Publishing Panel
How to Get Published
April 10, 2025, 12:00-1:00 pm
UC Theater
Are you interested in publishing your writing someday? Does the process of publishing creative writing seem confusing or murky? Do you want to know how to land a book deal? Are you conisdering work as an editor or agent?
Come to the UC Theater on the final day of the Spring Literary Festival, Thursday April 10, to hear from industry insiders about the many paths to publication.
Meg Reid
is the Executive Director of Hub City Writers Project in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where she finds and champions new and overlooked voices from the American South, including Carter Sickels, Drew Lanham, Ashley M. Jones, and Anjali Enjeti. An editor and book designer, her essays have appeared online in outlets like DIAGRAM, Oxford American, and The Rumpus. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she served as Assistant Editor of the literary magazine Ecotone and worked for the literary imprint Lookout Books. She was a Publishers Weekly Star Watch 2021 Honoree. She loves literary nonfiction and braided essays. She lives in a bungalow in a historic district with her husband, two cats, and a short-legged terrier mix.
Alyson Sinclair
is the Publisher of The Rumpus, an online independent literary magazine dedicated to risk-taking work by emerging and established writers. For a decade, she also ran a boutique literary publicity firm called Nectar Literary. Previously, she has been a publicist for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, McSweeney’s, and City Lights Books in San Francisco, CA. She lives in Asheville, NC.
Zoe-Aline Howard
is a literary agent at Howland Literary and a book publicist at Pine State Publicity. While earning her BFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Certificate at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, she had the privilege to work across publishing in multiple capacities, including an internship at Lookout Books.
Alice Martin
is a fiction writer from North Carolina and (soon to be!) Assistant Professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University. She received her PhD in English Literature from Rutgers University and has been a long-time staff writer for Shelf Awareness. Before returning to academia, Alice worked in commercial book publishing on both the house and agency side at Algonquin Books, Folio Literary, and Writers House. Her creative writing has appeared in the Carolina Quarterly, Appalachian Heritage, Reed Magazine, and Triangle House Review, among others. Her debut novel, Westward Women, is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press in March 2026.
