Adrian Shirk is an agent at Drift(less) Literary.

She brings over ten years of experience as an author, editor and career mentor to dozens of emerging writers. She has two books of creative nonfiction, And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Stories from the Byways of American Women and Religion, and Heaven is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia, both from Counterpoint Press. Her essays have otherwise appeared in The Atlantic, Lit Hub, and others, as well as Catapult, where she was previously a columnist and regular contributor. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wyoming, and worked as an editor at Wilder Quarterly, as well as the erstwhile small press The Corresponding Society and its biannual journal Correspondence. Most recently, in addition to working with clients and developing manuscripts for Drift(less), she teaches in the BFA Creative Writing Program at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, serving as the Writing Lives Advisor and Internship Coordinator. She lives in the Catskills, where she helps run a cooperative artists’ residency called The Mutual Aid Society.

She is seeking: I represent long-form literary fiction (novels, novellas, autofiction, or linked short stories) and first person-driven narrative nonfiction (memoir, essay collections, reportage, special areas of research where the author is present in the text, e.g. not objective or scholarly). I also consider self-help or how-to books on subjects in which the author has had a significant amount of personal or professional experience. I’m especially interested in working with under-represented voices and stories, especially women and nonbinary folks, working class authors (or authors with working class backgrounds), LGBTQ+, and writers of color. I occasionally consider some genre (horror) or speculative fiction (sci-fi), but only if the stories and themes are somewhat socially-engaged (think, Octavia Butler, Ursula Leguin, Margaret Atwood).