Melissa Flashman is a literary agent with Trident Media Group. A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Melissa Flashman majored in English at Wesleyan University. After stints in the English Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins, commercial and indie radio, the advertising world and something called cool-hunting (it was the late Ô90s), she got her first job in publishing working as an assistant in the literary department of ICM before moving to Trident Media Group where she was a literary agent for over ten years before joining Janklow & Nesbit Associates in 2017.
Melissa represents award-winning and best-selling fiction and nonfiction. In nonfiction, she is particularly interested in conversation-changing books including journalism, science, technology, business/finance/economics, memoir/narrative, essays and cultural criticism. She is drawn to a range of literary and commercial fiction and is particularly excited about stories that touch on the deeper meaning of life, family, identity and love. A good page-turner is always welcome.
MelissaÕs authors have won numerous awards including the National Book Critic Circle Award, the Rona Jaffe Award, the Hugo Award, n + 1 writerÕs fellowship, The NationÕs Ridenhour Prize and the American Book Award among others. A former first serial and magazine agent, she enjoys helping her writers place journalism, essays and fiction in a range of publications including The New Yorker, HarperÕs, the New York Times, Vogue, The Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, the Paris Review, n + 1, Tin House, the Baffler and Jacobin.
Some recent titles by her authors include Sweetbitter (Knopf) by Stephanie Danler; The Selfishness of Others (FSG) by Kristin Dombek; Winning Arguments (HarperCollins) by Stanley Fish; Trainwreck (Melville House) by Sady Doyle; The Utopia of Rules (Melville House) by David Graeber; The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century (Metropolitan) ed. by Sarah Leonard and Bhaskar Sunkara; The Road to Ruin (Portfolio) by James Rickards; and O Fallen Angel (Harper Perennial) and Book of Mutter (Semiotext(e)) by Kate Zambreno.
She lives in Brooklyn; find her on Twitter @melflashman.