she continues to edit a few of her longtime authors such as kristen hanna mary kay andrews augustin burrows, sarah addison, allen sally hepworth greer hendricks and sarah paganin she is currently president and publisher of the saint martin's publishing group. monica odom founded her agency in 2019 after working in publishing for nearly a decade. including roles as an agent at liza dawson associates and bradford literary agency. she earned her ms. in publishing from nyu and has a ba in english from montclair state. she was also schooled and bookselling at her local indie watchung booksellers, which happened to be my local indie for any years and i just learned that she was actually married there. namaste monica monica is also a member of the association of american literary agents where she serves on the board and the dei committee. she is president of the dei nonprofit literary agents of change and it's dedicated to the holistic and intentional expansion of intersectional diversity equity inclusivity and justice in the publishing industry. anjali singh is an agent raisha pandey literary. harlem-based boutique literary agency before becoming an agent she worked as literary scout and translator and as an editor at vintage books houghton mifflin harcourt simon & schuster and as editorial director at other press she's best known for having championed mahjong satrapis perceptibles after stumbling across it on a visit to paris. she has always been drawn to the thrill of discovering new writers and among. novelists whose career she helped launch our chimamanda now god say adichie. samantha hunt and southern haddad her current client list includes the author's bridget m davis susana aloha now, he's ahmed which debut radian fugitives was recently shortlisted for the penn faulkner award. she also represents several graphic novelists in the adult and children's book spaces. to the summer field is the publisher of amazon publishing and brilliance publishing. she launched amazon original stories the short content imprint of amazon publishing which releases short stories and collections from many of the world's top authors and celebrities including margaret atwood and koontz. therefore said chimamanda adichie and mindy kaley julia announced a new imprint with mindy and amazon studios earlier this year before joining amazon publishing. she was an executive at today executive editor there and that of content and managing editor at nbc news digital. she's received a peabody and was named a finalist for the pulitzer prize. i'd like to thank jennifer monica anjali and julia in advance for considering the issues. we are about to discuss. many of which have enormous implications for our future so our first question we know the pandemic has been a struggle adversely affecting people's mental health. i'm like each of you to speak to your own experience what you're seeing among colleagues and what it portends for the future. we'll start with angela. um, well that's a really big question. i guess my own experience and i think it sort of mirrors. everyone's was just really leaning and leaning into work for those kind of almost two years. i was just in front of my laptop all the time also because we launched a side business which was a lecture management business and we represented a couple of key anti-racist educators leila saad and tiffany jewels. so we were very in-demand but what i also really enjoyed about that was it kept me in conversation with people academic spaces and people in corporate spaces and kind of really gives me a lens and to kind of things outside of publishing which i very much appreciate but i definitely felt very grateful that i like my job so much because it's it didn't being in conversation with these folks. let me kind of tune the rest of the world out. and feel like i was yeah doing things that i really really cared about but i you know, i think expensive neglecting my family for sure and then, you know more recently. i think i've been able to take some more necessary breaks and tried to get away from zoom and away from my screen and take some vacations and really regroup, but i have a tremendous amount of freedom in terms of how i structure my work life and home life and that was part of why i wanted to work as an agent and kind of not feel beholden to corporation. so that's my two cents. thank you. thank you anjali, monica. definitely echoing anjali's last statement there and you know the freedom to create your own schedule is also the freedom to create your own schedule and you know when lockdown happened in 2020. i was already working from home as a literary agent. so what was interesting is was kind of waiting a couple months for everyone else to like get there like at home setup started. i was also pregnant throughout 2020 with my first baby and you know. the nice part is i wasn't forced to put on pants and go anywhere and throughout that whole time but you know, i did miss the editor lunches and stuff like that. but yeah, i threw myself into my work in 2020. um, i sold the most books of any year in 2020, you know, and i'm still just waiting from the multiple publish, but and then in 2021, obviously i was like trying to come back from attorney leave and 2021 was a mess, you know, and i it felt like i was doing a lot of problem solving in 2021 as literary agent as like a bridge naturally right between authors and publishers. and yeah, i feel like a lot of people were hoping for and we're getting like grace in flexibility and time. you know and pushing out delivery dates was definitely a thing and then pub dates having to be pushed out was a thing. so everyone kind of just trying to stay grounded within like the immense collect of trauma. we were having but also trying to you know. recognize our humans trying to do this work, right? so i have that's all to say i feel like there's been a little bit more humanity that has come forth in the last couple years. i'm hoping it sticks around. but we shall see. that's that's interesting about humanity and people being attentive to others because again, we know that people have been struggling jennifer. what about your own experience? jennifer you're muted. when we first wouldn't thank you when we first went into lockdown and and everything was so uncertain what it felt like was living through a war. we we've lived through a war and we're living through a war and look around and see what does that do to people when you live through a war together. i think it forges stronger bonds among people for sure. i also think that we have to look around and see so some terrible things came out of this