Event Recording
Members Only
November 10, 2023
Author Sim Kern joins us to discuss The Free People’s Village, a USA Today bestseller and Indie Next pick described as “eat-the-rich climate fiction,” with agent Rebecca Podos of Rees Literary Agency and editor and publicist Irene Vázquez of Levine Querido.
As a case study of the path to publication, From Manuscript to Marketplace offers candid talks between an author and members of their publishing team about each step of the publication process: acquisition, editorial, marketing, and more.
Sim Kern is the USA Today bestselling author of The Free People’s Village, an Indie Next pick. Their debut horror novella, Depart, Depart!, was selected for the Honor List for the 2020 Otherwise Award, and their short story collection, Real Sugar is Hard to Find, was hailed in a starred review by Publishers Weekly as, “a searing, urgent, but still achingly tender work that will wow any reader of speculative fiction.” As a journalist, they report on petrochemical polluters and drag space billionaires. Sim spent ten years teaching English to middle and high schoolers in Houston, Texas, before shifting to writing full-time. Find them all over the internet, but especially on tiktok at @simkern.
Senior agent Rebecca Podos (she/they) has been with the Rees Literary Agency since 2011. A graduate of the MFA Writing, Literature and Publishing program at Emerson College, her own Young Adult fiction is published by Balzer+Bray/ HarperCollins and Running Press Kids/Hachette. A complete list of her authors’ published and upcoming projects can be found on her personal website, Rebeccapodos.com.
Born in New Orleans, raised in Houston, & now living in Manhattan, Irene Vázquez is a queer Black Mexican American poet, editor, translator, and journalist. Irene’s debut chapbook Take Me To the Water was released by Bloof Books in 2022. Their writing also appears in When Language Broke Open: Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent, out from University of Arizona Press. They are a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominated writer, whose work can be found in Muzzle and the Oxford American, among others. By day, Irene works at Levine Querido, editing books about feisty twelve-year-olds & angsty adults.
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