Maeve MacLysaght [SOLD OUT OF PITCH APPOINTMENTS] is a literary agent with Aevitas Creative Management.
Maeve is a queer ex-classicist based in Oakland, CA. She holds a B.A in Comparative Literature from Occidental College, a publishing certificate from NYU, and an MLitt in Ancient Greek Monsters from The University of St Andrews in Scotland. The goal of her list is to increase the amount of queer and BIPOC joy in the world, and to make space for marginalized authors to rework the tropes that historically oppressed them.
She is looking for strong commercial genre concepts with beautiful prose in horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and graphic novels for all age ranges. She is drawn most to stories with big, campy stakes but surprising emotional cores, lovably immoral characters, queer coded villains, and people kissing while things explode.
She reads widely across genre and age range and is particularly looking for queer and POC authors taking on genre tropes in commercial fiction.
Wish list:
- Rich and subtle world building like Wilder Girls or The Mortal Engine series
- Normalized trans and non-binary existence in world building, like the Tales of the High Court series
- Shamelessly manga and fanfic inspired stories like Foxhole Court
- Silk punk, asian attitudes, historical revision that doesn’t think Europe invented the world (Socrates was born after Confucius died! Genghis Khan was a contemporary of King John! Guns were being used in China before the English invented longbows!)
- Reworking myth and gods and their influence, like The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps
- Sexy, dark, magical horror, like the Hexslinger series
- Queer romance with high stakes, like Lord of the White Hell
- Middle Grade protagonists who cry and fail and try anyways, like How to Train Your Dragon
- F/F romance, friendship, and intersectional girl gangs against the world
- Ride-or-die friendships and high stakes
- Strange grammatical magic, like Diana Wynne Jones
- Graphic novels inspired by manga and Miyazaki
She is NOT looking for:
Nonfiction
Superhero graphic novels
Genre fiction that perpetrates the racist, colonial, imperialistic, sexist, ableist tropes of the past
Non-intersectional representation; no victories at the expense of another group
Low stakes, excessive realism