PEN America, in conjunction with P&T Knitwear, is thrilled to welcome back award-winning author Susan Shapiro for a panel discussion of insider tips and tricks for navigating the publishing world! Shapiro will be joined in conversation by literary agent Johanna V. Castillo (Writers House), author-editor Eamon Dolan, poet-editor Deborah Garrison (Knopf, Pantheon, Schocken), author-editor Clarence A. Hayes (The Ghosts of Gwendolyn Montgomer), editor Emi Ikkanda (Tiny Reparations Books, Dutton, Plume), and author-editor Kevin Nguyen (The Verge, Mỹ Documents).
This hybrid event will be held in-person with limited amphitheater-style seating, and will be available live over Zoom for professional members of PEN America.
Not a PEN America member? Join us today!
The cost of the $8 general admission ticket for in-person can be applied towards your purchase of any book or product in P&T’s café the night of an event or through online purchase.
Johanna Castillo is a Senior Agent at Writers House Literary Agency. A seasoned publishing professional with over 20 years of experience, she previously served as Vice President & Executive Editor at Simon & Schuster and Editorial Director of Atria Español for nearly fifteen years. She’s acquired, edited, or represented more than 50 NY Times bestsellers and worked with acclaimed authors including Isabel Allende, Samanta Schweblin, Laura Esquivel, Agustina Bazterrica, Colleen Hoover, Sara Shepard, Reyna Grande, Antonia Hylton and Mercedes Ron. She is recognized as an industry expert in translated literature and the U.S. Latine and Spanish-language markets.
Eamon Dolan has been a book editor for over thirty years, specializing in psychology, current affairs, science, history, and memoir. He has published bestsellers by, among others, Jay Shetty, Mary L. Trump, Pope Francis, Patric Gagne, Patrixk Bringley, Keith O’Brien, Richard Dawkins, Buzz Bissinger, nd Eric Schlosser. He’s the author of THE POWER OF PARTING, a blend of memoir, research, and reportage about the benefits of stepping away from abusive relatives, which Putnam published in 2025. He’s also a professional photographer whose work has been shown at the International Center of Photography. He lives in Brooklyn.
Deborah Garrison, Editorial Director of Poetry / Executive Editor at the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, was a staff member at The New Yorker for fourteen years before she joined book publishing in 2000. Her areas of interest include poetry, literary fiction, and biography, and the works she edits appear on the Knopf, Pantheon, and Schocken imprints. She is author of the bestselling poetry collection A Working Girl Can’t Win and Other Poems, The Second Child: Poems, and the forthcoming I Was a First Alto in the 1980s.
Clarence Haynes has worked as an editor at Random House, Amazon and Hachette. He’s author of the nonfiction middle grade Penguin book The Legacy of Jim Crow and coauthor, with actor Omar Epps, of the acclaimed young adult Afrofuturist series Nubia: The Awakening and The Reckoning. His debut adult urban fantasy novel The Ghosts of Gwendolyn Montgomery was the first fiction published by Hachette’s Legacy Lit last year. His new book The Broken Hearts Agency comes out from Hachette in June.
Emi Ikkanda is an Executive Editor acquiring nonfiction and fiction at Tiny Reparations Books, Dutton, and Plume at Penguin Random House. She’s published diverse culturally relevant books like #1 New York Times bestselling author Ijeoma Oluo’s Mediocre, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s National Book Award finalist The Undocumented Americans, Josephine Baker’s memoir Fearless and Free, Carla Power’s Pulitzer finalist Home, Land, Security, TIME 100 honoree Tourmaline’s national bestseller Marsha, bestselling novelist Michael David Lukas’s The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, and Sanaë Lemoine’s New York Times Editor’s Choice The Margot Affair.
Kevin Nguyen worked as a senior editor at GQ and is now the features editor at the Verge. He lives in Brooklyn. His previous novel New Waves out in 2022, and his new novel My Documents, were published by Random House’s One World. LA Times says of My Documents: “The paths of four family members diverge drastically when the U.S. government begins detaining Vietnamese Americans in this rich gripping novel that lands squarely as a mirror of our contemporary moral squalor.”
Susan Shapiro an award-winning writer and professor, freelances for the NY Times, Washington Post, WSJ, LA Times, NY Magazine, Slate, Salon, Oprah & New Yorker online. She’s the bestselling author/coauthor of books her family hates like American Shield, The Bosnia List, The Forgiveness Tour and Five Men Who Broke My Heart, recently optioned for a movie. She uses her writing/publishing guides The Book Bible and Byline Bible to teach her popular “instant gratification takes too long” courses at NYU, The New School, Columbia University and in private online classes. Follow her on Instagram at @Profsue123 or email [email protected].