"I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters," George Saunders wrote in an essay on Vonnegut. "He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to 'real life' - he can put whatever he wants in there.
What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.... In fact, 'Slaughterhouse-Five' seemed to be saying that our most profound experiences may require this artistic uncoupling from the actual. The black box is meant to change us. If the change will be greater via the use of invented, absurd material, so be it."
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
What our clients are creating
Our team
Annie DeWitt
Founder & Literary Agent
Annie DeWitt is a passionate literary agent, occasional professor, novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Her debut novel White Nights In Split Town City, out from Tyrant Books in Summer 2016, made The New York Times Book Review’s “Short List” and has received accolades from BookForum, Interview Magazine, Publishers Weekly, amongst many others. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, The Believer, Guernica, Esquire, BOMB, Electric Literature, Bookforum, NOON, The LA Review of Books, The Iowa Review, The American Reader, art+culture, Poets and Writers, amongst others. DeWitt was a Co-Founding Editor of Gigantic, a literary journal of short prose and art carried throughout the U.S. and abroad. She brings over a decade of teaching at various houses of academia including Columbia University, Barnard, Bard, The New School, Bennington and Skidmore.
Trained as an agent under Frank Weimann at The Literary Group International before her stint in graduate school at Columbia School of The Arts, where she received an M.F.A. In Fiction in 2007, DeWitt has had a passion for book sales since her days as a bookseller at Harvard Bookstore in her twenties when she first started writing.
Previous to her return to agenting in 2020, under the eponymous DeWitt Authors at The Shipman Agency, DeWitt founded The Roxbury Writers Residency in 2018 with her partner, photographer Jerome Jakubiec, out of their then home in the Catskills.
DeWitt currently represents a host of fiction writers, memoirists, poets and talented multi-hyphenates including Joseph Keckler, Brittany Newell (Soft Core, FSG), Nicole Treska (Wonderland, S&S), Uchenna Awoke’s (The Liquid Eye of The Moon, Catapult), KB Brookins (Pretty, Knoph), Nicholas Goodly (Star Power, Scribner) and Dottie Lasky (AstroPoets & Katie, Harper and The Green Lake, Norton).
annie@enlivenendeavors.com
Mary Alice Stewart
Associate Book Agent
My journey to Enliven began when I read Annie DeWitt’s White Nights in Split Town City. The book was, to me, not only transformative in a deep, soul-sense, but a crash course in craft during an impressionable time of development as a young writer. It was astounding when our worlds collided—Annie came to Bennington College in 2017 to teach a fiction course called “Dirty Realism” when I was in my last years of undergrad. The experience of that class was nothing short of extraordinary. A few years later, I received an email from Annie explaining a new exciting venture as a literary agent at The Shipman Agency, and she asked if I had a manuscript. I said, no, I did not. She responded, what do you need in order to finish? I said, a job. She gave me a job.
This is a true story about how a book can change your life. In this spirit of care, I became a literary agent to keep the ripple-effect going as long as possible, as a way of both acknowledging my good luck, saying thank you, and putting skin in the game as a literary citizen, finding connections and homes for emerging voices.
I am looking to acquire writing—literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry—of singular cadence, in language and feeling, with a special interest in history, interdisciplinary thought, character/voice-driven narrative, working-class stories, the natural world and place-based writing. Some of my favorite works and writers include Janet Frame, Carolyn Chute, Yoko Tawada, Flannery O'Connor, The Goonies (dir. Richard Donner), William Faulkner, Annie Ernaux, Lady Snowblood (dir. Toshiya Fujita), Joy Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, Denis Johnson, Jill McCorkle, Lynda Barry, Toni Morrison, The Diaries of Opal Whiteley, Breaking the Waves (dir. Lars von Trier), John Berryman, Percival Everett, Arrival (dir. Denis Villeneuve), Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King, and Watchmen by Alan Moore.
Mary Alice Stewart is a writer, editor, and a literary agent at Enliven. 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 where she also teaches writing to students heading into the trades. Mary Alice has lectured/consulted for Tin House, 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, Rose Books’ inaugural anthology Primal Scream, Joyland, No Tokens, and elsewhere. An essay of hers has been translated into Italian for Edizioni Black Coffee's website. Mary Alice is from, and lives in, Maine.
maryalice@enlivenendeavors.com
Rebecca Rodriguez
Film Agent
With over a decade working in management representation, Becca Rodriguez launched Subtext in 2025 – a management company providing holistic representation for authors, journalists, brands, and screenwriters across genres in the fiction and nonfiction space.
Rodriguez most recently served as a manager in the book department at Untitled Entertainment (formally Grandview Entertainment). Prior to Untitled, Rodriguez ran and oversaw the establishment of the books and IP department as a manager at Curate. Before Curate, Rodriguez was a manager in the book department at The Gotham Group where she represented authors, journalists, publishers, publications, and slates of clients on behalf of literary agencies. Rodriguez began her career as an assistant working at Anonymous Content working across various departments from talent to literary and media rights.
Rodriguez’s roster includes award-winning, New York Times, Sunday Times, and USA Today bestselling authors and screenwriters whose various work is set up around town and in development for series and feature adaptations with studios, buyers, and producers. Her roster includes distinctive clients such as critically acclaimed author Emily Adrian, Pushcart Prize nominee Lucie Britsch, New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author and journalist Maureen Callahan, International Latino Book Award winning author Ann Dávila Cardinal, playwright and lyricist Cary Gitter, writer, professional dancer at the Moulin Rouge, and entrepreneur Allie Goodbun; writer and director Alyssa Donovan, PEN America/Hemingway Award winning author Oscar Hokeah, PEN/Faulkner Award winning author Deesha Philyaw, Sue Grafton Memorial Award nominee, winner of the 2020 McKnight Distinguished Artist Award winner and 2025 Minnesota Book Award author Marcie Rendon; debut novelist Hattie Williams, writer and journalist Erin Van Der Meer, Locus Award finalist Hannah Yang, Dylan Thomas Prize winning author Yasmin Zaher, among others.
