Emily Forney is, as she likes to say, a professional fangirl. From the early days of crafting fiction prompts on Tumblr to writing miniseries on how to write a successful fantasy battle scene, she fell in love with the minor details of storytelling. After receiving her MFA in Creative Writing, emphasizing in commercial and upmarket fiction, she worked in editorial roles for both digital and print until she realized she wanted to stay with her favorite authors throughout their careers. She was named a 2022 Publisher's Weekly Star Watch honoree and was previously a publishing and editorial fellow for the LA Review of Books, where she trained with her editorial background to shift into agenting and find new, progressive voices.

She bounces between Phoenix and Charleston, getting swept up in beach reads and epic eight-part fantasies on the daily. In another life, she was a historian, where she got a history degree after watching National Treasure one too many times, and now uses her four years of studies to impress tourists during bar trivia. A dedicated romantic, Emily is often on road trips, in flea markets, sitting on benches with local curmudgeons and trying to convince them to tell her life stories.

Her list includes bestsellers, award winners, and books that inspire fandoms. Her tastes are wide ranging, but for the most part she looks for books with high concept commercial hooks, timeless stories with complex characters, escapist tales, and big, sweeping worlds.

Watch our interview with Emily on YouTube!

In children's books, she is most interested in:

• When high concept plot meets high concept thought, with life or death consequences.

• Thoughtful, multi-layered stories about love and loss and first experiences in the contemporary space.

• Darker speculative work. Murder, magic, monsters. Something gothic, creepy, or spooky.

• Adventure stories with a lot of movement, exploration, but also have solid grounding in the heart and emotions of the kids within the story.

• Stories with a play pattern. We usually see the term used in young children's media (think kid's cartoons with a particular format for each episode that kids can remember well). For instance, the Gallagher Girls series, The Princess Diaries, Camp Confidential, all of these books have specific calling cards for young teens to hold onto through each book. Think also books with houses, factions, districts, mystery patterns, etc.

In adult, she seeks:

• Stories that are sweeping, deeply political, has strong subplots and ensemble casts, but also enjoyable and accessible to readers who wouldn't necessarily call themselves fantasy readers.

• Book club and upmarket fiction. Longer slice of life stories with layered storytelling with big reveals in smaller spaces.

• Beautiful, sweeping, maybe even tragic stories with intricate worlds that don't sacrifice plot for shock value.

• Romantic, steamy fantasy romances.

• Rom-coms and young romances that are just plain fun. Something to celebrate love and meet cutes and the start of a relationship that's part of a "deal gone wrong" or a summer exile. Isolated environments and books where readers, particularly romance readers, can just have a good time and enjoy themselves.

• Adult fantasies with plenty of layers, multi-POVs, deep political and religious plots, thoughtful world building.

• Books set in college, with characters in their early to late 20s, at the messy stage of adulthood where not everything fits and there are too many forks in the road.