Ask an Editor, Ask an Agent
Instructors: Michael Mungiello, Ian Van Wye
2024 dates to be announced soon
This is a three-week course on publishing led by both a literary agent and editor. Designed to give authors the broadest possible overview of the industry, this class centers on answering the participants' specific questions and editing their written materials.
The first session takes the form of a general introduction; opening remarks about how agents and editors work together will be followed by an in-depth Q&A session. The second session entails one-on-one conversations with the agent in which participant and agent review and edit the author's query letter, as well as discuss how to begin building their profile; they'll discuss recommendations about where to publish smaller pieces and how to connect with other writers in the interest of establishing a community of colleagues. The third session takes the form of an editor-led hands-on review of a twenty-page writing sample, with an eye to helping the writer catch the eye of agents and editors alike.
Mike Mungiello has conducted workshops for the Community of Writers, Gotham Writers Workshop, and Authors Publish. He represents literary fiction and non-fiction, and his clients' books have been praised in the New Yorker, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, with several being named Best Books of the Year by NPR and Bloomberg. He's an agent at InkWell Management.
Ian Van Wye is an assistant editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he works with a list of authors that includes David Diop, Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Laurent Binet, Virginie Despentes, Robert Sullivan, and Peter Handke, among others. He has also assisted with books by a number of FSG’s leading writers: Janet Malcolm, George Packer, Eliza Griswold, Louis Menand, Geoff Dyer, Robert Gottlieb, and Samuel Moyn. His primary interests include literary fiction, fiction in translation, and nonfiction, especially intellectual and global history, as well as creative nonfiction.