Meet Our Team
- Directors
A faculty member of the Creative Writing & Literature Program at The Lichtenstein
Center, Meg Wolitzer is program director (along with Susan Scarf Merrell) of BookEnds.
Her novels include The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among others. Wolitzer, who has also written books for young readers, was guest
editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017. She is host of the literary radio show and podcast Selected Shorts. 
Susan Scarf Merrell is a faculty member in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at the Lichtenstein Center, and program director (along with Meg Wolitzer) of BookEnds. The author of Shirley: A Novel, which became a major motion picture starring Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg, Merrell is also the author of A Member of the Family, and The Accidental Bond: How Sibling Connections Influence Adult Relationships. She served as fiction editor of The Southampton Review. Essays, book reviews and short fiction appear most recently in The New York Times, Newsday, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common Online, The Washington Post, and East Magazine.
JP Solheim is Associate Director of BookEnds, focusing on community development, recruitment, and social media. They were a BookEnds Fellow in 2020, and has taught in the MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at The Lichtenstein Center. Stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, MQR: Mixtape, The Pinch, Poets & Writers, and The Southampton Review. Also a literary scholar, they are the author of The Performance of Listening in Postcolonial Francophone Culture (Liverpool UP), and they have taught at Stony Brook University, University of Michigan, Université de Paris VII, and University of Illinois—Chicago, in addition to creative writing workshops at the Northwestern Summer Writers’ Conference, StoryStudio Chicago, and other writing centers and associations around the country.
- Mentors for Fellowship Eight
Karen E. Bender is the author of two story collections: Refund, a Finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, a shortlist selection for the
Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize, a longlist selection for the Story
Prize, and a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and The New Order, a longlist selection for the Story prize. A new collection, The Words of Dr. L and other stories, is forthcoming in May 2025 from Counterpoint Press. She is also the author of two
novels: Like Normal People, a Los Angeles Times bestseller, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection,
and A Town of Empty Rooms. Her fiction has appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, The Harvard Review,
Guernica and others, and has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories, Best American
Mystery Stories, and won three Pushcart prizes. She has won grants from the National
Endowment for the Arts and the Rona Jaffe foundation. She is fiction editor of the
literary journal Scoundrel Time. Karen has taught creative writing at universities including Hollins University, the
University of Iowa, Warren Wilson College, Chatham University, and Tunghai University,
and is currently Core faculty at the MFA program at Alma College.Vanessa Cuti's fiction has appeared in The Best American ShortStories 2021, The Kenyon Review, AGNI, West Branch, andothers. She received her MFA from Stony Brook University and was part of the first BookEnds cohort in 2018, where she worked with mentor Amy Hempel. She lives in the suburbs of New York. The Tip Line (Crooked Lane, 2023) is her debut novel.
Alison Fairbrother is the author of the novel The Catch, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, an Amazon Editor’s Pick, and a People magazine “Best New Book.” She is an associate editor at Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House, where she works with novelists Kristen Arnett, Aja Gabel, Anna Hogeland, R. O. Kwon, and Jenny Xie, among others. She received her MFA from Stony Brook University and was a BookEnds fellow during the program’s inaugural year.
Daisy Alpert Florin is the author of My Last Innocent Year (Holt, 2023),which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, an Amazon Editors’ Pick, a Washington Post Staff Pick and an Indie Next pick. Daisy attended Dartmouth College and received graduate degrees from Columbia University and Bank Street Graduate School of Education. She was a recipient of the 2016 Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship at Sarah Lawrence College and was a 2019–20 fellow in the BookEnds novel revision fellowship where she worked with founding director Susan Scarf Merrell. A native New Yorker, she lives in Connecticut with her family.
Stephanie Gangi is an acclaimed novelist, short story writer and essayist living and writing in New York City. Her debut novel, The Next, was published by St. Martin’s Press and her second, Carry the Dog, was published by Algonquin Books. Gangi’s work has appeared in, among others, Arts & Letters, Catapult, LitHub, Hippocrates Poetry Anthology, McSweeney’s, New Ohio Review, Next Tribe, and The Woolfer. She’s working on her third novel, I Saw it Happen.
Matthew Klam is the author of the novel, Who Is Rich?, a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book, nominated for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, and Sam the Cat, winner of the PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for a Debut Short Story Collection, and a finalist
for The Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, First Fiction. He's a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting
Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts. His writing has been featured in such
places as The New Yorker, Harper's, GQ, The New York Times, Esquire, The O' Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction. He's currently a Visiting Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Stony Brook
University.
Lincoln Michel is the author of the novel The Body Scout (Orbit, 2021) and the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press, 2015), and the forthcoming novel My Metallic Realms (Atria, 2025). His fiction appears in The Paris Review, Granta, F&SF, NOON, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. His essays and criticism have been published by The New York Times, GQ, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian. He is the former editor-in-chief of the website Electric Literature and is the co-editor of the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated anthologies Tiny Crimes (Catapult, 2018) and Tiny Nightmares (Catapult, 2020). You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com and @thelincoln.
