Tanner Crunelle (Poetry, ’24) & Ellen Gwin (Poetry, ’24)

Our English Department has some amazing alumni. Jamie Carr, class of 2012, a literary agent for The Book Group, visited campus on Thursday, October 27th to speak with an audience of graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, and administrators. This visit was made possible by the Dorothea Benton Frank Writing Series, which brings well-known authors and publishing industry professionals to enrich the literary life of Charleston.

Born and raised in Lower Manhattan, Carr graduated from the College of Charleston with a B.A. in English in 2012. She then moved to Portland, where she earned an MFA in creative writing under the tutelage of Leni Zumas, the author of speculative fiction works such as Red Clocks. She felt taking this time was especially important for her own writing. “I sort of always loved reading and writing, and I wanted more time and space to be able to keep doing that, so I wound up moving to a really tiny MFA program in Portland, Oregon.” While an MFA student in Portland, Carr worked as an intern at Portland-based Tin House. After this experience, she wanted to be an editor. “When I was sitting around at table with people who were talking about books, thinking about books, taking books apart, putting them back together—that is when I was like, ‘Oh I want to work in publishing.’”

Upon moving back to New York with her aspirations to be an editor, Carr realized her real dream was to be “on the ground floor of books” as a literary agent. The secret life of books is indeed mysterious to many. It’s not as simple as moving a writer’s final draft from hard drive to bookshelf. Carr has seen firsthand how the publishing machine works.

She started in the Big Apple worming around the William Morris Endeavor talent agency. Her first job was in the mailroom. While there, she saw all facets of the publishing industry and was promoted to be able to buy her own projects. Now, as an agent for The Book Group, a woman-owned agency in Manhattan, her time is spent “juggling potential clients, reading manuscripts, prepping the author for submission,” and then, “selling it to a publisher.” There’s a lot of “zhuzhing” involved in publishing, Carr explained. To sell a work to editors at large firms, it must be explained strategically.

It’s essential for an author to get an agent if they are looking at big publishing houses. Carr explained why writers need agents saying, “Writers need agents because all of the big publishing houses do not take submissions unless they are through an agent.” The first contact with a publisher is often in a query letter. An author should be concise and direct, contact agents who represent books they like, and contact a small number of promising agents. Identifying relevant “comp titles” (abbreviation for “comparable titles”) in this stage is very important. The whole process should have the writer feel “empowered.”

At the end of Carr’s informative industry talk, she answered questions from the audience, emphasizing a sense of community. One student asked Carr if she would do anything different with her start in the publishing world. “I think in retrospect not being as nervous about [reaching out to people] and asking questions, and I wish I had talked more with everyone I met.” She also advised students to stay in touch with each other after completing the MFA. She has seen firsthand how former classmates can help with workshopping and professional networking even after graduation. Another student asked if a writer should change agents and editors each time they publish a new work. Carr answered, “Usually if there’s a really good relationship, most authors are with their agent for a while.” She did note, however, that “editors move around to different places.”

The MFA program also hosted an informal discussion with Carr over coffee. Questions ranged from literary genre to life in New York City as an agent, which she said suits her well. She spoke about the hard-won wisdom of maintaining the relationships built in a writing community, like at an MFA program. She had several relevant takes on how publishing is influenced by social media, social activism, and literary conventions revealed how publishing is, first and foremost, a business. It’s affected by people’s fractured attention spans and the rising cost of paper. However, Carr occupies a unique position. She explained how books fit into and, at times, challenge the market. With a commitment to accepting works by “marginalized voices,” Carr is the literary agent for poets like Tiana Clarke, fiction writers like Chloe Cole, and nonfiction authors such as Ella Dawson. She’s earning her stripes in the publishing world as a hardworking agent for a wide range of authors.

It takes a special person to advocate for art while also working in the business world. Jamie Carr makes us all proud to call ourselves CofC Cougars.

Congratulations to MFA alum Joshua Garcia (MFA ’21) whose book, Pentimento, was selected through Black Lawrence Press’s open reading period and will be published in the spring of 2024.

Garcia describes Pentimento as “a hybrid collection that peels back layers of belief, doubt, and identity to explore themes of repentance and renunciation. From an Italian word meaning ‘to repent,’ a pentimento is an instance in painting when traces of an artist’s earlier decisions or mistakes are visible through the final layer(s) of paint. Using modes of confession, ekphrasis, and biblical persona, Pentimento excavates a queerness entangled in one’s faith tradition.” Interspersed in the collection are lyric essays and lyric sequences which include photographic self-portraits.

