janet silver
Janet Silver, the Literary Director of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth agency, brings more than three decades of experience as an acclaimed editor and publishing executive to her work as a literary agent. She joined the agency after 25 years at Houghton Mifflin Company, where she was Vice President and Publisher.
Throughout her long career, Silver has remained committed to advancing the work of exceptional writers of fiction and narrative nonfiction. Her clients benefit from both her in-depth knowledge of the publishing process and her reputation as one of the finest editors in the industry, who has worked with such celebrated writers as Philip Roth, Tim O'Brien, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Safran Foer, Anita Desai, John Edgar Wideman, and Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri. Many of the writers she discovered as an editor won national awards and honors, including Monique Truong (The Book of Salt) and Peter Ho Davies (The Welsh Girl).
Silver also brings to ZSH an eye for ground-breaking works of lasting value in a wide range of nonfiction. Under her direction as a publisher, a host of important works achieved record critical and commercial success, including Richard Dawkins's bestseller The God Delusion; Tim Egan's The Worst Hard Time, winner of the National Book Award; and the memoir Beautiful Boy by David Sheff, a Starbucks selection.
As an agent, Silver represents writers of the highest quality literary fiction as well as narrative nonfiction in a range of subjects, including memoir, science, biography, history, philosophy, and medicine. Major sales of books by her clients include the memoir Wild by novelist Cheryl Strayed (Knopf), recounting her solo trek on the Pacific Crest trail; Brian Christian's The Most Human Human (Doubleday), an inside look at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence; and award-winning writer Michael Byers's Percival's Planet (Holt), a novel based on the discovery of Pluto in 1930. She also represents several distinguished poets, including Alan Shapiro, winner of the prestigious $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Award, and Michael Collier, former Poet Laureate of Maryland and the director of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.
Her clients' many awards and honors include appearances in The Best American Essays and The Best American Short Stories of the Century; the O. Henry Award; the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; the Whiting Writers' Award; the Rona Jaffe Award for Fiction; the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and degrees and fellowships from country's top graduate writing programs, including the Stegner at Stanford, the Iowa Writers' Conference, the University of Michigan, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
Silver holds a B.A. from Brown University and an M.A. in English and American Literature from the University of Chicago. She has lectured on the publishing industry nationwide and has been featured in Poets and Writers; Boston Magazine; and the TV news magazine Chronicle. She currently serves on the board of trustees of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the advisory board of Ploughshares magazine.
