Samantha Wekstein

Currently Looking For

**Please be aware that someone is impersonating this agent using a fake email address. Please only respond to emails from Sa******@**************ry.com.** Samantha Wekstein grew up in Westchester, NY. She attended the University of Maryland,College Park and received a B.A. in English. Go Terps! She now lives in NYC with her husband and dog. After internships with Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency and Rowman & Littlefield, she began her career in 2013 at Writers House LLC. She then briefly worked as an assistant at The Agency Group (now UTA) before returning to Writers House for the next 5 years where she began supporting the CEO, and then the Founder, before becoming an agent. She’s been lucky to work with a variety of best-selling and award-winning authors across all genres. She joined TLA in 2019 where she’s excited to grow her list. In YA, she loves creative and epic fantasies in the vein of Sarah J. Maas or Leigh Bardugo. But she is also drawn to realistic stories with multi-dimensional female characters like those of Jenny Han, Julie Murphy and Melina Marchetta. She is always interested in elevating diverse voices, particularly through feminist narratives. She is seeking MIDDLE GRADE of all stripes, but especially stories that deal with themes of friendship, adventure, or encountering tragedy for the first time. Her favorites are Sharon Creech, Shannon Hale, and Gail Carson Levine. She is also on the lookout for whimsical, meaningful, and funny PICTURE BOOKS by author/illustrators. ***Please do not send text-only projects.*** Here’s a website for her illustrators: https://wekstein-illustrators.weebly.com/ Some favorites include: DON’T LET THE PIGEON DRIVE THE BUS, I WANT MY HAT BACK, DRAGONS LOVE TACOS, THE DAY THE CRAYONS QUIT, and HAIR LOVE. On the adult side she is drawn to commercial voices in ROMANCE (in the vein of Christina Lauren, Jasmine Guillory, or Emily Henry), and WOMEN’S FICTION. She’d love to find HISTORICAL FICTION that focuses on female or queer perspectives and is particularly interested in underrepresented settings and voices. In FANTASY, her tastes are broad. She’s always on the hunt for romantic second world fantasy (romantasy!). She loves epic and high fantasy, intricate court politics, plotting and intrigue, historical fantasy or fantasy rooted in world mythologies (specifically from underrepresented perspectives and cultures), fantasy as an exploration of social justice, feminism, or family dynamics. She loves ride or die friendship groups, and redemption arcs. Overall, she’s looking for well-developed relationships and friendships, slow-burns, well thought out magic systems (she’s pedantic about the logic of magic and cares about the rules). Some specific wish list items: Jewish fantasy, magic school books (dark academia included), and cozy fantasy. For SCI-FI she’s looking for stories grounded in the human experience, world-building that’s logical and not too technical, female, nonbinary, BIPOC, and Queer led sto

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be emailed to https://QueryManager.com/SamanthaWekstein I am currently closed to queries. Please fill out my Query Manager form. You’ll be required to submit a query letter and your first 10 pages as an attachment. If you’re submitting a picture book, please include illustrations. https://QueryManager.com/SamanthaWekstein Please do NOT notify me about full requests, but do let me know if you receive an offer. Thank you! Guidelines & Details Consultations Vital Info samantha@thompsonliterary.com @SWekstein Website

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