Joshua Garcia’s poetry has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, North American Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and was a 2021-22 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.

Congratulations, Joshua!

The 2022 winners of our MFA Creative Writing Program’s Fiction and Poetry Prizes are:

Fiction: Erica Appleton, “The Precipice”
Judged by Laura Spence-Ash

Poetry: Hailey Williams, “To Brother-Ghost on Halloween”
Judged by Michael Prior

Congratulations to Erica and Hailey!  Both will be awarded $500.

Read the announcement in The College Today.

By Hailey Williams and Jammie Huynh

Dr. Jason Koo visited the College of Charleston on January 20 to kick off the Spring semester’s Dorothea Benton Frank Writing Series with an Industry Talk. MFA Director, Dr. Emily Rosko spoke to a large gathering of CofC’s student-writers, saying she was “delighted to have Jason Koo here to speak today about his experiences and the challenges with starting and growing a nonprofit literary organization.”

With the 10th anniversary of Brooklyn Poets approaching (on Walt Whitman’s birthday), Koo said he has “much to celebrate, not the least of which is the opening of our first brick-and-mortar space at 144 Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights.” Despite this, the sense of achievement is still difficult to grasp. There’s so much left to do.

He painted us a picture of Brooklyn Poets’ new home: “The landlord hasn’t bothered to clean the place. Someone’s iced coffee from Starbucks is still sitting on a ledge inside, unmoved since my first visit last September.” With much to do for the new space, the balancing act of serving as Executive Director of Brooklyn Poets while also working as an English professor at Quinnipiac University, and a baby on the way, there is an urgency to get things done. Koo reflected on the big picture: “When I think about all these costs and the new management skills I’ll have to learn on the fly, I think it all seems a little crazy.” The room lightened with this touch of levity. He felt it might be useful to give us a “a sense of the furious what-the-fuck-was I-thinking thinking that goes into a venture like Brooklyn Poets.”

Though Jason Koo admired CofC’s MFA program for offering an Arts and Cultural Management emphasis alongside the Studio track, he admitted that “if faced with a choice between that and the Studio emphasis when I got my MFA, I would have chosen the Studio option.” He described himself as “a poet who grew up completely impractical and backed into the business of arts management more out of necessity than desire or any sense of calling.”

Jason Koo clarified that the literary nonprofit experience isn’t exactly a simple alternative to the traditional academic route for poets: “I wish I had a DIY playbook to offer you and could recommend building your own arts organization as a sexy alternative to landing one of these jobs, but I don’t, and I can’t. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

Brooklyn poets began as a Tumblr blog in 2012. “Remember Tumblr?” he chuckled. “At that time, I had little more than a name, a logo, and a couple of promising ideas.” He imagined generative small-group workshops of ten students in his own home and created a 40-week curriculum for his ideal poetry school. He also imagined cool T-shirts.

For the first five years, Koo didn’t earn a salary from Brooklyn Poets. After creating inclusive workshops, open mics, reading series, and retreats, the company started to become profitable in 2017. Even so, to keep the company profitable he could only pay himself a part-time minimum wage.

Despite Brooklyn Poets absorbing all his time and savings, he stuck with it. To give some context, Koo spelled out the challenges he’d faced in academia. Since getting his PhD in 2007, he had “only landed jobs as a visiting assistant professor or adjunct or as a ‘substitute professor’ though it wasn’t clear who I was substituting for.”

The choice to keep building Brooklyn Poets came from seeing the affect his labors made on the world around him: “It’s harder to change existing institutions if you’re not in power than it is to create a new space you have the power to shape. I’ve worked like a dog for Brooklyn Poets, as I have for Quinnipiac, but the difference is that I can see my work for Brooklyn Poets having a real community impact.” With the physical location and the wide-spread use of online platforms, Brooklyn Poets will be able to expand their customers in Brooklyn as well as world-wide.

For those of us looking to start a nonprofit or other venture, Jason Koo gave the following advice: “I urge those of you dreaming of alternative spaces, and perhaps just quixotic enough to try to create them, to bank on your own work ethic, and the worth of your ideas. Don’t be discouraged by the many ways you’ll have to exploit your own labor, because that’s what it’s going to take. There might not seem to be a whole lot of self-care in this, but I assure you there is. I’ve learned over these ten years that all the sacrifices I’ve had to make and commitments I’ve taken on because of Brooklyn Poets have made me happier.”

