About Us
Erin Murphy Literary Agency is a leading U.S. children’s book agency headquartered in southern Maine. We focus on connections—between writer and editor, story and reader—as well as on helping our clients build their careers and grow as artists. Please view Publishers Marketplace for more information about recent deals and rights activity at EMLA.
Erin Murphy
President
Erin was born and raised in Arizona, and founded EMLA in Flagstaff in 1999 after a 7-year career as an editor at a regional publishing house. As founder of EMLA she has focused not just on helping authors and illustrators to publish books for children and teens, but on building careers. In 2016, she relocated the agency headquarters to southern Maine. Her clients’ notices in addition to hitting bestseller lists include a Caldecott Honor (plus writer clients seeing their books get Caldecott silver and gold), a Newbery Honor, a Sibert Medal, Stonewall Medals, APALA silver and gold, American Indian Youth Literature Honors, a National Jewish Book Award finalist, a Schneider Award, and multiple Edgar, Sydney Taylor, Américas, Golden Kite, Jane Addams, and Orbis Pictus awards or honors, among others.
Erin accepts queries by request or referral, or from people who have attended conferences where she spoke, at Query Manager.
Ammi-Joan Paquette
Senior Agent
Ammi-Joan Paquette has been with EMLA since 2009. Now a Senior Agent, she represents a robust list, including a broad range of NYT Bestselling and award-winning authors and illustrators, across all ages and genres of children’s and teen literature. She is most drawn to surprising plots, tight pacing, and language that makes you sit up and take notice.
In her non-agent life, Joan is also an author herself of picture books and novels, including All from a Walnut, The Train of Lost Things, and the Two Truths and a Lie series, co-written with Laurie Ann Thompson.
Joan accepts queries by referral or request, or from attendees of conferences where she part of the faculty. Contact her via the EMLA web form.
Tricia Lawrence
Senior Agent
Tricia is the “Pacific Northwest branch” of EMLA—born and raised in Oregon, and now lives in Seattle. After 16 years of working as a developmental and production-based editor (from kids books to college textbooks, but mostly college textbooks), she joined the EMLA team in March 2011 as a social media strategist and began working as an agent in October 2011.
As senior agent, Tricia represents picture books/chapter books that look at the world in a unique and unusual way, with characters that are alive both on and off the page, and middle grade and young adult fiction and nonfiction that offers strong worldbuilding, wounded narrators, and stories that grab a reader and won’t let go. Her client, Paula Yoo, was awarded the Boston Globe-Horn Book award and long-listed for the National Book Award in 2021 for her YA nonfiction book about Vincent Chin.
Tricia loves hiking/walking/running, camping out in the woods with her husband and their dogs, and collecting rocks. She loves BBC America and anything British. She has way too many books and not enough bookshelves. She’s obsessed with pattern and color and is always listening to music (playlists for every situation and project) and lately has spent her spare time draping and fitting a half-size mannequin the size of a doll (this after continually binge-watching all of Project Runway).
Tricia accepts queries by request or referral, or from people who have attended conferences where she is part of the faculty via the contact page on EMLA or the contact page at her website.
Kevin Lewis
Agent
Kevin has been a publishing professional for more than 25 years and has held positions at Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, and Disney. He has edited such best-selling and award-winning writers and illustrators as Cynthia Rylant, Mark Teague, Dav Pilkey, Angela Johnson, Laurie Halse Anderson, Matt Cordell, Lauren Thompson, Derek Anderson, Jane Dyer, Tony DiTerlizzi, Holly Black, Loren Long, LeUyen Pham, and Kadir Nelson, to name but a few.
In addition to editing, he has written close to a dozen picture books, including Chugga Chugga Choo Choo and My Truck Is Stuck.
He lives with his husband and dog in a 200-year-old farm house in the Hudson Valley.
As an agent, Kevin’s focus primarily is on writer-illustrators and diverse voices. Kevin accepts queries from referrals and conferences via the EMLA contact form.
Miranda Paul
Agent
Miranda Paul joined Erin Murphy Literary Agency in 2019, and maintains a small but mighty client list of authors and author-illustrators. Miranda represents both fiction and nonfiction, from board books through young adult, and the very occasional adult project. In addition to agenting, Miranda is the award-winning author of more than twenty books for children including One Plastic Bag (illus. Elizabeth Zunon), Speak Up (ill. Ebony Glenn), and Water is Water (illus. Jason Chin).
Miranda accepts submissions through Query Manager—please follow submission policies outlined at the top of her Query Manager page.
Dennis Stephens
Business Manager
Dennis Stephens is EMLA’s business manager and is in charge of the agency’s accounting. When he came to EMLA in 2009, he brought 18 years of middle management experience to the table, as well as a familial background rich in conflict resolution (from being a middle child with four sisters). He is fueled by coffee and prefers the title of Bon Vivant, which was well earned through more than a decade of planning EMLA client retreats. You barely have to finish asking if he’s got anything interesting to share before he starts spouting trivia. For example, the word “bookkeeper” is one of only two words in the English language to contain three sets of double letters back-to-back-to-back. The other is “bookkeeping.”
Susan Murrell
Director of Miscellany
Susan always wants to be traveling, gardening, or reading. After a 20 year break to work in behavioral health, she is relieved to have her primary focus being books. In this case, she has the wonderful EMLA library to enjoy, when she isn’t scanning and filing statements and contracts, managing the receiving and shipping of books and miscellany, or supporting Dennis and Erin in various ways.