pandemic, but some really good things came out of it too. and i do that. i do want to echo what a few other people said, which i think there is a lot more sense of looking out for one another. i think there's a lot more sense of checking in because we don't take it for granted. i think that when we were able to get a little bit more work life balance because as monica said the freedom to make your own schedule, i think we made sure we didn't take that for granted either things didn't become so automatic like automatic 15 hour week commute go into the office seem somebody. sit at your desk go to lunch go home. now when we see people we're grateful that we see them now when we see someone on zoom or google hangouts, we take a moment. i think to check in because we're not taking anything for granted and i think living through a war does that to people you don't take things for granted. right. thank you, jennifer, julia. thanks. well, i mean looking back now. i think i can see some silver linings so many of our team members do creative work which can really benefit from the privacy and concentration. you can find when working from home or in a mostly empty office, which is where i'm at right now and my editors tell me all the time that being left alone with their manuscripts and submissions has really empowered them to raise the bar on the quality of their books. um, and so i i do think there is that silver lining i'll admit i also have enjoyed cutting my commute and you know, it's given me extra time with my family and i've discovered i do my best thinking wearing elastic waisted pants. um i do and and you know, i think we really miss the casual hallway conversations about projects or even weekend plans, especially with new employees who started since the pandemic. i think the hardest part is onboarding new people who don't have that short history or that and it can have a real real trouble kind of integrating and figuring out where they fit and how things really work. we do have a really strong online chat culture. and so the team is always pinging each other and trying to capture that casual conversation spark. i think at this point for me what i'm trying to be really deliberate about is managing communication flow and helping disparate teams connect the dots. i think there's a lot of fomo as we're missing the kind of osmosis that happens when we're all together. and so i mean, that's the area that lately i've been sort of focusing on at this point, okay? well, that's that's good. i'm gonna to jump to another question. because i'm not much on the skeptic in the room about yeah the the office okay, so and it's clear to me that a lot of executives want everyone back in the office. okay, they say it helps with perspective promotes team building encourages learning or it could be they have 30 year leases. they don't want to get out of i mean it could be any of those but you have that and then you have a subset of staffers who have said they don't want to go back. and and i'm just i'm i myself am curious about this. how do we go from the office is a fine place to work to a categorical rejection by some of office life. i mean who's right here and and what is the future of work going to look like and i'll throw it back to jennifer? okay, i was gonna say no one. size fall and if there's one thing that we've learned in the pandemic is that either it's executives who want everyone back in the office, but then there's executives don't and then there's a more junior staffers who want to be in the office and more junior staffers who don't so everyone's response to this has been different and it's not really based on your rank within the company. i think that's why it's and i'm i can only speak for saint martin's publishing group. i can say that mcmillan has a pilot program that is still ongoing where we're gathering information. i do notice that when people get get as much choice as possible, they're incentivized to make it to make it work. so i think there's no one-size-fits all answer and i really don't think that it's the executives that want to come back in the junior staffers who don't because i've it be both ways. good point julia. i mean, what's your experience like at amazon? i mean i think you know a multiplicity of responses, you know based on on staff doesn't matter where they're they're seated in in the company. yeah, i mean, i think most of us can really understand the contradiction in our own daily lives. i mean the desire to connect and the and the comfort and the convenience of staying at home in those elastic ways to dance. but i mean, i will say like the thing i see that we're missing is we're just not having as much fun together and i think that does take a toll on the individual and team dynamic. so i'm really trying to focus on figuring out how to make room for those lighter moments and connections when when we're still at the point of of listening and figuring out what people are comfortable with and what what makes things work best for individuals. i mean, i do think that as jennifer said it really depends on the individual some of us have gotten really good at working from home many like it many don't some want a little bit of both and i think at amazon and at amazon publishing, we're really focusing on keeping our talented team and building them further and so we're really listening to what works for people. and figuring out kind of a flexible approach to people doing their best work. yeah, that that's interesting. so anjali and monica, you're both small business owners. okay, and so i'm wondering about about this this question for the two of you. anjali i i think it i think it actually it's the same answer right which is flexibility is actually something you can bring to there in a small business and in a large business and that there is no one size fits all approach. i feel like i'm one of the good things to come out of the pandemic was this recognition that people can be at home and actually be incredibly productive. i feel very stigmatized when i had young children and wanted flexibility in my work life and wanted to work from home because it was it flew against the corporate more as in the corporate culture, but there was no good reason that that wasn't going to be okay and i feel like you know, i think companies that are like successful work places really make space for different employees at different stages of their life and who need different things, right? so um in that period of my career, i wanted more flexibility, but i wasn't necess i always gonna need that same structure in different times and i feel like i