Born and raised in Santa Monica, CA she currently resides in Los Angeles. She received a BA in English Literature from Occidental College.
Matthew Silverstein
TV Production Liaison
Matthew Silverstein is a two-time Emmy Award–winning Supervising Producer with more than 20 years of experience in live television, news, and talk show production.
At CBS’s The Talk, Matt spent over a decade as Supervising Producer, leading the show’s news team, pitching and shaping editorial content, briefing on-air talent, and coordinating every element of its live broadcasts.
In addition to his media work, Matt has recently taught at UCLA, where he designed and led a course on leadership, entrepreneurship, and social media in the entertainment industry. His teaching blends extensive industry experience with educational innovation, reflecting his passion for developing the next generation of storytellers.
Matt brings deep expertise in talent relations, editorial strategy, and cross-platform storytelling. With his background in both television and education, he supports the agency in expanding its creative vision and building opportunities that bridge publishing, media, and entertainment.
matt@enlivenendeavors.com
Jemma McDonagh
Foreign Agent
Jemma McDonagh has 20 years experience in the publishing industry where she has secured major publishing deals for a diverse list of prizewinning and bestselling fiction and non-fiction.
Prior to JMA, Jemma was Joint Managing Director at The Marsh Agency. Before that she worked at Gregory & Company Authors' Agents and in the publicity and editorial departments at Orion.
Shortlisted for Rights Professional of the Year 2023, Jemma is also a founding committee member of OpenBooks, the first collaboration between agents, booksellers, and publishers to attract talent from underrepresented backgrounds into the book business.
John Buffalo Mailer
Film Production Lead
John Buffalo Mailer is an award-winning producer, screenwriter, journalist, playwright, actor, and director with over twenty movies to his credit.
Mailer has been an editor for three national magazines – High Times, Tar, and Stop Smiling, and has written for Playboy, New York, ESPN, Art Forum, LitHub,Provincetown Arts, Corriera De La Sera, The Norman Mailer Review, The American Conservative, Vector and Inked Magazine among others.
He is a member of The Actors Studio, a Theater Major at Wesleyan University, has performed in dozens of plays in New York, including the notorious 2011 revival of Draculastarring Thora Birch (American Beauty, Ghost World). That same year he appeared opposite Shia LaBeouf in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, opposite Paul Giamatti and Ellen Burstyn in Matthew Barney’s River Of Fundament, Tony Sirico in Friends And Romans, Alec Baldwin, Demi Moore, and Dylan McDermott in Blind(which he also wrote the screenplay for), Sienna Miller in An Imperfect Murder, Eden Epstein (Leopoldshtadt) in The Second Sun, directed by Jennifer Gelfer, and Peter Cambor (CSI LA) in the feature adaptation of his play about 9/11, Crazy Eyes, retitled American Terrorist, directed by Charles Kopelson and released by Lions Gate in 2020.
Buffalo can most recently be seen playing opposite Luke Wilson, Abigail Breslin, Andy Garcia, Donald Sutherland, Ryan Phillipe, and Kyle MacLachlan in Miranda’s Victim, directed by Michelle Danner, released by Vertical in 2023.
In addition to being a Lifetime Member of the Actors Studio and Playwright Directors Unit, Buffalo is a member of The Screen Actors Guild, Actors Equity Association, and The Dramatists Guild of America. He has lectured widely and appeared in various talk shows.
Buffalo executive produced How To Come Alive With Norman Mailer, a feature documentary about the life of his father, Norman Mailer, directed by Emmy Award-Winner Jeff Zimbalist (Remastered) and Produced by Emmy-Award Winner Vicki Marquette (Road Runner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain). How To Come Alive was listed as one of the Top 10 documentaries of 2024 by Variety and Men’s Journal.
Buffalo lives in New York with his wife, Olivia Rutigliano-Mailer.
johnbuffalo@enlivenendeavors.com
Kirsten
Wolf, Esq.
Legal Eagle
Kirsten Wolf is a graduate of University of Massachusetts Amherst and Boston University School of Law. A native of Boston, MA, Kirsten relocated to New York in 2003 and began her career in publishing at a small literary agency. After several years as an assistant, associate agent, and contracts manager, Kirsten founded Wolf Literary Services, a literary agency and consulting company, in 2008. Kirsten currently dedicates her time to legal and financial consulting for literary and other media agencies, publishers, and independent artists, primarily focused on negotiation of a broad spectrum of publishing related agreements.
Bar Admissions: Massachusetts, New York
Ira
Silverberg
Advisory Board
Ira Silverberg is the Director of Broadview Arts Management, a consultancy working with artists, writers, nonprofit arts organizations, and their funders.
He’s worked in the Literary Arts as an editor, literary agent, and funder, including as Editor-in-Chief, Grove Press; Publisher, High Risk Books/Serpent’s Tail; Senior Editor, Simon & Schuster; and Literature Director, the National Endowment for the Arts.
He’s been an Adjunct Faculty Member at Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program since 2014; serves on the Board of Directors of Copper Canyon Press; on the Advisory Board of Artifacts; and has written for The Paris Review , Frieze, New York Magazine/Vulture, Document Journal, and ArtForum. He lives in Bellport, NY where he is working on a memoir.
Leslie Shipman
Advisory Board
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.