AG Educational Events
Tuesday, December 9, 2025
7:00 pm Eastern
Online
In the return of our long-running series From Manuscript to Marketplace, we’re joined by debut novelist Eshani Surya, agent Dana Murphy, and editor Roxane Gay to discuss Ravishing, a work of speculative fiction that confronts the tech industry, beauty culture, chronic illness, and family drama.
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.
We’ll hear how Surya’s querying process resulted in two agents at Trellis Literary Management co-agenting her and selling the manuscript to Roxane Gay. Gay and Surya will discuss their editorial relationship and significant changes that shaped the book’s final form. We will also hear plenty about the experience of promoting a debut that was years in the making.
A Q&A will follow the presentation; you can pre-submit a question when registering for the event. A recording will be made available for those who cannot attend live.
The event will take place via Zoom with automatic closed captioning. To request any other accessibility features, please email support@authorsguild.org and we will make every effort to accommodate.
Eshani Surya is a chronically ill South Asian writer living in Philadelphia. She holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and is a 2023 finalist for the A.C. Bose Grant for Speculative Literature, a 2022 Asian Women Writer’s Workshop mentee, a 2022 Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop scholarship recipient, and a 2021 Mae Fellowship recipient. Ravishing is her first novel.
Roxane Gay is a writer, editor, and professor. She is the author of several bestselling books including Bad Feminist, Hunger, Difficult Women, and Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business. She is also the author of the Eisner Award winning World of Wakanda for Marvel and the editor of Best American Short Stories 2018. Her short stories and essays can be found in Harper’s Bazaar, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and the editor of an eponymous imprint at Grove Atlantic. In 2018, she won a Guggenheim fellowship. She is also the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and working on several books and film and television projects. Her newsletter, The Audacity, is hosted at Substack.
Dana Murphy is a literary agent at Trellis Literary Management, which she joined in 2022 after ten years building her list at The Book Group. She represents literary and upmarket fiction for both adult and teen readers, as well as narrative nonfiction and essay collections. Across genre, Dana falls in love at the story and line-level simultaneously, and is always searching for language and plot that move in equal measure. She is based in Philadelphia.
