Lucy Cleland joined the agency in 2025 and brings over a decade of experience representing prize-winning authors of fiction and nonfiction. Her taste is bold and eclectic; she loves working with writers who, to steal from a line Dickinson, “tell all the truth but tell it slant.”
Lucy’s clients have been National Book Award and Pulitzer finalists, winners of the NBCC Award and PEN America Awards, recipients of MacArthur “Genius” grants, and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; their books have been featured in the New Yorker Briefly Noted, New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a variety of best books of the year lists, as well as ranked as USA Today Bestsellers and selected for the Book of the Month Club.
Lucy’s nonfiction taste is anchored by her interest in the way culture shapes us (and we shape it). She represents ‘big idea’ books, narrative nonfiction, pop culture/cultural criticism, history, psychology, social science, philosophy, natural science, and select memoir. She’s looking for stylish writers who have their hands on a curiosity-inducing subject, books that add depth and context to conversations in the zeitgeist, and experts that offer readers powerful and urgent clarity about their lives and the world around them.
In fiction, Lucy is drawn to novels with sticky or unusual concepts. On the literary side, she loves authors that explore how social issues and human hearts get painfully and gloriously tangled up together. On the commercial side, she gravitates towards transportive historical fiction and genre-bending contemporary work, particularly grounded fantasy and sci-fi stories that trace the downstream effects of a single “twist” on our world.
Regardless of genre, authors writing from marginalized perspectives are heartily welcomed.
A southern transplant originally from Atlanta, Lucy lives with her wife and two dogs in Boston. Previously, she worked as an agent at Kneerim & Williams and Calligraph. You can find her on instagram at shelfpromotion.
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