1 Session: Sunday, May 19
3:00-5:30pm ET
Mary Alice Stewart

Mary Alice Stewart is an Assistant Agent under Annie DeWitt at The Shipman Agency while grinding it out as a writer herself. Her fiction has appeared in Forever Mag, Joyland, No Tokens, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. Mary Alice has lectured for The Shipman Agency’s Work Room, North Carolina Writers’ Network, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, Caricon: A Celebration of Caribbean Literature, Chelsea Hodson’s Morning Writers’ Club, and more. She has attended The John Ashbery Home School and the Disquiet workshop in Lisbon, Portugal, and received a residency with Virginia Center for Creative Arts. As a private editor, her clients have gone on to publish with premier publishing houses. She is from Maine.

This seminar will discuss the nitty-gritty, "industry standard" query from the perspective of an Assistant Agent. We will go over often overlooked basics and effective ways to communicate your creative projects in hopes of making it out of the slush pile. In the spirit of “demystifying,” this lecture hopes to center the work and the writer above all else, in an industry that though is beholden to art, is also beholden to capitalism and market trends.

Over the course of this workshop, writers will listen to a comprehensive lecture and have the opportunity to ask further questions/clarifications in a Q&A, as well as a few prompts to help craft their own effective queries.