Behind the author/agent process with Hanif Abdurraqib and Alia Hanna Habib

You have an idea for a book. Now how do you find a literary agent you can trust? And what will the process look like—from proposal writing to editing—to produce a book that will one day appear in your local bookstore? 

Stanford Public Humanities invites you to hear from leading agent Alia Hanna Habib, the author of Take It from Me: An Agent's Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch, and one of her critically-acclaimed authors Hanif Abdurraqib as they share insights from both sides of the publishing relationship and process. They will be in conversation with Mark Greif, Stanford English professor, author, and cofounder of n+1. 

Please RSVP at this link to attend. 

Alia Hanna Habib is a Vice President and literary agent at The Gernert Company, where she represents MacArthur Fellows, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, National Book Award finalists, and numerous New York Times bestselling authors. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Hanif Abdurraqib is an award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio and the 2025-26 Denning Visiting Artist at Stanford. His newest release, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (Random House, 2024) was a New York Times Bestseller and longlisted for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. His previous book, A Little Devil In America (Random House, 2021) was a winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2021, Abdurraqib was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2024 was named a Windham-Campbell Prize recipient. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School. 

This event is made possible by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning. Cosponsored with the Stanford Creative Writing Program.