Clients — Hagfish

Hagfish represents a growing list of authors and literary estates. Please note that we do not accept queries.

Nettie Jones

Nettie Pearl Jones was born in Arlington, Georgia, in 1941. She received a BA in secondary education from Wayne State University, and taught in the Detroit Public School System and the Royal George School in Montreal. She received a master’s in education from Marygrove College in 1971.

Later that year, she moved to New York City and continued her education at The New School for Social Research and the Fashion Institute of Technology. She later studied at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where she focused on Arts in Ministry.

Jones’ first novel, Fish Tales, was acquired by Toni Morrison and published by Random House in 1984. Her second novel, Mischief Makers, was published in 1989. Her essays and short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. She is currently at work on a third novel.

Jones was named a Promising New Novelist by The New York Times in 1985. She is the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts' Individual Artist Award, a Yaddo fellowship, a Michigan Council for the Arts Award, a New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study Student's Choice Award, a Carnegie Fund for Authors grant, and a PEN America Freedom to Write grant.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux reissued Fish Tales in April 2025. Purchase it here.

Recent press:

New York Review of Books
The New York Times
The Paris Review
Bookforum
Chicago Review of Books

Joyce Johnson

Joyce Johnson was born in 1935 in Washington Heights, in New York City. As a child, she was trained in classical music and performed on Broadway. She later studied at Barnard College. Her first novel, Come and Join the Dance, was published in 1962, when she was 26. She has published two other novels, Bad Connections (1978), and In the Night Cafe (1983).

While at Barnard, Joyce befriended Elise Cowen, Lucien Carr, Allan Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, of the Beat movement. She wrote about this time in her memoir Minor Characters, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983. A collection of her coorespondence with Kerouac, Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair, was published in 2000; her biography of Kerouac, The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, was published in 2008.

In 1990, Joyce published What Lisa Knew, a book-length investigation of her extensive reporting for Vanity Fair on the domestic murder of 6-year-old Lisa Steinberg. In 2005, she published Missing Men, a memoir about her childhood, her mother, and her two marriages, a book that, in her own words, “shaped itself around absences.”

Joyce’s fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in Harper’s, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and The Washington Post. She lives and works in New York City.
Recent Press:

NPR Fresh Air
The New York Times
Vanity Fair

Chuck Wachtel

Chuck Wachtel is the author of the novels Joe the Engineer, which was awarded a PEN/Hemingway Citation, The Gates, and 3/03, as well as a collection of stories and novellas, Because We Are Here. He has also published five collections of poems and short prose. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts in both poetry and fiction, and the Mary Shelley Award for Outstanding Fictional Work. His short fiction, poems, essays, and translations have appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals both here and abroad. He divides his time between the Lower East Side and upstate New York.