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

Ian Van Wye's presentation will explore what happens when an editor contacts an author (or their agent) directly, and the collaborative process by which an idea for a book becomes a formal submission to a publishing house.

Ian Van Wye is an assistant editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where he works with a list of authors that includes David Diop (winner of the International Booker Prize), Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, Virginie Despentes, Robert Sullivan, Peter Moore, George Musser, Annie Cohen-Solal, and Elias Canetti. He has also assisted with books by a number of FSG’s leading writers: Peter Handke, Janet Malcolm, George Packer, Eliza Griswold, Louis Menand, Geoff Dyer, Robert Gottlieb, and Samuel Moyn. He is interested in acquiring literary fiction, fiction in translation, and nonfiction, especially intellectual and global history, as well as creative nonfiction.

Before joining FSG, Ian worked as an assistant to literary agent Amy Williams. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College with degrees in History and Literature and French. He is from Asheville, North Carolina and lives in Manhattan.