Cecile Barendsma is a literary agent with the Cecile B Literary Agency. She grew up in the Netherlands, studied Linguistics and Literature at the University of Amsterdam, and moved to New York after finishing the Radcliffe Publishing Course. She studied International Relations at the New School, Spanish at El Taller, and took courses at the Art Students League and Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. She speaks Dutch and German, and reads French.

With two decades of experience in international publishing, Cecile was most recently Director Foreign Rights at Janklow & Nesbit Associates where she worked, among many others, with Peter Bognani, President Carter, Joan Didion, Tom Harris, Rachel Khong, Rao Pingru, Matthew Sullivan, Gay Talese, Craig Thompson, and Tom Wolfe. Cecile attends the Frankfurt and London Book Fairs, is a Jerusalem Book Fair Fellow, and was a guest speaker at the Abu Dhabi Book Fair, and Penn State writers workshop.