Meet the Agents
Sandra Dijkstra | Elise Capron | Natalie M. Fischer | Jill Marr
SANDRA DIJKSTRA is the founder, owner, and President of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. She is agent to authors in the arenas of fiction and non-fiction, including literary and commercial fiction, and on the non-fiction side: history, politics, current affairs, business, science, and religion.
Truly bicoastal, Sandra was born in the Bronx, schooled in the East, then went west to grad school at UC Berkeley. Some twenty-five years ago, she brought to agenting literary taste honed by a Ph.D. in French Literature, a keen editorial eye trained during a decade of study and of university teaching, and on the business front, her homegrown New Yorker selling smarts. Over these years, Newsweek dubbed her "the best agent in the West," Esquire chose her as one of the nation's "top five literary agents," and the Los Angeles Times proclaimed her an "über-agent" and "the most powerful literary agent on the West Coast."
Sandra looks for writers with something significant to say and who know how to say it in a unique way. Her hallmark is an eye for quality fiction that sells well, and on the literary fiction side, her roster of authors includes Chitra Divakaruni (One Amazing Thing, to pub early in 2010), Maxine Hong Kingston (Woman Warrior, and next year, A Broader Margin to My Life), Anchee Min (Pearl of China, due next spring), Lisa See (Snowflower and the Secret Fan, and more recently, Shanghai Girls), Adrienne Sharp (The True Memoirs of Little K, to pub summer 2010), and Amy Tan (Joy Luck Club, and more recently, Saving Fish From Drowning), among others. This fall, her list features Marilyn Chin's dazzling debut Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen. On the mystery/thriller side, she champions bestselling Diane Mott Davidson, the Queen of the Culinary Mystery, Cosmopolitan's Kate White whose new thriller (Hush) is scheduled for next spring, and Susan Kandel, whose brilliant Cece Caruso series has been acclaimed by the NYT's Marilyn Stasio and others, with her Dial H for Hitchcock, due this fall. And, on the children's front, she is Stellaluna author/illustrator Janell Cannon's proud agent.
Sandra's roots in academe, as well as her passionate concern that our books contribute to making this world a better place, have led her to become the advocate for a leading group of investigative journalists, including the Wall Street Journal's Jess Bravin, the Los Angeles Times's Michael Hiltzik, and ProPublica's T. Christian Miller, amongst others. She is proud to champion the work of two important critics of our times, Mike Davis (Ecology of Fear) and Chalmers Johnson (Blowback), and Sandra is agent to major American historians, many of them award-winning, including Pulitzers Stephen Hahn, and Leon Litwack, as well as prize-winning Civil War historian Eric Foner (The Story of American Freedom), and historians of the slave trade, Ira Berlin (The Making of African America, forthcoming), and Marcus Rediker (Slave Ship), Her history list proudly features Steve Fraser (Wall Street, America's Dream Palace), civil libertarian Peter Irons (People's History of the Supreme Court), economic historian David Landes (The Wealth and Poverty of Nations), Gary Nash (The Unknown American Revolution), Marilyn Yalom (The History of the Breast, and more recently, American Resting Place), and Elaine May (America and the Pill) and many more. This fall, Adrienne Mayor, new to our list, pubs her The Poison King, The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy.
In addition, Sandra has developed a strong list on the science front, featuring such gurus as Don Norman (Emotional Design, Design of Everyday Things), Irv Yalom (The Gift of Therapy), Dr. Gary Small (iBrain, Memory Bible), Jordan Fisher Smith (Nature Noir), and Bernd Heinrich (Summer World, The Mind of the Raven), as well as on the business side, starring bestseller Joel Greenblatt (The Little Book that Beats the Market), David Einhorn's Fooling Some of the People All of the Time and Herman Miller's Max dePree (Leadership Is an Art). Reaching for the sky, on the realm of religious studies, Sandra champions award-winning scholar Paula Fredriksen (Augustine and the Jews) and bestseller Stephen Prothero (Religious Literacy and the forthcoming Great Religions).
Her goal is to help authors realize their dreams, supporting their work through each phase of the publishing process, so that their book reaches its widest readership, here and abroad, and in as many formats as possible! To that end, she has assembled a team of powerful staffers, each of whom is a great reader and supporter of the Dijkstra List, and a few of whom are agenting their own lists, as well!
ELISE CAPRON is Sandy's Executive Assistant and a Literary Agent at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. She specializes in debut fiction, character-driven literary and offbeat fiction, and short story collections. She is also interested in selected nonfiction if it has a literary edge.
A graduate of Emerson College, Elise holds a BFA in Writing, Literature and Publishing. She also served on the editorial staff of the Emerson Review. She interned at Harcourt and the Dijkstra Agency before joining the agency full-time in 2003.
Elise is interested in fiction with unforgettable writing, a terrific narrative voice/tone, and great characters. She loves novels with an unusual or eccentric edge, and is drawn to stories she has never heard before. She hopes to work with writers who are professional, have a realistic sense of the market, and who are getting their work published regularly in literary magazines.
Some of Elise's recent and soon-to-be-published books include Tiphanie Yanique's How to Escape from a Leper Colony (Graywolf), Jonathon Keats' The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six (Random House), Ali Liebegott's The IHOP Papers (Carroll & Graf), Peter Plate's Soon the Rest Will Fall (Seven Stories Press), and Whitney Lyles' Party Games (Simon Pulse) and First Comes Love (Berkley).
NATALIE M. FISCHER is a Literary Agent and "Girl Friday" at the Dijkstra Agency. She is in charge of managing the submission cycle, interns, foreign tax, permission requests, copy machine errors, paper ordering, and anything else that needs to be done!
An honors graduate of the University of San Diego, California, Natalie holds a B.A. in Literature/Writing. She started as an intern at the Agency in 2007, after which time she left to write author profiles and book reviews for the San Diego Union Tribune. Finding that journalism was just not for her, she returned to work full-time at the Dijkstra Agency in April 2009.
Natalie is actively seeking new clients, and is especially interested in talented, hard-working new authors with a fresh, unique voice and hook. Her specialty is commercial fiction, with particular interest in children's lit (all ages, picture book-YA), romance (contemporary and with a passion for historical), historical fiction, multi-cultural novels, and select paranormal/fantasy.
JILL MARR is an acquiring associate agent at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.
She graduated from San Diego State University with a BA in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing and a minor in History. She has a strong Internet and media background as well as over 10 years of publishing experience. She wrote features and ads for Pages, the literary magazine for people who love books, and continues to write book ads for publishing houses and promotional features for television.
After writing ad copy and features for published books for years, she knows how to find the "hook" and sell it.
Jill enjoys taking the time to meet budding writers at conferences around the country, including The Surry Writers Conference, Pike's Peak Writers Conference, (JAWS) Journalism and Women Symposium, The La Jolla Writers Conference, SDSU Writers Conference, Murder in the Magic City, Killer Nashville, Writers Boot Camp and more.
Jill is interested in commercial fiction, especially women’s fiction, multi-cultural fiction, historic fiction, mysteries and thrillers. She is also looking for non-fiction in the areas of self-help, inspirational, cookbooks, memoir (she especially loves travel and foodie memoirs), parenting, history, health & nutrition, pop culture, humor and music.
While she prefers you send manuscripts and proposals by mail, Jill is happy to look at queries by email at jill@dijkstraagency.com. (Please see our How to Submit page for submission requirements for other agents.)
