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Larissa Melo Pienkowski
Azantian Literary Agency
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About
Larissa Melo Pienkowski is a literary agent at Azantian Literary Agency. She has a background in publishing and focuses primarily on speculative fiction for adults and young adults, as well as select middle grade. She is an active participant in the online writing community.
Currently Looking For
I joined Azantian Literary Agency in 2025 after five years with Jill Grinberg Literary Management. Across age groups, my list spans the spectrum of literary and commercial in both fiction and nonfiction. I’m proud to represent brilliant, creative, conversation-sparking clients who have gone on to become USA Today bestsellers, Indie Next picks, Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selections, and winners of the Nebula Award, GLAAD Award, and National Indie Excellence Award, among others. As a queer, mixed-race Latina who grew up hungry for stories that mirrored my own and those around me, I believe books are a critical tool in the ongoing fight for liberation. Given my passion for books that challenge the status quo and make people feel seen, my list centers BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled, neurodivergent, international, and other historically marginalized authors. Adult Fiction I gravitate to books where the personal stakes are high, the writing is sophisticated and confident, and characters’ desires and motivations are both unique and propulsive enough to drive the plot. A well-developed voice is paramount. And while my MSWL errs on the side of specificity, I’m always excited to fall in love with something new and unexpected. Some of what I’m looking for: Adult Nonfiction In nonfiction, I’m looking for authors with an established platform in their field who are writing voicey, on-the-pulse cultural commentary and reflections on capitalism and colonization, power and privilege, race and identity, gender and sexuality, art and culture, beauty and the body politic, and academia and intellectualism. I’m a sucker for narrative nonfiction that draws insightful connections between investigative journalism to the author’s personal experiences to humanity at large, and I have a deep and abiding love for well-researched microhistories—the more niche the better. Some specific wants: Middle-Grade and YA Fiction While I’m taking on middle-grade and YA fiction extra selectively at the moment, I will absolutely keep reading if the characters’ voices jump off the page so vividly that I forget an adult wrote the book. Picture books are almost always a hard sell for me, but I’m open to being surprised. I love middle-grade fiction across genre, especially if there’s a ragtag group of friends at its core, or if it handles heavier topics in a moving way with a beautiful literary quality to it. I want to see more marginalized kids experiencing joy, though I won’t shy away from storylines centered around identity as long as they feel unique and specific to the character. I laugh and cry very easily, and my favorite middle-grade books make me do both. In YA, my tastes can skew a little darker. I’m always on the lookout for queer, feminist, and decolonial revenge/coming of rage books; original twists on dark academia (I’d love to see dark academia in a non-Eurocentric setting); “unlikable” protagonists; queer protagonists in historical YA; and standout coming-of-age stories tha
Submission Guidelines
Please query me via my Query Manager link: https://QueryTracker.net/query/lmpnk Consultations Vital Info @@lmpnk Website
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