Dana Murphy is a literary agent with Trellis Literary Management. She joined Trellis Literary Management in 2022, after a decade building her list at The Book Group. She represents a wide range of fiction and nonfiction for both adult and teen readers. Books by her clients have been New York Times and international bestsellers and chosen as Barnes & Noble Discover, Book of the Month, Read with Jenna, Indie Next and NYT Editors’ Choice picks. Across genre, Dana falls in love at the story and line-level simultaneously. She’s always searching for language and plot that move in equal measure, one in constant support of the other. She believes this symbiosis can exist anywhere on the commercial-to-literary spectrum and is most drawn to writing that aims to transform the reader, disrupt hegemony, and center community Ñ particularly by marginalized writers who have historically been boxed out of traditional publishing spaces. In fiction, Dana looks for books (and authors!) with a soft heart, a sense of humor, and a deep earnest affection for their characters and story. Her forever favorites are genuinely hilarious romantic-comedies that read like the best kind of fan fiction, coming-of-age that captures the specificity of being young today, high-concept and/or speculative novels that press on our shared cultural bruises, and anything that celebrates found families and friendships as their own glorious love stories. Dana’s nonfiction taste trends towards narrative nonfiction and essay collections about pop culture, class, gender, race, science, food and so on. She will always reach for well-researched cultural criticism that interrogates the power structures shaping our collective understanding of “good” taste or reckons with “low” and “unworthy” pop culture in a smart, serious way.Born and raised on Long Island, Dana moved to New York City to study Critical Film Theory and Sociology at NYU, lived there for ten years, and now calls Philadelphia home. If she’s not answering your emails, she’s probably snuck off to one of her favorite places: a campsite in the woods, the beach in her hometown, or a quiet dive bar to drink their cheapest beer and read a book she isn’t working on.Dana’s favorite non-client authors (if your work is similar, please get in touch!): Hanif Abdurraqib, Emily Henry, Casey McQuiston, Shea Serrano, Mary HK Choi, Kate Racculia, Kristen Arnett, Morgan Rogers, Anna Weiner, Megan Stielstra.