Erin Clyburn

Erin Clyburn joined the Howland Literary team in 2022 after four years with boutique New York–based agencies. She was previously the director of collection development for Turtleback Books and has over a decade of experience in magazine publishing, most recently with Food & Wine. She holds a B.A. in English Literature from Mississippi State University and an M.A. in Children’s Literature from Hollins University. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her partner and a few unruly rabbits.

Erin represents middle grade fiction, YA fiction, and adult fiction and nonfiction.

Across the board, she gravitates toward lyrical writing with a strong sense of place and works that are strange, genre-bendy, atmospheric, and often dark. Erin is particularly interested in Southern fiction and nonfiction from diverse voices in the below genres. She loves works about the human body, whether a gory body horror or a nonfiction work about endurance athletes. Her favorite books are literary in style but with genre elements (horror, fabulism/magical realism, mystery, thriller), and she loves books set in our world but with a speculative twist. The stranger, the better. Send her your weirds.

In middle grade fiction, Erin is looking for everything, but has the biggest soft spots for horror and mystery. Middle grade favorites include The Riverman, Small Spaces, Ghost (the Track series), Hide and Seeker, Greenglass House, The Westing Game, and The Canning Season. In YA fiction, she is looking for horror, mystery, thriller, grounded fiction with speculative elements, and magical realism/fabulism. Young adult favorites include Clown in a Cornfield, Neverworld Wake, The Taking of Jake Livingston, Ace of Spades, Midwinterblood, and The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender.

In adult fiction, she is looking for literary and upmarket works in speculative fiction, horror, mystery, psychological thriller, domestic thriller, and magical realism/fabulism. Adult favorites include Catherine House, Leave the World Behind, Long Division, The Thin Place, The Scent Keeper, Mexican Gothic, Never Let Me Go, The Elementals, The Age of Miracles, Baby Teeth, and Every Bone a Prayer. She is also looking for commercial psychological and domestic thrillers in the vein of Ruth Ware, Alyssa Cole, and Lisa Jewell.

In nonfiction, she’s interested in intersectional perspectives and is looking for voice-driven, deeply researched narrative nonfiction and deep dives into topics including food and culinary history, nature/environment, the ways we interact with the outdoors, medicine, pop science, athletics and the human body, and pop culture, specifically horror movies and video games. She’d love to see nonfiction in the vein of The Radium Girls, Cultish, Hurts So Good, Tacky, Taste Makers, The Book of Eels, Hidden Valley Road, A Philosophy of Walking, and Finding the Mother Tree. 

Submission Guidelines

I am only accepting submissions via my personal Query Manager link. Please include your title, word count, genre, one-sentence pitch, synopsis, and query letter. For fiction, please include the first 20 pages of your manuscript. For nonfiction, please include your book proposal.

Guidelines & Details