This event is virtual-only (via Zoom) and is open to Helen Zell Writers' Program MFA students and Zell Fellows, as well as U-M graduate and undergraduate students. It is not open to the general public. Please email Julie Cadman-Kim (kimjulie@umich.edu) for login instructions.

Kiley Reid is the author of Such a Fun Age, which was a New York Times bestseller and longlisted for the Booker Prize. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, The Guardian, and others. Reid is currently an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

Claudia Ballard has been a literary agent at WME since 2008 and a partner since 2016. She represents fiction, from established short-story writers to debut novelists and beyond, as well as creative nonfiction and journalism. Amongst the writers she works with are award winning and bestselling fiction writers Kiley Reid, Julie Buntin, Emma Straub, Curtis Sittenfeld, Sana Krasikov, Madhuri Vijay, Marie-Helene Bertino, Halle Butler, Lydia Kiesling, Zack Williams, and Alice Munro. Her nonfiction writers include Chloé Cooper Jones (Easy Beauty), Jordan Kisner (This Places), Dr. Marcia Chatelain (Franchise), Andrew Leland (The Country of the Blind) and she has work forthcoming from journalists Alice Gregory, Carrie Battan, and J. Wortham amongst others.

She is looking to work with writers who surprise readers, who make us laugh, can tap into our deepest emotions, and who can introduce us to new ways of thinking about and seeing our complex world. Among the clients she works with are New York Times bestselling authors, Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honorees, Granta Best of Young American Novelists, Cullman and Guggenheim fellows, Whiting Award winners, and recipients of the NYPL Young Lions Awards as well as the Nobel Prize.