About
Calligraph is a full-service literary agency with offices in New York and Boston. Our mission is to help talented writers imagine and achieve their publishing goals. We offer representation for new and established authors, and we sell rights for our clients worldwide in print, audio, electronic, film and television.
We represent literary and commercial fiction and a wide range of non-fiction, including biography, history, memoir and narrative, popular science, popular culture, and business, children’s books and YA. Our authors include creative writers, experts in their fields, established journalists, and academics. We are selective in who we represent, with an emphasis on the quality of the writing.
We work alongside clients through every step of the publishing process, from the seed of an idea and the first contract negotiation, to watching over marketing and promotion, and to keeping the book in print many years later.
We want our writers’ work to reach the widest possible audience, and we handle excerpts, magazine writing, speaking engagements, and the sale of other subsidiary rights. The agency works with carefully chosen co-agents to sell dramatic rights and to represent translation rights in foreign territories. We also have close relationships with leading agencies in the UK and represent a number of British writers in the US and Canada.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Calligraph is proud to build on the legacies of the two agencies from which it stems; the Zoë Pagnamenta Agency, founded in 2008, and the Kneerim & Williams Agency, founded by Ike Williams and Jill Kneerim in 1990.
Since its founding in New York City over fifteen years ago, The Zoë Pagnamenta Agency has flourished, taking on a broad range of well-respected authors from many different fields on both sides of the Atlantic. The agency’s long roster of clients has included many award-winning and best-selling authors. By building strong relationships with authors and publishers in the US, the UK, and internationally, Pagnamenta and her colleagues have, over the years, established a reputation for working with passion, taste, determination, and integrity to represent books that matter, and inspire. Zoë brings to Calligraph a commitment to the conscientious, steadfast representation of her clients.
For over 30 years, the Boston-based agency of Kneerim & Williams cultivated a client list that included best-selling novelists and prize-winning historians, scientists, poets, and journalists. At the heart of the agency were its dynamic founders, Ike and Jill, who prized the power of books to communicate ideas that change the world and tell the human story in all its variations. Over the course of their illustrious careers, Ike and Jill enriched the lives of many clients and colleagues with their incisive publishing expertise and bohemian spirit. Generous with their time and supportive of younger agents, many in the industry and at Calligraph today are proud to call them mentors. Katherine Flynn became a partner alongside Ike and Jill in 2016. Ike Williams continues to be a valuable colleague. Jill Kneerim passed away in 2022. Please see the wonderful obituary in the Boston Globe here. Calligraph proudly upholds her legacy by advocating for writers and thinkers whose stories and ideas move the world forward.
