Our Agents
Our Agents
After a first career in consulting, Caryn began her second career as an agent in 2003 and has never looked back. Social justice has been at the heart of her list since she started agenting, and she is always on the lookout for authentic, kid-appealing stories and art that disrupt the prevailing narrative in some way. No matter the genre, Caryn looks for characters that stick with her long after she has closed the book. She loves a story that brings her a good, cathartic cry, a huge belly laugh, some outrage, some new knowledge, and above all, hope.
Please send her:
Untold Jewish and Muslim stories
Layered YA rom com by and about non-white and/or queer creators
Timeless, heartwarming middle grade like THE VANDERBEEKERS, particularly by non-white and/or queer authors
MG and YA graphic or narrative nonfiction
Illustrators with a bold, fun style
Caryn holds an MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA, and a BS from the University of Virginia. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and dog. Somehow her two children have become twenty-somethings.
RECENT DEALS
Lynnor Bontigao to illustrate Liz Garton Scanlon and Audrey Vernick's THE WORLD'S BEST CLASS PLANT, which focuses on a class that is terribly disappointed in the lack of a class pet, until a class plant turns out to be the best thing ever, to Putnam Children's.
Author of Caldecott Honor winner GOING DOWN HOME WITH DADDY Kelly Starling Lyons's RIDING MAGIC, featuring a boy who visits his uncle's ranch, but is scared to ride the horses, illustrated by Floyd Cooper; and LYRIC'S FAVORITE SEASON, a rhyming celebration of the seasons, illustrated by Cathy Ann Johnson, in a two-book deal, to Nancy Paulsen Books/PRH.
NYT-bestselling author of EYES THAT KISS IN THE CORNERS Joanna Ho's EYES THAT SPEAK TO THE STARS, about a young Asian boy, bullied for the shape of his eyes, who comes to realize that his eyes are like his father's, his grandfather's, and his little brother's; they connect him to his history and future, and he is powerful, illustrated by Dung Ho, to HarperChildren's.
COUNT ME IN author Varsha Bajaj's THIRST, the story of a 12-year-old girl in the slums of Mumbai who must make a difficult choice that could endanger her family when she stumbles on a secret plan by some corrupt officials to divert her neighborhood's already meager water supply, to Nancy Paulsen Books/PRH.
NYT and Indie Bestseller Joanna Ho's THE SILENCE THAT BINDS US, in which a 16-year-old girl, her Chinese American parents, and other Asian families face racist accusations for putting too much "pressure" on their kids after her popular older brother's death by suicide, and she attempts to challenge the racism and ugly stereotypes through her writing, only to realize that she still has much to learn and that the consequences of speaking truth to power run much deeper than she could have foreseen, to HarperChildren's.
Emily Inouye Huey's debut BENEATH THE WIDE SILK SKY, a YA novel set on an island in Washington state in the days leading up to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, featuring a 15-year-old girl who uses her passion for photography to document what is happening to her family and her town as she fights to save her family's farm with the help of the boy next door, to Scholastic.
THINGS I LOVE:
Social justice
Politics
Theater
Choral singing
Travel (hopefully again soon!)
The common denominator in my list is “smart with heart” and Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s essay on “mirrors, windows, and sliding doors” is never far from my mind.
REPRESENTATIVE TITLES
The most important work that I do is lifting the voices of creators who can help erase hate from our world.
AWARD WINNERS
& BESTSELLERS