mean, i feel like what yeah young people benefit from being around older mentors and from the office structure. but also there should be room for an individual's need for flexibility too. right and i feel like figuring out how to balance that. i know this question is going to come later so i'm gonna say more about this about sort of like bringing more bypuck into the community and like what does it mean if you're not working in new york and i feel like there's lots of great ways publishers gonna kind of approach thinking about it and i feel like flexibility and creativity like publishers do not need to be so set in their ways we have i mean when i started in the business we printed manuscripts that you had to go to the office you had to have a physical nation of now you can read a management pretty much anywhere and so why we're sort of sticking to this idea of like you have to be in a physical space. however, i do think figuring out a way to balance the mentorship that comes from being around employees with more experience and the camaraderie that comes from being around employees that are at the same level like that's kind of what what the balance that we should be striving for but the flexibility is for the answer in my mind. yeah. no, i think those are those are all those are all great points and before getting to monica i i kind of laugh when i read the president of airbnb's response. to office life and i think some of you probably familiar with it. i mean basically said nobody ever has to come back to the office and by the way, you know, if we were reimagining the world right now, okay if it never existed before would anybody ever conceive of building an office? i mean what purpose does it have monica over to you? yeah, that's a long lines of what i was gonna say is like this is not a new idea at the millennial, you know being a digital nomad was like the dream and you know, definitely a part of why i was like i want this freedom. i want to be able to work at a coffee shop or like, you know on my couch or like with a friend yesterday. i worked downstairs with my neighbor who also sits at our dining room table and works in finance. we were like, what are you doing? what are you doing? so that has been really interesting. and yes seeking out ways where it's like you're not with a colleague but you're with someone else. and i will also say you know, i think it's even like gen z's influence of like what's your dream job and the response is like i don't dream of labor and you know, it's like these ideas were there and the pandemic caused us all to to spell that idea of like what we could never try that. it's like well you had to try it. it was like it wasn't the end of the world and now it's like emerging of those two things has allowed for their to be like acceptance of like you're not, you know, some irresponsible like freelancer roaming the world if you're a digital nomad, it's like very normal. so i think those things are happening and you know, i think we will get to this but acknowledging kind of the inequality in expecting someone to work from home and expecting someone to work in the office and that it's both personal preference as far as like how how productive is someone in whatever environment and sometimes someone has a tribe both to find that out and have the flexibility to try that and be trusted that they will do that work that they will do the work and but you know, if someone's working from home, you'll assume they have the internet a computer a laptop, you know things but also, you know that person might be like, i don't want to work in my house like it's more comfortable for me to work or like i live with a bunch of people. i can't work in my house like you know, i actually rented an office space in a co-working building in 2021 for a year, and i decided not to re-up it because my son was not able to go to daycare. so like we you know because everything was shut down so i decided like i would leave the home. i can't he can't hear me. um, so but i will say that was just a reminder to me that like, i don't like to work in it. it's i used to be a member of the wing the co-working space. and obviously they had other. problems that have been just the pandemic that led me to cancel my membership, but that was that was a place where we were headed with the digital nomad thing and now co-working spaces have kind of like imploded. so yeah, i think it's making sure that people who allow people to figure out what's their best style. not paternalistically like hovering over them to like monitor and make sure like, they're hitting their you know, whatever they need to hit. so i think it might require a whole rethinking of like what is performance and you know, how much value is someone's time because labor is so you sell in your time? i could i on but i'm wrapping it up. you know, these are all these are all great points so you i mean a couple of things that you touched upon here are the notion of employees and kind of where they choose to work out of and i think you know, this is what publishers, you know, all of you are kind of have alluded to this they have to wrestle with when they're talking about the future work, what's hybrid gonna look like and can how do you allow everybody to be be set up for success? equally? um, i mean, do you do you offer to pay for your employees who are working from home to offer to pay for their internet? i mean, what's all that going going to look like and i think one one person in the in the chat actually raised a point, which i think has a lot of validity and all of you have kind of alluded to it as well as this notion of the phase. it depends on what phase of your career. okay that you're in that has enormous relevance in terms of what an office might mean to you and i guess you know my takeaway in all this is like all of us have this overall conceit of what an office looks like from having been in them and knowing what it used to look like. but at the office of the future look very very different. so so another thing that be you've alluded to is this notion of remote work. having the potential okay to help the industry. diversify its workforce in a meaningful way and so my question to to again, this is for all of you. do you think that's do you think that's happening? do you think it can happen our publishers effective at recruiting? beyond what i would describe as the historically lily white publishing courses and are there alternatives that publishers should explore to diversify staffing and monica. i'm going to start with you. i'm very curious to hear what the people in the publishing side