Rachel Pastan is the author of four novels, most recently In the Field. Based on the life of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, the novel was selected for the National Book Foundation’s inaugural Science + Literature award. Pastan’s 2014 novel Alena was named an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review. Pastan has served as Editor-at-Large at the Institute for Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, where she developed the popular behind-the-scenes-at-the-museum blog Miranda. She taught fiction writing for many years in the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program, at Swarthmore College, and elsewhere. She is now working toward opening a bookstore in her hometown in 2025.
Matthew Thomas's New York Times-bestselling novel We Are Not Ourselves was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the Folio Prize; named a Notable Book of the year by the New York Times; named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Apple, and others; and named one of Janet Maslin’s ten favorite books of the year in the New York Times. We Are Not Ourselves is being translated into nineteen languages. Matthew has a BA from the University of Chicago, an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine.
Dawnie Walton is the author of The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, winner of the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the Audie Award for Fiction. Her debut novel was also longlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and was named one of the best books of 2021 by The Washington Post, NPR, Esquire, and former U.S. President Barack Obama. She is the cofounder and editorial director of Ursa, an audio production company celebrating short fiction from underrepresented voices, and is the cohost of its accompanying podcast. Formerly an editor at Essence and Entertainment Weekly, she has received fellowships from MacDowell and Tin House, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (where she has taught a fiction seminar). Born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband.
A faculty member of the Creative Writing & Literature Program at The Lichtenstein
Center, Meg Wolitzer is program director (along with Susan Scarf Merrell) of BookEnds.
Her novels include The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among others. Wolitzer, who has also written books for young readers, was guest
editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017. She is host of the literary radio show and podcast Selected Shorts. - Agents
Sarah Bedingfield
Sarah has been an agent with Levine Greenberg Rostan since 2016. She represents high-concept,
genre-busting literary novels, domestic and psychological suspense, upmarket, big-hearted
family epics, historical fiction, and international, diverse voices. She loves most types of literary and upmarket commercial fiction, especially novels that show powerful imagination, compulsive plotting and unique points of view that say something important. Family dramas, cross-genre narratives with notes of magical realism, darkly Gothic stories that may lead to nightmares and twisty psychological suspense are among her favorite things to read. A southerner at heart, she can't help but love books set in the south, but she’s a die-hard for any world immersive enough to make her miss her stop on the train or cry in public.
Hailing from North Carolina, Sarah graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with a double major in Psychology and English. She spent her first three years in New York teaching 11th-grade English in the Bronx and getting her masters at Hunter College. She began her publishing career in trade fiction editorial at Crown and Hogarth, where she worked for almost five years before becoming an agent.
Sarah Bowlin
Sarah Bowlin joined Aevitas Creative Management as an agent in 2017. Before becoming an agent, she spent a decade as an editor of literary fiction and nonfiction, first at Riverhead Books and most recently at Henry Holt & Company.
She is interested in work that simultaneously captivates and challenges and in her time as an editor she worked with many acclaimed and award-winning writers including Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Sheila Heti, Salvatore Scibona, Helen Phillips, Rachel Khong, and Julie Buntin. As an agent, she works with emerging and established voices including the Giller Prize-winning Souvankham Thammavongsa, PEN Bingham Award-winning novelist Vanessa Veselka, and acclaimed voices in fiction and nonfiction including Aysegul Savas, Lynn Steger Strong, Gene Kwak, Ashley Nelson Levy, Jasmin Hakes, R.K. Russell, Sabrina Orah Mark, Elisa Albert, Ismail Muhammad, Janika Oza, and Kevin Nguyen, among others. She is interested in bold voices and work that bends genre or forms—specifically stories of strong or difficult women and unexpected narratives of place, identity, and the shifting ways we see ourselves and each other. Originally from the South, she now lives in Los Angeles.
Jade Wong-Baxter
Jade Wong-Baxter joined the Frances Goldin Literary Agency in 2021. She previously worked for three years at Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents. Her clients include Delia Cai (Central Places, Ballantine, 2023); Hannah Matthews (You or Someone You Love, Atria, 2023); and Courtney Preiss (Welcome Home Caroline Kline, Putnam, 2024). Jade is looking for adult literary/upmarket fiction and narrative nonfiction, with an emphasis on narratives by and about people of color, as well as the perspectives of marginalized identities. Her other areas of interest include grounded speculative, memoir, cultural criticism, and Asian-American history.
Sabrina Taitz
Sabrina Taitz is a literary agent at WME, where she's worked since 2015. Sabrina represents upmarket and commercial fiction, as well as a broad swath of nonfiction, ranging from memoir to lifestyle to cookbooks. Her list includes New York Times bestsellers, B&N Book Club selections, Amazon Book of the Month selections, an ALA Award winner, a William C. Morris Award winner, and a Best American Writing selectee. Sabrina is looking for propulsive and dynamic writing that keeps her turning the pages. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and daughter.
