Iris Blasi is a literary agent with Arc Literary Management. She has close to two decades of experience in publishing, working in multiple facets of the industry. She joined Arc Literary Management in 2021 after four years at the Carol Mann Agency. Prior to becoming a literary agent, she was Marketing Director and Senior Editor at Pegasus Books. She has held editorial, marketing, publicity, and consulting roles at Random House, Pegasus Books, Union Square Press, Open Road Media, literary PR firm Hilsinger-Mendelson, and consulting firm Idea Logical, Inc. She has worked on best-selling and award-winning books by authors including Lawrence Block, Rachel Carson, Michael Dirda, Erica Jong, Ira Levin, Alexandra Silber, Jerry Stahl, Gloria Steinem, Charles Strouse, and Fay Weldon.
Iris graduated from Princeton University with a B.A. in English and dual minor in American Studies and Gender Studies, and she holds a masterÕs degree from New York University in Humanities and Social Thought, with a thesis on the life and legacy of the American writer Dawn Powell. Her writing on books, arts, and culture has appeared in outlets including The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Dow Jones Newswires, Publishers Weekly, BUST Magazine, The Jewish Daily Forward, Bitch Magazine, and BookPage. She has spoken in the US and Canada on the topics of publishing, marketing, media theory, and digital and social media at NYU, SXSW, Sarah Lawrence, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, the WomenÕs National Book Association, Digital Book World, Publishers Launch, MagNet: CanadaÕs Magazine Conference, and Humber CollegeÕs Book Summit. She is a volunteer for the award-wining nonprofit organization The Telling Room, currently mentoring in the Young Emerging Authors Fellowship.
She is seeking nonfiction in the categories of biography, memoir, history, science/nature, pop culture, cultural criticism, current events, politics, and narrative nonfiction. She has a strong interest in feminism (especially intersectional feminism), in nature, climate change, and conservation, and in social and racial justice. She has a particular penchant for books stemming from a quirky journalistic, academic, or personal obsession.
On the fiction side, she is presently seeking literary and commercial fiction with a strong voice. She is also seeking upmarket mysteries and thrillers. She has a special weakness for books about a major event (a wedding, a reunion, a funeral) that reunites a group of people, books that take place in compressed time periods or places (i.e. The Dinner), books set in boarding schools or on college campuses (Prep; The Secret Place), and books with a gently comic touch. She is a big fan of Jami Attenberg, Megan Abbott, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Emily Henry, Linda Holmes, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Curtis Sittenfeld, Emma Straub, J. Courtney Sullivan, Jonathan Tropper, and Kevin Wilson, and would love to see submissions along any of those lines.