Regina Brooks is the CEO and President of Serendipity Literary Agency, and the author of “Writing Great Books for Young Adults” and “You Should Really Write A Book: How to Write, Sell, and Market Your Memoir,” and is on the faculty of several low residency programs.  Serendipity Literary Agency, one of the largest African-American owned literary agencies in the country, represents clients whose awards and honors include the National Book Award, Newbery, Michael Printz, and Caldecott honors and winners of the NAACP Image Award and Edgar Award and a host of others.    She was named a Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree, Woman of the Year by The National Association of Professional Women, and is a two-time winner of the Stevie^TM Award for Women Entrepreneurs.  She is a member of the National Book Foundation’s Book Council, and on the board of the Association of American Literary Agents and the Association of Writing Professionals.

Sara Crowe is a Senior Agent at Pippin Properties, where she represents books for children and adults. She began her career at The Wylie Agency and worked in foreign rights for eight years, before building her own client list. Her clients include Newbery and Printz winners, New York Times best-selling authors, and debut authors. She loves finding new talent to champion and nurturing and developing careers.

Pippin Properties, Inc. has spent the past 20 years helping build careers for authors and artists whose work stands the test of time, many of whom have become household names in their own right, such as Kate DiCamillo, Katherine Applegate, Peter H. Reynolds, Doreen Cronin, Jason Reynolds, Nina LaCour, Erin Entrada Kelly, Jandy Nelson and Kathi Appelt.

Daniel Kirschen began his career at ICM Partners in 2010 and has been there since, focusing on literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, memoir and pop culture.

He’s drawn to writing that is impressive and assured without being showy; that successfully blends the high-brow and the low-; that marries propulsive storytelling with emotional depth. His clients include: Ann Patchett, Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman, Dan Piepenbring, Morgan Parker, Lee Durkee, Chuck Palahniuk, Amy Rose Spiegel, Desus & Mero. On a personal note: He’s a native of Rochester, NY, and a graduate of William & Mary, with a degree summa cum laude in philosophy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Daisy.  

Tina Pohlman spent nearly 25 years as an editor and publisher in New York, at various houses including Harcourt, Crown, and Spiegel & Grau. She has acquired and edited a wide range of critically acclaimed and best-selling authors over the course of her career, including Colson Whitehead, Patrick deWitt and Christine Schutt, in fiction, and Temple Grandin and Arika Okrent in nonfiction.

An agent since 2018, Tina loves discovering distinctive new voices and working closely with authors. Recently published and forthcoming fiction titles from her clients include Mateo Askaripour’s New York Times best-selling “Black Buck” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and Emily Hall’s “The Longcut” (Dalkey Archive). Her nonfiction titles include Kelly Conaboy’s “The Particulars of Peter: DNA Tests, Dance Lessons, and Other Reasons to Hang Out with My Perfect Dog” (Grand Central Publishing) and Arika Okrent’s “Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme-and Other Oddities of the English Language” (Oxford University Press). She is currently an agent with the Ross Yoon agency, based in Washington, DC.

Cindy Spiegel is co-CEO of Spiegel & Grau, an independent publishing company that was previously an imprint of Penguin Random House. Before that she was publisher of Riverhead Books, where she was a founding editor. Among the writers whose careers she launched are James McBride, Bryan Stevenson, Khaled Hosseini, Chang-rae Lee, Gary Shteyngart, Philipp Meyer, ZZ Packer, Alex Garland, Danzy Senna and Sana Krasikov ; and she has also edited and published books by Yuval Noah Harari, Yann Martel, Sara Gruen, Harold Bloom, Ari Shavit, Dan Pink, Steven Rinella, Anne Lamott and many others. She sits on the board of Archangel Ancient Tree Archive and on the advisory board of Columbia Global Reports.