Lara Perkins represents authors and illustrators of picture books, middle grade, and YA fiction. She has been with Andrea Brown since 2010 and is also the agency’s Digital Manager.

In picture books, Lara is actively seeking picture book author/illustrators who bring distinct perspectives to their work, particularly if that perspective has been underrepresented in children’s literature. She is drawn to bold and colorful art, a playful use of texture and media, and kid-appealing humor or heart.

In middle grade, Lara is drawn to fresh, unexpected fantasy and light fantasy, clever (more…)

Aleta George is the author of the award-winning biography, Ina Coolbrith: The Bittersweet Song of California’s First Poet Laureate. She has written for Smithsonian, High Country News, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is currently the open space reporter for the Bay Area Monitor, a publication of the League of Women Voters.

Ina Coolbrith: The Bittersweet Song of California’s First Poet Laureate is a new biography about a pioneer poet, Oakland’s first public librarian, and the most popular literary ambassador in the early American West.

California named Coolbrith its first poet laureate in 1915 during San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and 2015 marks her centennial of being named California’s beloved first lady of poetry and America’s first laureate.

Andy Ross has worked in the book business for 39 years, all of his working life. He was the owner and general manager of Cody’s Books in Berkeley, California from 1977-2006. Cody’s has been recognized as one of America’s great independent book stores.

During this period, Andy was the primary trade book buyer. This experience has given him a unique understanding of the retail book market, of publishing trends and, most important and uniquely, the hand-selling of books to book buyers.

Andy is past president of the Northern California Booksellers Association, a board member and officer of the American Booksellers Association and a national (more…)

Brooke Warner is publisher of She Writes Press, president of Warner Coaching Inc., and author of Green-Light Your Book (June 2016), What’s Your Book?, and How to Sell Your Memoir, and the co-author of Breaking Ground on Your Memoir. Brooke’s expertise is in traditional and new publishing, and she is an equal advocate for publishing with a traditional house and self-publishing. She sits on the board of the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), the Bay Area Book Festival, and the National Association of Memoir Writers (NAMW). She blogs actively on Huffington Post Books and SheWrites.com. She lives and works in Berkeley, California.

Dick Jordan grew up in Seattle, Washington. At age 7, he donned a suit and tie, climbed aboard a United Airlines DC-6, and took his first big trip: Up to Vancouver, British Columbia, for the day, back to Seattle the same evening by train. As a teenager at the end of the heyday of U.S. passenger train travel, he rode the rails to and from Miami Beach. In between these two “Big City Trips”, he learned to appreciate the outdoor wonders of the West by joining the quintessential “F Troop” of the Boy Scouts and camping in the rain and mud of Western Washington.

His service in the U.S. Air Force took him to Texas, Indiana, and the Far East. Along the way he spent nine months studying Chinese in Monterey, California, (more…)

Constance Hale is a San Francisco based journalist and author. Her three books on language and writing, including her latest, Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing (W.W. Norton, 2012), have earned her the label “the sassy Safire.” Her eight-part series on writing sentences appeared in The New York Times Opinionator section. She has also written articles and essays for The Atlantic, Honolulu, Smithsonian, Afar, The Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and several anthologies of travel literature. More at www.sinandsyntax.com.