This event is open to MFA students, English PhD students, Zell Fellows, and recent MFA alumni only. Please email asbates@umich.edu for login instructions.

Julie Barer began her career as a bookseller at Shakespeare & Company, where she discovered the joy of putting books into people’s hands. Her first job in publishing was at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, and she started her own agency, Barer Literary, in 2004. She is now a partner at The Book Group, an agency she co-founded in 2015.

Julie represents a variety of writers across a literary spectrum, with a special emphasis on fiction. Julie’s clients have been finalists and winners of numerous grants and prizes, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics' Circle Award, the Man Booker Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Orange Prize. Works by several of her clients have graced the cover of The New York Times Book Review and have appeared on national and international bestseller lists.

A few of Julie’s most well-known clients and projects are Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn, Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam, Circe by Madeline Miller, Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson and Writers and Lovers by Lily King.

Julie is particularly interested in representing a diversity of voices from around the world and from a wide range of backgrounds. She is especially interested in work featuring LGBTQ characters, stories of immigrant families, and novels about the experience of being different or other. Julie feels strongly about bringing under-represented stories to light, across race, class and sexuality, and relishes the opportunity to be challenged and educated by fiction, to learn more about herself and the world around her: one of the greatest things literature can offer us.