Miriam Altshuler

Miriam Altshuler began her career at Russell & Volkening, where she worked with such writers as Anne Tyler, Eudora Welty, Joseph Campbell, Nadine Gordimer, and Bernard Malamud. In 1994 she established her own agency, until she joined DeFiore and Company in 2016. Miriam specializes in adult literary and book club fiction, narrative nonfiction, and books for children. She is particularly interested in finding emerging and underrepresented voices, and she loves reading and representing books that focus on diversity and explore the experiences of BIPOC people. First and foremost, she responds to voice and stories that are character-driven. She searches for books that draw her in and give her a new perspective on a world she doesn’t know, or make her think more deeply about a world she does know. Miriam seeks books with a heart and writers with wonderful storytelling abilities. In fiction, she is most interested in family sagas, historical novels, and stories that offer a new twist or retelling of some kind. She does not work with adult romance, sci fi, or fantasy. In nonfiction, she loves memoir, narrative nonfiction, and self-help (as long as it is not highly prescriptive). She particularly responds to books that have an important cultural, social, or psychological focus. For children’s books, she focuses primarily on YA and middle grade, and her tastes vary broadly in those areas. It always comes back to the voice and the heart of a story for her.