Send a Query to Zoe Howard at Howland Literary Agency
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What I am looking for is best explained by the books I've already repped, projects like:
- Morgan Day's The Oldest Bitch Alive (Astra House): following an aging French bulldog who lives in a glass house and one day ingests an orb of parasitic worms; approaching death, and filled with new life, she begins to see everything differently—her artist-architect owners, the younger dog alongside whom she lives, and the wild unknown beyond the panes.
- Sara Maurer's A Good Animal (St. Martin's): set against the isolated backdrop of a sheep farm in Michigan's Upper Peninsula in the '90s, following a high school couple as they tumble toward a rash decision informed by the laws and limits of their access to reproductive care, blurring the line between agency and endangerment.
- Lauren Haddad's Fireweed (Astra House): following a white woman's misguided investigation into the disappearance of an Indigenous woman along the Highway of Tears, subverting the missing woman plot and exploring how we make the public tragedies of others our own when looking for a positive reflection of ourselves; pitched for readers of Samantha Hunt and Mona Awad.
- Maria Pinto's Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless (Great Circle): essays on subjects ranging from zombifying fungi to deforestation for the sake of police training in Atlanta, finding through the author's foraging that the indispensable yet understudied fungal kingdom is, like the experiences of many marginalized communities, defiant to rigid study, and that the very marginality that has marked the lives of Black, brown, queer, and neurodivergent folks helps them dwell in and with the mystery from which mushrooms emerge.
- Jen Jackson Quintano's Unlikely Praise Song (Broadleaf): underscoring through her deep-rooted love for the complicated landscape she calls home, the need to challenge the harmful rhetoric colonizing the US’s most conservative communities, with a commitment to reproductive freedom, empowerment of women’s stories, and dignity for women nationwide.
In 2026, I'd love to see more:
- Region-specific writing from outside of NYC/LA: I'm looking for settings that disengage us from assumption, whether from flyover states, isolated communities, or international settings currently underrepresented on American bookshelves.
- Books that embrace material culture: what we engage with, how we engage with it, and why, from nature writing, to histories of an object, to fresh takes on sustainability or maximalism.
- First books of prose by poets with published collections: in publicity, I've worked closely with poets like Ashley M. Jones (Lullaby for the Grieving), Keetje Kuipers (Lonely Women Make Good Lovers), and more.
In adult fiction, I'd love to see:
- Off-center stories plagued with guilt, remorse, and forgiveness (Emily Ruskovich’s Idaho, Claire Oshetsky’s Poor Deer, or Quiara Alegría Hudes’s The White Hot)
- Novels that challenge who a narrator can be (Morgan Day's The Oldest Bitch Alive)
- Literary fiction with book club potential, books where the language is the reading experience, but a plot twist lands us (Sara Maurer's A Good Animal, Nina de Gramont's The Christie Affair, Ann Patchett's The Dutch House).
- Queer stories that tear open a realistic & unspoken experience (Chloe Caldwell's Women, Navid Sinaki's Medusa of the Roses).
In adult nonfiction, I'd love to see:
- Book-length essays
- Personal writing that uses disparate subjects as a container for a single theme (like foraging in Maria Pinto's Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless, or laughter in Nuar Alsadir's Animal Joy).
- Pioneering movements from underrepresented regions
- Cultural identities of place (like Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar, Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year)
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