AYLA ZURAW-FRIEDLAND

Blonde woman in her 20s in a black tshirt standing in front of a bookshelf

Ayla Zuraw-Friedland joined the Frances Goldin Literary Agency in 2022 after starting her agenting career at The David Black Agency in 2019. Previously, she worked as an editorial assistant and assistant editor at Beacon Press in Boston, and as a development editor for encyclopedias at Oxford University Press. She received her BA in English and Creative Writing from Connecticut College in 2015, and her writing can be found or is forthcoming in The Drift, Excerpts Magazine, The Financial Times, GAY the Magazine, Publishers Weekly, and The Cape Cod Poetry Review. She is interested in literary fiction and nonfiction that inspect big questions about queer identity, class, community, and art & technology through a personal lens, as well as poetry and a limited number of graphic or hybrid projects.

WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR

Nonfiction: Always looking for new ways of seeing cultural institutions that been invisibilized by ubiquity--like why are grocery stores like that? What are the uses and misuses of talk therapy in the modern age? Why have we all agreed to pay rent forever to the benefit of a few and the detriment of many? Is statistics real?

For fiction, it is well known that I love ghosts, both literal and figurative. I love a story about a person who has been suddenly tasked with caring for a baby/friend/animal/family member that they are woefully unprepared for, but end up learning about love and support and self care anyways. I love queerness and coming of age and exploring the cruelties of our younger teenage selves with the perspective and experience adulthood brings. I would love a satire novel about a nepo baby in academia who ends up accidentally helping to solve a murder or find a missing artifact or both (like CUNK ON EARTH meets THE CHAIR).

SAMPLE TITLES OR AUTHORS

OLD ENOUGH by Haley Jakobson (Dutton 2023)
IDLEWILD by James Frankie Thomas (Abrams 2023)
RAPE GIRL and how to be a good girl by Jamie Hood (Pantheon 2025)
MOUNTED: ON BLACKNESS, HORSES, AND LIBERATION by Bitter Kalli (Amistad 2025)
I CAME HERE TO MAKE FRIENDS: A MEMOIR OF AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MODEL by Sarah Hartshorne (Crown 2025)

Specializes In

FICTION: LGBTQIA+, Literary Fiction

NONFICTION: Cultural/Social Issues, LGBTQIA+, Memoir, Narrative

Considers

FICTION: Humor/Satire, Multicultural/Global Fiction, Short Story Collections

NONFICTION: Adventure/True Story, Cultural/Social Issues, Current Affairs, History, Humor, Investigative Journalism, Memoir, Narrative, Pop Culture, Psychology, Technology