Ayla Zuraw-Friedland

Ayla Zuraw-Friedland joined the Frances Goldin Literary Agency in 2022 after starting her agenting career at The David Black Agency in 2019. Previously, she worked as an editorial assistant and assistant editor at Beacon Press in Boston, and as a development editor for encyclopedias at Oxford University Press. She received her BA in English and Creative Writing from Connecticut College in 2015, and her writing can be found or is forthcoming in The Drift, Excerpts Magazine, The Financial Times, GAY the Magazine, Publishers Weekly, and The Cape Cod Poetry Review. She is interested in literary fiction and nonfiction that inspect big questions about queer identity, class, community, and art & technology through a personal lens, as well as poetry and a limited number of graphic or hybrid projects. To give a sense of her taste, a few of her favorite contemporary writers are Carmen Maria Machado, Kristen Arnett, Hanif Abdurraqib, Helen Oyeyemi, Daniel M. Lavery, Raven Leilani, Candice Carty-Williams, Alexander Chee, Akwaeke Emezi, Rivka Galchen, Becky Cooper, and Venita Blackburn. Her current clients include J. Halberstam, Haley Jakobson (OLD ENOUGH, Dutton 2023), James Frankie Thomas (IDLEWILD, Abrams 2023), Jamie Hood (TRAUMA PLOT, Pantheon 2025; how to be a good girl, Grieveland 2020), Shelly Jay Shore (RULES FOR GHOSTING, Ballantine 2024), Sarah Hartshorne (I CAME HERE TO MAKE FRIENDS: ESSAYS ON AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MODEL, Crown 2025).