Kiara Valdez

Kiara Valdez is an Afro-Dominican writer and an editor at First Second. She was born and raised in New York City (shout out to Washington Heights) and has been an avid comics reader all her life. She graduated from Williams College with a double major in English Literature and Japanese, and spends her free time reading, writing, and enjoying a long list of other hobbies she can’t keep up with.

Though she is proud of every book she’s worked on at First Second, she especially enjoyed working on the Check, Please! series, Bloom, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, Grimoire Noir, Snapdragon, Himawari House, and Frizzy. For her own list she is only looking for graphic novels and is mostly focused on middle grade and young adult. She is open to all genres but is especially interested in magical realism, memoir, #ownvoices stories (especially those from Latinx and Black creators), and stories with LGBTQ+ characters and romance. She likes stories that feel contemporary, real, and are grounded in our world regardless of the genre it’s in, and is a sucker for well-done resolutions/happy endings.

You can find her chattering away on twitter, and get a sense of her taste through her acquisitions tab on her website.

Submission Guidelines

I only accept agented graphic novel submissions.