Claudia Ballard

Claudia Ballard is a literary agent and a partner at WME. She represents a wide range of fiction and nonfiction, including novelists, short-story writers, cultural critics, and memoirists. She loves working with and advocating for writers who open portals to new experiences and places, allowing readers to reconstitute their thinking about our messy, extraordinary world. Originally a Californian, Claudia lives in New York with her husband and three kids.

In both fiction and nonfiction, she is drawn to imaginative voice, perceptive and propulsive storytelling, vivid emotion and soul, stories about families, and joyful (or dark!) humor. The writers she works with are New York Times bestselling novelists, National Book Award finalists, Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists, Granta Best of Young American Novelists, and Whiting Award recipients. A small sample of her fiction clients includes Ben Shattuck, Curtis Sittenfeld, Emma Straub, Halle Butler, Julie Buntin, Kiley Reid, Marie-Helene Bertino, m.s. RedCherries, and Zach Williams. In non-fiction she works with memoirist Chloé Cooper-Jones, journalists Jessica Winter, Carrie Battan, Alice Gregory and J Wortham, as well as comedian Jenny Slate and playwright Brendan Jacobs-Jenkins (both for their prose writing) amongst many others.

For fiction and nonfiction projects, please submit just your query letter without sample material.

Please include your bio as part of all submissions.