Faculty

Sacha Black is a best selling and competition winning author, rebel podcaster, and professional speaker. She has five obsessions: words, expensive shoes, conspiracy theories, self-improvement, and breaking the rules. Sacha writes educational nonfiction books for writers and sapphic books for Young Adults. She also writes under a super secret pen name. When she’s not writing, she can be found laughing inappropriately loud, or thinking up new ways to break the rules.

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Alice is the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Shanghai Immortal, the first in a trilogy following charmingly irreverent half-fox spirit, half-vampire Lady Jing. Alice has lived all over the world and been interloper, compatriot, tourist, and foreigner. As a result, she’s fascinated by the interplay between self-perceived versus imposed identity and how this intersects with belonging, themes she enjoys exploring in her stories. A recovering lawyer and xiaolongbao enthusiast, Alice now lives in London with her family.

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Lori Rader-Day is the Edgar® Award-nominated and Agatha, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark award-winning author of The Death of Us, Death at Greenway, The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, The Day I Died, Little Pretty Things, and The Black Hour. She is co-chair of the Midwest Mystery Conference and served as 2019-2020 national president of Sisters in Crime. She teaches creative writing for Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies.

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Rebecca Faith Heyman began her work as a freelance editor almost twenty years ago, after completing her BA/MA in English and American Literature at New York University. She is the creator and founder of First Line Frenzy®, an ongoing learning project to help writers develop their craft. Rebecca is an advisor to the board of Reedsy, Inc., and the founder and director of The Work Conference. She believes that humor, honesty and keen discernment are the foundations of good editorial work.

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Paul Rapacioli is a moderator, writer and founder of the news site The Local which for millions of readers a month publishes news from Sweden, and eight other European countries, in English. He's the director of the Fojo Media Institute at Linnaeus University. In his book Good Sweden, Bad Sweden, Paul analyzed the mechanisms that have made Sweden a target for international populism and nationalism. When The Local began to see that Sweden was overrepresented among the troll factories' fake news, he began to dig deeper and discovered a pattern. Paul has been a board member of SWF since 2019 and our moderator from year one.

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Adnan Mahmutović has a PhD in English Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing. He has lectured at the Department of English, Stockholm University, since 2007 and served as editor at Two Thirds North, a journal of transnational writing. His writing includes, Ways of Being Free, and, Craft of Editing. His creative works include: Thinner than a Hair, How to Fare Well and Stay Fair, and At the Feet of Mothers. His stories and creative non-fiction appear in the UK and US magazines, and his essay, Comics, War and Ordinary Miracles, was adapted by BBC Radio. He also hosts the podcast, Love and its Discontents.

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Sally O-J is a literary editor and writer’s mentor. Her full surname is Orson-Jones, but she has used O-J since her friends at school decided it was less of a mouthful! Since 1998, Sally has worked as a Book Doctor with authors whose experience range from absolute beginners to published literary stars like Sarah Waters, Viv Albertine, Sophie Haydock and Hayley Campbell. Sally especially loves the process of developing works in progress. She previously worked as a journalist and editor in the music business and has written and edited scripts for broadcast, album sleeve notes and features.

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Agents

Jamie Cowen has worked in publishing for more than twenty years. Before joining Ampersand in 2013 he was a commissioning editor at HarperCollins, and prior to that he worked in legal and contracts departments at HC and the Hachette Group. Jamie is looking for genre fiction of all kinds, including crime, thrillers, SF, fantasy and horror. He is also looking for sport-related non-fiction and is keen to see submissions of all genres from under-represented voices and LGBTQ writers. Jamie’s clients include Tendai Huchu (The Edinburgh Nights series, Tor UK and US), A Y Chao (Shanghai Immortal, HodderScape), Adrian Selby (Snakewood, The Winter Road and Brother Red; Orbit), Mark Hill (His First Lie, It Was Her, The Bad Place and The Woman in the Wood; Sphere and Head of Zeus) and Michael Wood (the DCI Matilda Darke series, HarperCollins).

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Ayesha founded APL in 2007. Before becoming an agent she held several editorial positions, including most recently as a senior editor at Farrar Straus and Giroux. She is on the board of Art Omi and the AALA (Association of American Literary Agents) where she founded the Committee on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and helped launch the non-profit Literary Agents of Change. Her client roster includes Ibram X. Kendi, Patricia Engel, Danielle Evans, Matthew Salesses and Lisa Ko. While her interests are wide-ranging, she works mostly with literary fiction, narrative nonfiction across a broad range of topics including history and cultural commentary, memoir and biography, and some works of young adult fiction. She is drawn to distinctive voices with a compelling point of view and memorable characters. Ayesha's greatest joy is in finding and launching new literary voices.

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Founded in 1963, Greene & Heaton is an agency with a diverse range of clients. Laura has been there since 2018 and loves working on literary fiction and upmarket commercial fiction, of all different kinds, and is always on the lookout for meditative or moving novels about modern life. She prefers warmth and heart to coldness or ennui, although she loves novels with a bit of bite and sharpness to them. Laura is always looking for historical and period fiction, particularly early- or mid-twentieth century. She’s also keen on darkness and a claustrophobic feel in novels, from gothic to horror to murder mysteries to ghost stories to psychological thrillers to speculative/magical realist fiction to novels that feel like true crime, or intense and emotional narratives about dark things, and thinks being truly scared by a story is one of the most difficult things a writer can achieve.

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