Jennifer Chen Tran is a literary agent at Glass Literary Management.
With over a dozen years of experience in the publishing industry, Jennifer is passionate about nurturing and championing the creative lives of the authors and artists she is honored to represent. She works with a wide range of award-winning talent, including entrepreneurs, journalists, physicians, thought leaders, James Beard nominated chefs, and graphic novelists, among others. Jennifer is an editorial agent who believes in the art and magic of collaboration. She works with her authors from concept to publication, helping to polish each creator’s work so that it can best shine in a competitive marketplace.
Prior to joining Glass Literary Management, Jennifer was a literary agent at Folio Literary Management and Idea Architects and served as Of Counsel at The New Press. She obtained her Juris Doctor from Northeastern School of Law and a Bachelors in English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. She is an attorney in good standing in California and New York, a member of the Authors Guild, and a member of the Association of American Literary Agents.
As a person of color and daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, Jennifer is deeply committed to amplifying voices from persons with disabilities, BIPOC, LGBTQ, underrepresented, marginalized, and neurodiverse communities. Her ultimate goal is to work in concert with authors to create books that will have a lasting positive social impact on the world—books that inform, entertain, and inspire.
In her free time, you can find Jennifer relaxing with a good book, trying to complete a recipe with too many ingredients, or exploring the Lone Star State with her family.
She is seeking:
In nonfiction, she seeks cookbooks, memoir, narrative nonfiction, and prescriptive nonfiction. She loves nonfiction (narrative or memoir with a platform) that sheds light on an unseen corner in society or history. Prescriptive nonfiction with practical takeaways, cookbooks with a unique angle or narratives centered on culinary life (see David Chang’s Eat a Peach), lifestyle titles (see Kate Oliver’s The Modern Caravan), humorous or visually-driven projects, and business books that read like memoir. Big idea books that shift how we perceive or navigate the world.
In fiction, she seeks: middle grade, young adult, graphic novels, bookclub fiction, commercial/mainstream fiction, and women’s fiction. She loves middle grade and young adult that has heart and humor or visually-driven elements (see Remy Lai’s Pie in the Sky). She gravitates toward contemporary fiction that braids together issues of social significance and identity (see Angie Kim’s Miracle Creek).
She is NOT seeking: science-fiction, fantasy; romance; screenplays.
Recent nonfiction titles Jennifer represented include Stuart Palley’s memoir Into The Inferno; 101-year old physician and mother of holistic medicine Dr. Gladys McGary’s The Well-Lived Life: A Centenarian Doctor’s Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Any Age; Kate Oliver’s The Modern Caravan; contributing cartoonist for The New Yorker and BuzzFeed, artist Natalya Lobanova’s Everyone is Awful, a debut collection of darkly humorous comics; and clinical professor at Stanford University School of Medicine Dr. Elizabeth Landsverk’s Living in the Moment.
Recent fiction titles Jennifer represented include author Kristen Kiesling’s The Harrowing, a YA graphic novel about a psychic teen girl who is forced to use her powers to track down killers, until she discovers her boyfriend is her next target; Lily Quan’s middle-grade novelization of Disney-Pixar movie Turning Red; and Rebecca Kelley’s contemporary novel No One Knows Us Here.
The Houston Writing Workshop 