Teachers

Michelle Brower has spent over fifteen years as an agent, first at Wendy Sherman Associates and most recently as a partner at Aevitas Creative Management. She co-founded Trellis Literary Management in 2021 in order to better serve and support her authors and create an agency with a lasting positive impact in the world of publishing.

Her list spans the spectrum of literary and commercial fiction, from thought-provoking story collections to page-turning thrillers. She is primarily interested in work that focuses on storytelling and emotional connection, rather than formal experimentation, and believes that the best reading experience engages both the heart and the head. She is looking for book club novels (a commercial idea with a literary execution), literary fiction, literary suspense, genre fiction for a non-genre audience, and upmarket women’s fiction. In non-fiction, she is looking for a personal story that illuminates a greater subject. Michelle also very selectively represents literary Young Adult fiction. In all of these areas, she is looking to support underrepresented voices.

Michelle is honored to work with books that have received a variety of accolades, including NY Times Bestsellers, National Book Award finalists, and Read with Jenna, Target, and Barnes and Noble book club selections. Her authors have received recognition from the Whiting Awards, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, MacDowell, the Steinbeck Fellow Program, the Sewanee Writers Conference as well as from many other organizations.

Michelle received her Masters degree in British and American Literature from New York University. Originally from New Jersey, she now lives in Seattle with her family.

Michelle’s favorite non-client authors (if your work is similar, feel free to get in touch!): Maggie Shipstead, Lily King, Louise Erdrich, Deesha Philyaw, Kiley Reid, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Kazuo Ishiguro, Yaa Gyasi, Celeste Ng, Jennifer Egan, Shirley Jackson, Ann Patchett, Sarah Waters.

Rebecca Brown is the author of 14 books published in the US and abroad, most recently YOU TELL THE STORIES YOU NEED TO BELIEVE (Chatwin Books, 2022). Her other books (novels, short stories, essays, prose poems) include AMERICAN ROMANCES, THE HAUNTED HOUSE, THE DOGS:A MODERN BESTIARY,  THE TERRIBLE GIRLS (all with City Lights) , THE GIFTS OF THE BODY (HarperCollins) and NOT HEAVEN, SOMEWHERE ELSE (Tarpaulin Sky).  She has also written a play, the libretto for a dance opera, a one-woman show, Monstrous, commission by Northwest Film Forum,  and popular arts and book criticism.  Her written work has been translated into Japanese, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Italian, etc.  She has taught writing and literature for 40 years in venues as diverse as prisons, public schools, homeless encampments, senior citizens’ centers, at-risk youth centers, and universities.  Her visual work has been displayed at the Frye Art Museum, Hedreen Gallery, Henry Art Gallery, Simon Fraser Gallery (Vancouver, BC) and the University of Arizona Poetry Center Gallery. She has taught and lectured in the US, UK, Belgium, Italy,  Germany, Japan and Uganda.  She was the designer, co-founder and first curator of the Jack Straw Writers program, first writer in Residence at Hugo House (1997-1999) and is a former Artistic Director of the Port Townsend Writers conference.   She lives in Seattle.

drea brown is a poet-scholar and assistant professor in the English Department at Texas State University. They are the author of dear girl: a reckoning (Gold Line Press 2015) and co-editor of Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature (University of Pittsburgh Press 2021). A recipient of fellowships from VONA, Cave Canem, and Hedgebrook, their writing has been featured in anthologies as well as various creative, academic, and public journals such as Smithsonian Magazine, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Southern Indiana Review, About Place Journal and Zócalo Public Square.

DERRICK C. BROWN is a novelist, comedian, poet, and storyteller. He is the winner of the 2013 Texas Book of The Year award for Poetry. He is a former paratrooper for the 82nd Airborne. He is the owner and president of Write Bloody Publishing, which Forbes and Filter Magazine call “…one of the best independent poetry presses in the country.” He is the author of eight books of poetry and four children’s books. The New York Times calls his work “…a rekindling of faith in the weird, hilarious, shocking, beautiful power of words.” He lives in Los Angeles. 

MAHOGANY L. BROWNE, selected as Kennedy Center's Next 50 and Wesleyan's 2022-23 Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, the Executive Director of JustMedia, Artistic Director of Urban Word, is a writer, playwright, organizer, & educator. Browne has received fellowships from Arts for Justice, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research & Rauschenberg. She is the author of recent works: Vinyl Moon, Chlorine Sky, Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, Woke Baby, & Black Girl Magic. Founder of the diverse lit initiative Woke Baby Book Fair, Browne's latest poetry collection Chrome Valley is a promissory note to survival and available from Norton in Spring 2023. And she readies for her stage debut of Chlorine Sky at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, Illinois. She is the first-ever poet-in-residence at the Lincoln Center and lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

S.K. Brownell is writer, artist, and educator from the American Midwest. Their work has been shortlisted for the inaugural Samuel R Delany Fellowship in Speculative Fiction and has received the National Partners of the American Theatre Playwriting Excellence Award, Solstice Literary Prize in Fiction Editor's Choice, and other honors. They are a Tin House Workshop alumn and a Sewanee Conference Tennessee Williams Scholar. Their fiction, poetry, and drama has appeared in Speculative North, Decoded, Great Lakes Review, Newfound, and elsewhere. Stephanie holds an MFA from Boston University and teaches at Carroll University, GrubStreet, and Pioneer Valley Writers Workshop. They currently live in Boston with a cat called Wander. Find them online at skbrownell.com or @skbrownell.

Twitter: www.twitter.com/skbrownell

Brenna Bruce captures a folk sound that makes you nostalgic for voices from the past. Moved by the honest writing and soothing melodies of Americana, she is inspired by the universality of telling stories through song and sound. She has one of those voices that captures all of the air in the room, leaving the listeners stunned, curious, and viscerally connected to the present moment.

Ana Maria Caballero is a first-generation Colombian-American poet and writer. Her work has won multiple awards, including the Beverly International Prize for Literature and Colombia’s 2014 José Manuel Arango National Poetry Prize. She’s been a finalist for the Academy of American Poets Prize, Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, the Essay Press Book Prize and the Tarpaulin Sky Book Award, among others. Her writing has appeared in numerous outlets, including L.A. Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, Sundog Lit, The Southeast Review, SWWIM and Jai-Alai Magazine. She believes poems should be valued as works of art and is excited about making this value manifest via blockchain technology.

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She and E.J. Koh co-translated Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021). Cancio-Bello has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association, and her work has appeared in Best Small Fictions, Kenyon Review Online, The New York Times, and more. She is co-director for the Adoptee Literary Festival and PEN America Miami/South Florida Chapter, and a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair. www.marcicalabretta.com

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer's Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi's poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn't Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice.