publishing. I attended the NYU Summer Publishing Institute in 2004 and dipped my toes into the literary world, reading submissions for Open City magazine and assisting the publisher of The Paris Review. I then worked part-time at two other agencies before joining ARLA in 2005.
I also live in Brooklyn, across the street from Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leonard Bernstein, and a large flock of parrots.
If you’re reading this to figure out how to address your query letter, “Ms.” is fine!
I joined ARLA in 2010 after graduating from New York University by way of southeastern Virginia. As soon as I started a new life in New York, I knew I would want to stay long past college, giving up the beach for city life. After four years of nonstop writing to fulfill a double major in Journalism and Sociology, I realized the magazine industry, in which I had once hoped to become a part, was not for me. Now, I’ve completely switched gears and I am happily delving into the publishing world.
