[This is a Virtual Ruby* event, taking place over Zoom. Join us: https://zoom.us/j/191145292?pwd=OGh3cU1YaVlqWGZuNmNGcktGd3ZHZz09 Password will be sent to you upon registration.]

Authors, join us for a two-part series demystifying the very mystifying process of getting a literary agent. For Part I, we'll have Ruby authors share their personal experiences. Ruby authors include Shruti Swamy, Meng Jin, Gabriela Garcia, and Rachel Khong. Come with questions; we may have answers!

Part II, happening at 5 p.m. PST on April 22, will feature literary agents Marya Spence (Janklow & Nesbit), Sarah Bowlin (Aetivas), and Samantha Shea (Georges Borchardt).

About our authors

The winner of two O. Henry Awards, Shruti Swamy's work has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. In 2012, she was Vassar College's 50th W.K. Rose Fellow, and has been awarded residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and Hedgebrook. She is a Kundiman fiction fellow, a 2017 – 2018 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, and a recipient of a 2018 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. She lives in San Francisco. Her debut collection of short stories, The House is a Body, will be released by Algonquin Books this August, 2020.

Meng Jin was born in Shanghai and lives in San Francisco. A Kundiman Fellow, she is a graduate of Harvard and Hunter College. Little Gods, her first novel, was published this past January, 2020.

Gabriela Garcia is the author of the novel Of Women and Salt, forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins (US), Picador (UK), and in seven other languages. Her fiction and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Tin House, Zyzzyva, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a Steinbeck Fellowship, and residencies and fellowships from Breadloaf, Sarabande Books, Lighthouse Works, the Keller Estate, and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. She has an MFA in fiction from Purdue University, where she also taught creative writing.

The daughter of immigrants from Cuba and Mexico, Gabriela was raised in Miami and currently lives in the Bay Area. In her past life she worked in music, magazines, technology, and feminist and immigrant rights organizing.

Rachel Khong is a writer and novelist living in San Francisco. Her first novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, won the 2017 California Book Award for First Fiction, and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for First Fiction. From 2011 to 2016, she was the managing editor then executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine. With Lucky Peach, she also edited a cookbook about eggs, called All About Eggs. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in the Mission district.

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*While we shelter in place during the Covid19 pandemic, The Ruby's physical location will be closed. As a collective, we'll continue to gather online for virtual workshops, events, and discussions. All are welcome to join us for these events.

For those who can afford it and would like to support The Ruby during this uncertain time, we are offering 3 tiers of virtual membership: $5/week, $15/week, and $25/week. (Though we have some money in our emergency savings account to get us through the next little while, we're pretty nervous about the future, and how long this might go on for.) Please help only if it's feasible for you. If you're in a tough time financially right now, we absolutely get it. Please, take care of yourself and stay connected to this community so we can help.

Here are the tiers of virtual membership (use these links to sign up):

$5/week - https://www.joinit.org/o/the-ruby/aRsJyABygL4FvvEJT

$15/week - https://www.joinit.org/o/the-ruby/o56ggrnNNx9rzn6AA

$25/week - https://www.joinit.org/o/the-ruby/q37HfmWSQMoLzPt4p

Want to make a one-time donation of more or less? We can still accept donations through last year's GoFundMe. Link is here.

Our Virtual Ruby calendar will be updated as events are added.

[Virtual Ruby] Getting a Literary Agent: Part I