Are you query-curious? Join us for a virtual pitch and query with literary agents!
About this Event

Whether you are ready to submit or just wondering how it all works, join us with literary agents Pam Gruber, Jim McCarthy, and Jessica Sinsheimer hosted by Kelsey Costa, Programs Chair of the WNBA-Boston Chapter and Aime Alley Card, author ofThe Tigerbelles and Programs Chair of the WNBA-Boston Chapter.

This event is free to all WNBA members. For non-members, there is a $20 attendance fee. After signing up for tickets, please fill out the form for your query and/or log line to go into the queue to be read and evaluated at our Agent Query night. We will accept a maximum number of 20 submissions. Please note we will try to get through as many queries as we can during the event, but may not be able to read them all.

Meet the Agents!

Pam Gruber is a literary agent at High Line Literary Collective. She aims to sign authors, not just individual books, and she believes in collaboration, communication, creativity, and mutual respect. Her clients write in all categories, from children’s and YA, to adult SFF and contemporary rom-com. She looks for work that is gripping from page one, whether that’s due to the voice, world building, or premise. She loves messy female protagonists, innovative twists on classic tropes, and getting swept away by fully realized worlds—be it the next town over or an imagined land unlike our own. She brings an inscrutable eye for detail to every book she gets her hands on, and her prior experience gives her insight into how editors think, and what they’re looking for.

Jim McCarthy is a VP and Senior Agent for Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. As an avid fiction reader, his interests encompass both literary and commercial works in the adult, young adult, and middle grade categories. He is particularly interested in literary fiction, underrepresented voices, fantasy, mysteries, romance, anything unusual or unexpected, and any book that makes him cry or laugh out loud. In addition to fiction he is also interested in narrative nonfiction whether it be memoir, history, or pop culture.

Jessica Sinsheimer is an agent at Context Literary Agency. She is always on the lookout for new writers, and–whatever the age group–she tends to love contrast: highbrow sentences and lowbrow content, beautiful settings and ugly motives–the books that are beautiful and scary, heartbreaking and hilarious. She loves secrets, scheming, revenge, plotting–and stories that have to be written forward and backward to make sense (SHE LOVES discovering a very cleverly planted clue that makes sense in retrospect). She’d love more of what she thinks of as “Rom Com 2.0” works–powerful, nerdy women with humor and heart. More underrepresented characters, please–especially those with power, agency, and happy endings.