About
About The Shipman Agency, Inc.
The Shipman Agency offers complete literary services to writers at all stages of their careers. While our primary focus is representing leading authors and thinkers for speaking engagements, we're pleased to offer the services of literary agent Annie DeWitt, independent book publicist Alisha Gorder, and Mike Levine, editorial consultant. We’ve also added The Work Room, online classes + seminars taught by our clients. Our mission remains the same: to provide clients, venues, emerging writers + students with the best possible experience, and to represent authors who are on the cutting edge of contemporary thinking about culture and the world.
Staff
Leslie Shipman, Founder
Leslie Shipman has spent 30 years promoting writers, and creating and managing literary events in New York City, from the National Book Awards Finalist Reading at the New School to Eat, Drink, and Be Literary at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
She is the former assistant director of the National Book Foundation (which presents the National Book Award), where she was instrumental in creating events and programs such as 5 Under 35, a prize for promising young novelists, the National Book Awards After Party, Eat, Drink, and Be Literary at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Innovations in Reading, a prize that promotes community organizations working at the grassroots level to encourage reading across constituencies, and BookUp, an afterschool program for middle school age students, as well as assembling awards juries. She consulted at PEN America, a leading advocate for free expression, and worked on the PEN Literary Awards, and the PEN World Voices Festival.
A poet with an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, her work can be found in the Kenyon Review, BOMB, Tinderbox, Mid-American Review, Cosmonauts Avenue and elsewhere. She lives in Ridgewood, Queens with her husband, musician Paul Pimsler, and their dog Junie.
Katie McDonough, Senior agent
Katie McDonough is a writer and editor with a background in book publishing and literary nonprofit work. Her writing has appeared in Thrillist, A Women's Thing, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, Used Furniture Review, and other publications. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School and is currently at work on a novel based on her motel childhood. Katie lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, son, and pet rabbit.
Kate Mabus, Program Manager
Kate Mabus is a writer living in Brooklyn. She is currently completing an editorial internship at Harper’s Magazine. She graduated from the University of Chicago, where she studied Creative Writing and Sociology, and reported on policy and the people reimagining it.
Kira Tucker, Associate Agent
Kira Tucker is a writer and artist from Memphis, Tennessee. A lifelong love of literature and language fuels Kira’s work as a professional editor and literary liaison. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English with a focus in environmental literature, both from Northwestern.
Kira currently lives in Chicago, where she also serves as Assistant Managing Editor for TriQuarterly. Her latest creative work is all about dreaming—a poetic investigation spanning the mythos of the American Dream and the landscapes of our collective unconscious.
Kira’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in Jazz & Culture, Tupelo Quarterly, The Spectacle, and elsewhere. Read it and more at kira-tucker.com.
Literary Services
Annie DeWitt, Literary Agent
Annie Dewitt is a passionate writer, editor and literary liaison. She brings to the Shipman Agency ten years of experience teaching at some of the country's leading creative writing programs including: Columbia University School of the Arts, Barnard, Bard, Bennington, Skidmore and The New School where she was nominated for a Distinguished Teaching Award. She has gone on to found and direct Roxbury Writers Residency at her home in the Catskills.
Annie was a Co-Founding Editor of Gigantic, a literary journal of short prose and art carried throughout the U.S. and abroad. Her debut novel WHITE NIGHTS IN SPLIT TOWN CITY was named one of 2016’s “Most Anticipated” debuts by The Millions, was shortlisted by The New York Times Book Review as a debut novel of note and received accolades from BookForum, Interview Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Vogue, amongst many others. It now appears in several languages.
Her debut story collection in progress – CLOSEST WITHOUT GOING OVER – was shortlisted for the Mary McCarthy Prize. Stories in the collection have been translated into Latvian and Swedish and have appeared widely in the U.S. in Granta, Guernica, Esquire, BOMB, Electric Literature, NOON, The Iowa Review, The American Reader, ZYZZYVA, amongst others. Annie holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia School of the Arts.
Annie has also penned nonfiction reviews, essays and interviews for The Paris Review Daily, The Believer, BOMB, Tin House, Guernica, Esquire, BOMB, Bookforum, The LA Review of Books, art+culture, Catapult, The Towner, Rhapsody Magazine, and Poets and Writers. She was the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship.
Annie is looking to acquire literary fiction and nonfiction of extraordinary authenticity, urgency and voice.
Alisha Gorder, Independent publicist
Alisha Gorder is an independent literary publicist. Formerly Publicity Manager at Catapult, Counterpoint, and Soft Skull Press, she has worked on campaigns for Melissa Febos's Body Work, Matthew Salesses's Craft in the Real World, Courtney Maum's Before and After the Book Deal, Mac Crane's I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, Lydia Conklin's Rainbow Rainbow, Edgar Gomez's High-Risk Homosexual, Ye Chun's Hao, and more. She lives in the Bay Area.
Mike Levine, Editorial Consultant
Mike Levine offers developmental, substantive, and line editing for book manuscripts, essays, short stories, and book proposals. He specializes in literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, arts and culture, biography and memoir, and poetry. Before becoming an independent editor, he was an acquisitions editor at Northwestern University Press for nine years, overseeing a wide range of books, including fiction, nonfiction, drama, poetry, and scholarly titles. Among his authors were MacArthur Fellows, Guggenheim Fellows, Pulitzer Prize winners, and Tony Award winners. He published work by novelists Thomas Rayfiel, Kathleen Hill, and Ludmila Ulitskaya; poets A. E. Stallings, Rachel Hadas, and Amit Majmudar; playwrights Stephen Karam, Lydia R. Diamond, and David Ives; scholars Annette Insdorf and Brian Boyd; and novelist Jen Beagin and playwright Clare Barron, both winners of a 2017 Whiting Award. In 2015, he was named to New City’s Lit 50: Who Really Books in Chicago. He has participated in editors’ panels at the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop, AWP, and other conferences. Before working at Northwestern, he was a senior editor at the Great Books Foundation in Chicago. Since 2000, he has taught literature and film seminars in several continuing education programs. He also reads scripts for Steppenwolf Theatre Company. He has a BA from Washington University in St. Louis and a PhD in English from Rice University.
Mary Alice Stewart, Assistant Literary Agent to DeWitt Authors
Mary Alice Stewart is a writer, editor, and literary liaison. She has worked under mentor and literary agent Annie DeWitt at The Shipman Agency for five years as her assistant, and also is represented by her as a client. Her role has evolved and blossomed under this mentorship, and the support of The Shipman Agency, and she is looking to acquire writing—literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry—of extraordinary cadence, in language and feeling.
Mary Alice has lectured for The Shipman Agency’s Work Room, North Carolina Writers’ Network, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, Caricon: A Celebration of Caribbean Literature, Chelsea Hodson’s Morning Writers’ Club, and more. She has attended The John Ashbery Home School and the Disquiet workshop in Lisbon, Portugal, and received a residency with Virginia Center for Creative Arts. As a private editor, her clients have gone on to publish with premier publishing houses. Her writing has appeared in Forever Mag, Joyland, No Tokens, and more. An essay of hers has been translated into Italian for Edizioni Black Coffee's website. She holds an MFA and a BA from Bennington College and is currently a student at Central Maine Community College in their Electromechanical Technology program. Mary Alice is from, and lives in, Maine. She is at work on a novel about the last living Shaker community in New Gloucester, Maine.