Annie Hwang is always thinking about the future. This is partly because one aspect of her job as an agent is to help change and widen the literary land-scape, one author at a time. And it’s partly because that is who she is as a person, having spent her career advocating for and mentoring those in the community—especially writers who are just starting out. “It’s about the readership I’m trying to serve,” she says of her work beyond the individual authors in her care. “It’s about the community I’m trying to serve.” And to Hwang, community is what buoys her work: It is what supports her writers and what is paving the way for a more equitable future.
Hwang came to agenting by accident: With hopes of becoming an editor, she moved to New York City after graduating from UCLA in 2012. She started by applying for editorial positions, as they were the only ones she knew about in publishing at the time. Following a successful informational interview, an editor at St. Martin’s Press put her in touch with Folio Literary, where she landed an internship. She later became a part-time office manager, then a part-time assistant agent, and finally an agent able to sign authors whose work spoke to her. After eight years at Folio, she joined Ayesha Pande Literary, where she has used her incisive editorial eye to publish writers like award-winning poet Franny Choi, columnist and author John Paul Brammer, and the speculative fiction novelist Sequoia Nagamatsu, all writers who are expanding what narratives can do to speak truth to power, to grapple with our increasingly complex and complicated world, to write in a society where to be your true self can also be dangerous.
Esta historia es de la edición September - October 2022 de Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Esta historia es de la edición September - October 2022 de Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
THE MEUSEUM OF HUMAN HISTORY
READING The Museum of Human History felt like listening to a great harmonic hum. After I finished it I found the hum lingering in my ears. Its echo continued for days.
The Sea Elephants
SHASTRI Akella's poised, elegant debut, The Sea Elephants, is a bildungsroman of a young man who joins a street theater group in India after fleeing his father's violent disapproval, the death of his twin sisters, and his mother's unfathomable grief.
The History of a Difficult Child
MIHRET Sibhat's debut novel begins with God dumping rain on a small Ethiopian town as though. He were mad at somebody.
The Sorrows of Others
AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
We Are a Haunting
TYRIEK White’s debut novel, We Are a Haunting, strikes me as both a love letter to New York City and a kind of elegy.
RADICAL ATTENTION
IN HER LATEST BOOK, THE LIGHT ROOM: ON ART AND CARE, PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS IN JULY, KATE ZAMBRENO CELEBRATES THE ETHICAL WORK OF CAREGIVING, THE SMALL JOYS OF ORDINARY LIFE, AND AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WITHIN HUMAN SPACES.
The Fine Print
HOW TO READ YOUR BOOK CONTRACT
First
GINA CHUNG'S SEA CHANGE
Blooming how she must
WITH ROOTS IN NATURE WRITING, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, POETRY, AND PHOTOGRAPHY, CAMILLE T. DUNGY'S NEW BOOK, SOIL: THE STORY OF A BLACK MOTHER'S GARDEN, DELVES INTO THE PERSONAL AND POLITICAL ACT OF CULTIVATING AND DIVERSIFYING A GARDEN OF HERBS, VEGETABLES, FLOWERS, AND OTHER PLANTS IN THE PREDOMINANTLY WHITE COMMUNITY OF FORT COLLINS, COLORADO.
