Michelle Hauck is a literary agent with the Storm Literary Agency. She devoured the classics at an early age, falling in love with heroic stories like The Three Musketeers, Ivanhoe, and The Scarlet Pimpernel. It wasnÕt until her teens that she got her hands on The Sword of Shannara and discovered a new heroic level in SFF. Now sheÕd like to advocate for stories that take the reader beyond the traditional heroÕs journey.

After graduating with a business degree, with a concentration in finance, Michelle worked as a cost accountant for several years before a short stint as a stay-at-home mom. Then she switched gears for twenty years working in an elementary school, where sheÕs learned a lot about what kids like to read and applied that to her own stories, publishing a historic fantasy series with Harper Voyager.

SheÕs been helping writers long before taking the step to become an agent. Her Midwest roots taught her to pay things forward, and along with several co-hosts, she ran an impressive collection of contests for writers, including Query Kombat, Nightmare on Query Street, and Picture Book Party. She also learned much from six years as a successful Pitch Wars mentor in adult SFF.

Currently, Michelle is taking submissions for middle grade, young adult, and some limited adult genres.

Drawn to all sorts of stories from the heroic to the humorous, she loves big worlds, inventive magic systems, and a rich sense of history. Characters with lots of back-story and villains with shades of gray make her day. SheÕs not the best fit for contemporary with dark themes, but she loves contemporary that can be described as quirky, fun, and light. She wants to look at all things SFF or historical, and wonÕt pass up a cozy mystery, page-turner thriller, or a sweet romance. A dash of politics is a great added ingredient.

She is not interested in nonfiction or picture books/chapter books at this time.

Some books IÕve read recently and enjoyed are:

Where Darkness Blooms, The Space Between Worlds, The Once and Future Witches, Station Eternity, The Swifts, Tilly in Technicolor, Where Darkness Blooms, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, The Space Between Worlds, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, This Time ItÕs Real, Legends and Lattes, The Seventh Bride, There Goes the Neighborhood, The Locked Tomb series, the Murderbot series, The Priory of the Orange Tree, Wings of Ebony, Mexican Gothic, Cemetery Boys, Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, How to Trap a Tiger, New Kid, Project Hail Mary, and The City We Became.

Old favorites include The Hunger Games series, The Wheel of Time Series, Anne of Green Gables series, The Legend of Eli Monpress, Ready Player One, and The Questionable Behavior of Dalia Moss.