In-Person Events

Behind the fanfare of a debut, most writers experience their path to publication as tentative and unlikely. This panel of ’25 and ’26 debut novelists will chart the course from feeling like literary outsiders to finishing, querying, selling, and publishing their first books. With and without an MFA, with and without an agent, with a big press or a small one, with a novel in a drawer—this panel aims to provide helpful, transparent accounts of the winding ways a manuscript becomes a book.