Publishing Panel

Author (and frequent Skylight Books event host!) Noel Alumit presents a panel on getting published, featuring author Dana Johnson, book critic and author David L. Ulin, editor Daniel Smetanka, and agent B.J. Robbins. Dana Johnson is the author of Elsewhere, California and Break Any Woman Down. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California where she teaches literature and creative writing. BJ Robbins opened her Los Angeles-based literary agency in 1992 after a multifaceted career in book publishing that took her from publicity at Simon & Schuster to Marketing Director and later Senior Editor at Harcourt. Her agency represents non-genre fiction, both literary and commercial and a wide range of nonfiction, from narrative to history and biography, pop culture, travel-adventure, sports and health. Daniel Smetanka has worked in various aspects of the publishing industry for close to twenty years. As an Executive Editor at Ballantine/Random House, Inc., he acquired and published award-winning debut books including The Ice Harvest by Scott Philips, The Speed of Light by Elizabeth Rosner, Down to a Soundless Sea by Thomas Steinbeck, and Among the Missing by Dan Chaon, a 2001 finalist for the National Book Award. He currently serves as Editor-at-Large for Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press. Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin authored The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith and The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Are So Important in a Distracted Time.