A Presentation
Jennifer Waite began writing her memoir after a divorce—a painful memoir that she deeply believed in—and after querying 80 agents, she finally found one who also believed in the work. Landing a book deal with Penguin is the stuff of author dreams, but it took years of persistence to find the right agent to make that dream a reality. Join Jennifer Waite and her friend, agent Iris Blasi of Arc Literary, as they talk about the experience, from both author and agent’s perspectives, of what it takes to make a book deal come true
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Jen Waite grew up on the coast of Maine. After graduating from Vassar College she moved to New York City for ten years, where she first worked in finance and then pursued acting and modeling. She moved back to Maine in 2015 shortly after the birth of her daughter, Vivienne. She is the author of the international bestseller, A Beautiful, Terrible Thing which details the discovery that her ex-husband was leading a double life. Survival Instincts is her debut novel. She is currently at work on her second novel and lives in Southern Maine with her six-year-old daughter.
Iris Blasi, an agent at Arc Literary Management, has close to two decades of experience in publishing, working in multiple facets of the industry. Prior to becoming a literary agent, she was Marketing Director and Senior Editor at Pegasus Books. She has held editorial, marketing, publicity, and consulting roles at Random House, Pegasus Books, Union Square Press, Open Road Media, literary PR firm Hilsinger-Mendelson, and consulting firm Idea Logical, Inc. She has worked on best-selling and award-winning books by authors including Lawrence Block, Rachel Carson, Michael Dirda, Erica Jong, Ira Levin, Alexandra Silber, Jerry Stahl, Gloria Steinem, Charles Strouse, and Fay Weldon. She graduated from Princeton University with a B.A. in English and dual minor in American Studies and Gender Studies and she holds a master’s degree from New York University in Humanities and Social Thought, with a thesis on the life and legacy of the American writer Dawn Powell. Her writing on books, arts, and culture has appeared in outlets including The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Dow Jones Publishers Weekly, BUST Magazine and more. She is a volunteer for the award-winning nonprofit The Telling Room, currently mentoring in the Young Emerging Authors Fellowship.
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