Thais Afonso

Thais is an Associate Agent with Azantian Literary Agency. Thais has eight years of experience in publishing between Brazil, China, and the United States. More recently, she interned at Writers House, where she honed her skills while supporting the desks of Amy Berkower and Johanna Castillo, and she was mentored by Jennifer Azantian before stepping up to the Associate Agent role at ALA. She intends to represent marginalized authors, and she’s especially seeking to uplift BIPOC born and raised in the Global South.

In Adult Fiction, Thais is looking to represent Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horror, Contemporary Romance, and Suspense/Thrillers. She still loves an element of speculative or the utter unsettling in this age category, and would love to find an unsettling story that defies genre, like Our Wives Under the Sea, Catherine House, Helen Phillips’ The Need or TV show Yellowjackets. She’s also seeking stories with a strong anti-colonial, anti-imperialist bent, be it an epic in the vein of The Ending Fire trilogy or space opera A Memory Called Empire, something more intimate like indie horror The Wicked and the Willing, or even a contemporary take—she’d love to sign a political thriller that explored the same themes as American Spy.

In contemporary suspense and thrillers, she would most like to see stories that are not related to solving murders, but she welcomes uber fast-paced, tightly woven-mysteries like The Puzzle Master or a BIPOC take on a Dan Brown thriller. Mostly, though, she’s looking for Sapphic authors in this space. Give her a lesbian obsession story or a thriller about an older woman taking her younger lover to meet her rich toxic family, only for terrible things to happen. Give her lesbian stories comped to Michele Campbell’s The Intern, Catherine Steadman’s The Family Game, or Stone Cold Fox.

In Horror, she’s also looking for lesbians, lesbians, lesbians. Plus, the unsettling, the Gothic, folkloric horror, horror mixed with fantasy or romance, and all the social horror. Recent favorites include Plain Bad Heroines and House of Hunger. She also would love to see horror in space, like S.A. Barnes.

She also tends to gravitate to critiques of capitalism in Sci-Fi. Fun and snappy romps like Murderbot will always attract her, but she would also love to see stories that tackle Global North interventionism in the Global South, and subversions of Global North competency being the norm—think Monarch from the perspective of a civilian in the Global South instead of an agent of an uber secretive and authoritarian GN agency, or anything you’d comp to Nnedi Okorafor. She also enjoys cyberpunk, solarpunk, and silkpunk.

She’s looking for almost all sub-genres of Fantasy, except Grimdark and Military. She’s keen on anti-colonial Epics, High-Fantasy set in the Global South, retellings of Global Majority Myths, Sci-Fi Fantasies in the vein of Arcane, and historicals that feels almost Second World, like Siren Queen. She also loves cozy, whimsical stories, like The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches or the Emily Wilde series. In Romantasy, she’s also looking for an epic, several-book-long love story like The Jasmine Throne, but anything Queer will probably have her interest.

In Contemporary Romance, she’s extra keen on signing lesbians of color, especially ones writing at intersectionalities that remain under-represented in traditionally published romance. She’s mostly seeking single-title romance dramas and rom-coms with character arcs that have a lot of depth. Books that feel like a blend of romance and women’s fiction/contemporary commercial, like Funny Story, Seven Days in June, and Honey Girl (though the last one falls on more on contemporary side, and for her list, she’d like a more central love story).

She’d also love to see a BIPOC take on something like The Lost City, where the protagonists are perhaps keener on protecting a sacred site/indigenous cultural heritage. And she welcomes darker takes on this concept that straddle thriller and horror instead of comedy.

In YA, she’s currently open to Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horror, and Supernatural Mysteries/Thrillers. She’s predominantly interested in anything with a speculative bent. She’s also especially keen on championing Queer voices in this space, especially BIPOC Queer voices.

In Horror, she loves stories about monstrous girls, like I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast is Me and House of Hollow. In Fantasy, she would love to find stories about angry, vengeful girls who never back down, in the vein of Iron Widow and Dread Nation. She would also love to see richly original BIPOC takes on beloved tropes, like A Magic Steeped in Poison did with competitions and A Tempest of Tea did with heists. And if you have a coming-of-age book about a Queer person finding and exploring the Queer spaces/community in a new magical world/new planet, something that could be described as Last Night at the Telegraph Club but speculative, she would love to see it.

She does love Romantasy in YA and she welcomes all of it, but she’s also looking to find fantasy manuscripts without romance—and stories with a focus on mentorship relationships, like Rust in the Root, are her favorites.

While she’s not a good fit for stories that put a positive spin on colonization—even space colonization—, space immigration without a settler angle would interest her. She’s also interested in space romps in this age category and sci-fi tinged with horror via cosmic threats.

In Mystery/Thrillers, give her anything that would crossover into horror because of supernatural elements. Anything you’d comp to Invocations, for example. She’d also love to see a speculative take on a story similar to The Reappearance of Rachel Price.

Across all genres, Thais is especially interested in intersectionality.  She wants to sign working class, Queer, BIPOC, disabled authors, and is keen on supporting authors whose marginalization intersect with other marginalizations, as she knows the paths to success in this industry get more limited if you have an intersectional identity.

She’s very keen on indigenous stories across age categories and in all genres—To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Elatsoe, and Firekeeper’s Daughter are recent favorites, but she wants stories that don’t match any comps too. Thais especially wants to represent Global South authors. As someone born and raised and based in Brazil, Thais seeks to put Global South stories front and center, as she believes those voices are more needed than ever. She’s also, in both age categories and across all genres, committed to supporting Palestinian authors, whenever they are ready and able to share their stories—she’s always open to queries for Palestinian authors.

Anti-MSWL

Thais is not the best fit for Picture Books, Middle Grade, and Contemporary YA. She’s not seeking to represent Military SFF, Literary Fiction, and non-speculative Historical Fiction in any age category. In all genres, she’s not a good fit for any sort of positive spin on war, Monarchy, colonization, or genocide. She will not represent books with Zionist and imperialist propaganda, copaganda, or racist, queerphobic, Islamophobic, and anti-semitic tropes.

In romance, she’s specially not a fit for enemies to lovers where the enmity comes with major power imbalance and/or any form of systemic oppression, and relationships that involve indenture and debts that need to be repaid. She’s also a terrible fit for dark romance (she’s okay with toxic relationships in all other genres, though). She’ll not represent romance with heroes that are in the military, the mafia, or law enforcement.

Please don’t send her books about Indigenous people if you’re not a culturally connected member of those Indigenous communities. That specially applies to Indigenous Brazilians, as she’s proud to see her country shifting away from appropriated Indigenous stories being repacked as folklore and ‘good savage’ narratives that have only caused harm.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be emailed to https://QueryManager.com/ThaisAfonso

Please submit your query letter, a two-page synopsis, and the first 20 pages of your book through Query Manager. I don’t accept submissions via email.

I’m currently only open to unsolicited submissions from BIPOC authors. If you are not an author of color, please hold your submission until I’m open to all queries. I intend to be open to general submissions on July 15th.

Please, if there is triggering content in your manuscript, add warnings to your submission package. I don’t have a maximum word-count for query letters, so you can add any and all content warnings to the end of the letter. In addition to CWs, I recommend your query letter feature a pitch, your bio, and basic information about the manuscript’s word count, title, and potential audience. Comps are super welcome, but not mandatory.

If I requested this submission from a pitch contest, please include a link to the pitch. If there’s a particular item in my MSWL you think your manuscript fills, I’d love for you to highlight it, but personalization is also not necessary. And don’t worry about mistakes. I’ll give equal consideration to all queries.

Guidelines & Details