Raphael Sagalyn was born and raised in Western Massachusetts and attended Tufts University and the Radcliffe (now Columbia) Publishing Procedures Course. He worked for Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, Beacon Press and Little, Brown before moving to Washington, DC to work for The New Republic.  He started the agency in 1980 and his first author was Jim Trelease who had self-published a pamphlet extolling the virtues and pleasures of reading aloud to children and students. Penguin released THE READ ALOUD HANDBOOK in 1982 and it was an immediate bestseller after "Dear Abby" called it "the best lifetime gift a parent can give to a child."

 

Bridget Wagner, Agent and Director of Foreign Rights, hails from Cleveland and graduated from Colgate University. She attended the Columbia publishing program and worked for ICM in New York and London before joining the agency in 2005.

 

Shannon O'Neill, Director of Domestic Rights, is a native of the Washington region. She has a Masters of Arts in Writing from Johns Hopkins University and graduated with honors from Dartmouth College.  She worked for Island Press and Politics & Prose Bookstore before coming to the agency in 2007.

 

Jennifer Graham, the Business Manager, has been solving problems at the agency for seven years.  She studied Literature at American University. She now works part-time as she also owns the best vegetarian restaurant in DC:  Vegetate.