Loft Spotlights

Rachel Werner is faculty for Hugo House and The Loft Literary Center, a We Need Diverse Books program volunteer, and a book reviewer for Shelf Awareness. She is also the founder of The Little BookProject WI, a community arts and nonprofit biannual collaboration.

When she isn't writing, Christine Ma-Kellams teaches at San Jose State University. As a social psychologist whose empirical work deals with understanding the psychological motives behind individuals' behaviors, Ma-Kellams pairs the art of fiction with the science of what makes people ticks.

Chris Stedman is a Minneapolis-based writer, speaker, and community organizer. He is the author of IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives (2020) and Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious (2012). 

Roohi Choudhry was born in Pakistan and grew up in southern Africa and the middle east. As a creative writer who worked for more than a decade in data analysis and social research, she is passionate about helping people use left-brain systems alongside right-brain intuition.

Ge Gao is a Chinese writer based in New York City. She received a BA in philosophy from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia University. Her essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Longreads, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere.

Emily Wolahan is a writer and teacher who lives in San Francisco. She has been senior editor at Two Lines Press, editor at JERRY Magazine, and is currently a poetry editor at Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and is the author of the poetry collection HINGE.

Ty Chapman is a Twin Cities–based author, poet, puppeteer, and playwright of Nigerian and European descent. He has been creating art with social justice themes for many years and is passionate about speaking to the Black experience in America.

Mary C. Moore is an agent with Kimberley Cameron & Associates and is seeking adult, young adult, and middle grade fiction. She is especially hungry for upmarket genre fiction a la Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones.

Courtney Stevenson has been an editor with HarperCollins Children's Books since 2016. She's looking for middle grade and young adult fiction and nonfiction projects, particularly ones that tell compelling stories that she hasn’t heard before.

Kat Kerr joined the Donald Maass Literary Agency in 2019 and is actively seeking to grow her client list. She's particularly hungry for magical realism, literary-leaning speculative and science fiction, women’s fiction, YA works with a lot of heart, and narrative nonfiction with something to say.

Stephanie Winter is an associate agent at P.S. Literary. She is actively looking for diverse and inclusive voices in fiction, nonfiction, and graphic novel spaces who make new worlds and perspectives come alive and particularly appreciates strong characters who bend stereotypes, genders, and more. 

Sharon Pelletier is an agent with Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. Favorite fiction categories include suspense and book club fiction. On the nonfiction side, She is eager for compelling, fierce narrative nonfiction by journalists and experts and select platform-based practical nonfiction.