Every so often, a book submission takes the publishing world by storm and every editor is clamoring to acquire it. Zakiya Dalila Harris, a debut author and former Knopf assistant editor, will discuss what it was like to navigate the 14-bidder auction for her book, pitched as Get Out meets Younger, and the Hulu TV deal that followed it. What should Black authors prioritize in order to protect the integrity of their work when querying, choosing an agent, and evaluating publishers’ offers? What does it mean to effectively advocate for Black authors at every step of the process? Zakiya and her agent will discuss the role she played in everything from pitching the book and creating a submission list to ultimately choosing Atria/Simon & Schuster to publish her debut.

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Zakiya Dalila Harris is a Brooklyn-based author with a passion for writing (and talking) about blackness, books, and oldies music. She received her MFA in nonfiction creative writing from the New School and her BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 2016 to 2019 she worked in editorial at Knopf/Doubleday. Her writing has appeared in Guernica and The Rumpus, and her debut novel, THE OTHER BLACK GIRL, is forthcoming from Atria Books in the US, Bloomsbury in the UK, and elsewhere across the globe in 2021.

Stephanie Delman is an agent at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, where she is proud to represent a spectrum of authors who write for the adult market. Her focus is fiction: literary/upmarket, psychologically propulsive suspense, near-historical fiction, and novels that play with genre and contain elements of surrealism, magic, or sci-fi. Stephanie also represents a limited selection of narrative nonfiction projects. Her clients include bestsellers and award winners, innovators and agitators. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars program, Stephanie considers herself a “hands-on” agent and is eager to work with debut authors who are serious about their craft.

The Bidding War to Publish Debut Novel by Zakiya Dalila Harris