By Sam Hann and Amanda Tigar

On a pleasantly bright and warm February afternoon, around thirty students and faculty gathered for the Spring semester’s second installment of the Dorothea Benton Frank Writing Series’s “Industry Talks.” Senior Editor for Bloomsbury Publishing, Callie Garnett, prepared to discuss her previous editing work which includes T Kira Madden’s memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, Rachel Louise Synder’s No Visible Bruises, and the New York Times bestseller Outlawed by Anna North. Garnett sat behind a sturdy gray table, laughed at the present circumstance, and said, “It’s so great to be here and so weird to be in a room with a mask at a microphone. Haven’t done that particular thing yet.”

The Director of the MFA Creative Writing Program, Prof. Emily Rosko, introduced Garnett. Rosko recalled how in a recent interview Garnett said, “Publishing runs on a sense of urgency. You want your submission to feel a little like a hot potato, not in the sense of something to get rid of, but something that will gather publishing colleagues around, get them interested, get them into a game of toss.” Rosko praised Garnett’s impressive resume as an editor.

Garnett began the talk stating she hoped “to demystify how publishing is set up to bring books out into the world.” Her interest in providing a clear explanation of the workings of the industry came from her own education where she learned little about how to apply her skills to publishing.

“I never thought about being an editor when I was young,” Garnett revealed. “I don’t think I knew what the job was. If I did picture it, I pictured a kind of well dressed man with nice shoes who sits at a desk with piles of paper and his red pencil.” She laughed at the fantasy of such an image because: “very little of that reading and editing actually happens during the day, like during working hours. That happens mostly after hours and on weekends.”

She described how most of her day revolves around communicating with her team, other departments–such as marketing, art, and sales–and the author via email, over Zoom, through a phone call, and even face to face. Garnett had not envisioned herself as a mediator, nor did she ever imagine herself enjoying the role, yet she said she loves acting as “the communicator back and forth between people who are being very blunt and sometimes upset” since she softens the potential blows by asking questions like, “Where can we go? What’s the best path forward?” She said, “I have to be positive and a cheerleader.”

Sifting through a pile topping seven hundred manuscripts high requires a careful eye and a text that stimulates and excites. Garnett described her process: “If the first page doesn’t keep me, I’m done. If you, the writer, haven’t earned my attention, I’m done.” For a work to grab her attention, it “needs to feel urgent because like anything that’s for sale, if it doesn’t feel urgent, it won’t sell.” The urgency of a work can be difficult to manage in an industry that has several moving parts.

Garnett illustrated how slow moving the industry is since she was currently working on manuscripts which will not be published until the winter of 2023. With a chuckle, Garnett mentioned how she recently acquired a book that would come out in 2025. “I like the slow pace, even though it can be infuriating, because it really does leave time for more considered thought,” said Garnett. The publishing industry has to battle the wealth of everyday language readily available; as Garnett acknowledged, “There’s so much writing. It’s so undervalued. There’s writing all over, every day text in your face. I really like the time that it takes to create a physical book.”

Due to the extended timeline required to get a manuscript from acquisition at the publishing house, to the shelves, and in a reader’s hand, publishing rejects trends. By the time a book has gone through the long process required, whatever was trendy has faded. Thus, as she claimed, “[the work] has to be more abiding.”

Garnett went into detail regarding her work on Rachel Lee Snyder’s No Visible Bruises and the tedious work of creating book covers. In the midst of designing a cover, there is often a split between the art department and the author, forcing the editor to be a spokesperson for the project. By putting the project first, says Garnett, you successfully “work at the intersection of art and commerce.”

She then transitioned to her own personal editing style. When considering a manuscript, “you have to always be asking yourself, what’s the big picture here? Does the structure work? Is there anything at stake if it’s a novel, and if it’s nonfiction, do I read this book and understand the content?” Garnett explained editing as an art, since too much editing may turn off a writer and not enough will hurt the book.

For instance, Garnett originally cut an em dash in T Kira Madden’s memoir in the sentence, “my hands–they are never not shaking.” Garnett’s reaction was to “cut the fat,” but Madden didn’t take the suggestion, “because she’s smart… as a writer, you have to know what the heart of your book is and what makes it pulse. And she knew.” When the New York Times wrote their rave review for Madden’s memoir, they pulled that exact line. Garnett laughed and admitted she “hoped she helped in other ways” with the manuscript.

Garnett concluded with valuable advice to everyone who may approach a manuscript as an editor: “The most useful thing I can bring to a manuscript is curiosity. That’s my number one role.”