Event Recording
August 29, 2024
Author Sally Wen Mao joins us alongside her agent, Clare Mao, and editor, Nidhi Pugalia, to discuss Ninetails: Nine Tales, her debut short story collection. With moderator Lily Philpott, we’ll cover the development of Sally’s manuscript, her shift from poetry to short-form fiction, and the acquisition and editorial process at Penguin Books.
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.
Sally Wen Mao is the author of the story collection Ninetails: Nine Tales (Penguin Books). She is also the author of the poetry collection The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf Press, August 2023), a finalist for the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Prize, and two previous poetry collections, Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2013 and 2021, The Paris Review, Granta, Poetry, A Public Space, Harpers Bazaar, The Washington Post, and others. The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she was recently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. She has taught writing at NYU, Cornell, and Sarah Lawrence College, and will be an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Baruch College in fall 2024.
Clare Mao is a literary agent at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, where she represents adult fiction and nonfiction. Clare was born and raised in Queens, New York, went to college in the Midwest, and now lives in Brooklyn. Prior to joining Greenburger in 2023, she worked at Europa Content and Janklow & Nesbit. Her clients are poets, musicians, journalists, artists, bar owners, cooks, poets, mental health professionals, and more, and include Johanna Hedva, Sally Wen Mao, Jia Sung, Simon Wu, and Mimi Zhu. In fiction, she is drawn to literary and upmarket fiction, and in nonfiction, she represents mostly narrative nonfiction such as memoirs or essay collections, as well as illustrated projects like cookbooks, photo books, and decks. Across genres, she is drawn to writers who are curious, thoughtful, and critical, who have expansive interests and concerns including and outside of writing, with a particular affinity for those writing across disciplines. Most importantly, she likes to work with writers who are having fun.
Nidhi Pugalia is an editor at Viking Penguin, working on fiction and nonfiction. In fiction, she is drawn to lyrical writing and propulsive plotting in the speculative, science fiction/fantasy, and magical realism spaces with a particular emphasis on books that can cross with other categories like romance, historical, psychological suspense, and mystery. She is also looking for narrative nonfiction from smart, passionate writers who offer a fresh or niche perspective. She has worked on such books as the Book of the Month club pick A Thousand Times Before by Asha Thanki, New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years by Shubnum Khan, and the Sunday Times bestselling series Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson. The brilliant authors has worked with include Sally Wen Mao, Sahaj Kaur Kohli, Megan Barnard, Brenda Peynado, Gwen Kirby, and Erin Swan, among others. Photo credit: Meriam Metoui.
Moderator: Born in Santiago, Chile and raised in New England, Lily Philpott is an Indigenous transracial adoptee. She has worked in the nonprofit sector in New York City for close to a decade, and is a member of the Starlings Collective, a group supporting BIPOC adoptee writers; a co-chair of the International Literature Committee at the Brooklyn Book Festival; and she volunteers as the Director of Programs with Singapore Unbound. She received her MFA in Fiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA).
With support from the National Endowment for the Arts and our donors, the Authors Guild Foundation is pleased to offer this program free to the public.
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