Southern New Hampshire University MFA Advisory Board members meet with students during summer residencies to offer insight into the art and business of getting their writing published.
Melanie Cecka is the Publishing Director of Bloomsbury Children’s Books and Walker Books for Young Readers, and the Publisher of Bloomsbury Children’s Books at Bloomsbury USA. Before joining Bloomsbury in 2004, Melanie was an editor with Viking Children’s Books and previously worked at Knopf Books for Young Readers and Villard Books (adult), both at Random House. She holds an MFA from the New School University and a BA from St. Lawrence University and is the author of New York Times Bestsellers Violet Comes to Stay and Violet Goes to the Country (Viking 2006, 2007).
Esmond Harmsworth, educated in England before graduating from Brown University and Harvard Law School, is a founding partner of Zachary Schuster Harmsworth Literary Agency of New York and Boston. His fiction clients include Sabina Murray, George Harrar, Laura Dietz, Sarah Stewart Taylor, Alicia Metcalf Miller and Donald Hays. His nonfiction clients include Jonathan Haidt, Keith Sawyer, Dave Balter, John Butman Gerry O’Neill and Dick Lehr. He has been a featured panelist or speaker at the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, Bouchercon and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is a board member of PEN/ New England and on the Advisory Council of Grub Street Inc.
Lorin Rees, of the Helen Rees Literary Agency, is a native of Boston who attended Bard College and earned an M.B.A. from Boston University. Some of his books and authors include “Words That Work” by Frank Luntz, “Leading From the Front” by Captains Angie Morgan and Courtney Lynch, “The Mortician Diaries” by June Nadle, “BrandSimple” by Allen Adamson, “Girl Most Likely To” by Poonam Sharma and “Blood Makes the Grass Grow Green” by Johnny Rico.
Jack Scovil, educated at Stanford University and the University of Utah, has been an agent for more than 30 years. He formerly was vice president and editorial director of the Scott Meredith Agency, where he represented such clients as Norman Mailer, Carl Sagan and Morris West. He is now president of Scovil-Chichak-Galen Literary Agency, which represents Edward Klein, Arthur C. Clarke, Walter Anderson, Margaret Truman, James Brady, Thomas Fleming, Merle Drown and Robert Begiebing.
Janet Silver, Janet Silver, is Literary Director and agent with Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency. She brings to the program a highly distinguished career of over thirty years as both an acclaimed editor and publishing executive. She spent 24 years at Houghton Mifflin Company, where she led the adult trade editorial group for more than a decade, capped by six years as Vice President and Publisher. Silver's breadth of experience highlights both her in-depth knowledge of the publishing process and her industry-wide reputation as a renowned editor of fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry. The roster of celebrated novelists whose work she acquired and edited includes Philip Roth, Tim O'Brien, Jhumpa Lahiri, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Safran Foer, Anita Desai, John Edgar Wideman, and Robert Stone. Two of her authors won the Pulitzer Prize: Lahiri in 2001 for her debut story collection Interpreter of Maladies and poet Natasha Trethewey for Native Guard in 2007. Many of the writers she discovered won national awards and honors, including Monique Truong (The Book of Salt) and Peter Ho Davies (The Welsh Girl). In addition to publishing numerous New York Times bestsellers, she championed works that garnered the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and many other honors.
Lissa Warren is vice president, senior director of publicity and acquiring editor at Da Capo Press/ Perseus Publishing. She previously worked at David Godine and Houghton Mifflin. The author of “The Savvy Author’s Guide to Book Publicity”(Carroll & Graf, 2004), she has spoken at numerous book festivals, universities and associations, and since 2003 has been an adjunct professor at Emerson College in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing Program. She also teaches at Boston University’s publishing certificate program. She holds a B.S. from Miami University and an M.F.A. from Bennington College. She is a published poet and poetry editor for the literary magazine Post Road.
Sarah Leslie Welsch, educated at Smith, Northwestern and Radcliffe, has worked in publishing (editorial and marketing/ sales) for 30 years. She worked at Vintage and Ballantine Books in New York and at Academy Chicago Press, the University of Chicago Press and Northwestern University Press. She is now director of marketing and sales at the University Press of New England, a publisher and distributor of scholarly and trade books (nonfiction, fiction and poetry).
George Geers, a long-time career journalist, is executive director of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project. He is also the founder and publisher of Plaidswede Publishing, which specializes in New Hampshire and New England books of fiction and non-fiction. He is clerk of the Academy of New England Journalists and was presented the academy’s Yankee Quill award for lifetime achievement in 2005.