Ruth Gila Berger (she/her) is a literary agent with Red Sofa Literary.

She spent twenty-four years at Consortium Book Sales & Distribution where she worked with a wide variety of independent presses, sales reps and independent booksellers. She has a MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University, and was in the first cohort who built Water~Stone Review. In prehistory, Ruth left suburban New York for the University of Iowa, where she got a BA in Theater Arts and Psychology. She never got over the culture shock. She current resides in Minneapolis where she lives with her wife and animals.

She is seeking:

• Adult and young adult fiction that has a hook, nuance, and heart. Characters should haunt me.
  
• Essay collections that show up in the wrong outfit, take a circuitous or unexpected route to writing, and question assumptions — yes please.
• Narrative nonfiction with a story – especially if it marries two seemly disparate fields like art and mathematics, physics and cooking, birds and language, etc. I want to read experts who can charm and surprise me, make me laugh and never take a tone of intellectual superiority.
• Memoir is where my heart lives but you have to knock my socks off and be connected to something in the larger world. Memoirists must have a platform to sell.
• Graphic Novels, only if they are original, beautiful and funny.

For all of it, if you’ve been told to shut up and stay in the margins where you belong, I want to be your champion.

On my inspiration shelf: Paradise by Toni Morrison, Festival Days by Jo Ann Beard, Apocalypse, Darling by Barrie Jean Borich, Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, NOLA Face by Brooke Champagne, A Secret History of World Wide Outage by Elizabeth O’Brien, There, There by Tommy Orange, Fleabag by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Crazy Like a Fox by Christi Furnas.