 Check out this Q&A to see if Lee's your dream agent! Lee Melillo (they/she) joined Dunham Literary, Inc. in May 2024 as Jennie Dunham’s assistant, following an internship with Dystel, Goderich, & Bourret LLC. She was made an Associate Literary Agent in June 2025. Lee additionally manages the agency’s social media and website, is a second-reader for queries, handles royalty statements and permissions, and assists on preparing submissions. Lee graduated summa cum laude from Fordham University in 2022, with departmental honors in English and Theatre Directing. Through her majors, Lee discovered her passion for advocating for writers. She believes literature is one of the most effective ways to gain empathy for and understanding of life experiences outside our own. Originally from New Haven, Lee now resides in Queens with her cats/office assistants, Meatloaf and Muffin Man. Lee maintains her love of theatre as the Executive Artistic Director of Personal Pizza Party, an indie production company, and by performing full renditions of musical theatre classics on the glorious stage also known as her shower. You can find Lee on Instagram and Bluesky at @leemelillobooks.  What’s your favorite moment so far of being an agent? I just got promoted in June, so I only have a couple months to pull from, but without a doubt: my offer meeting with my first client. We were both so excited! There was a palpable moment where we understood we’d be a perfect match for each other and that our visions for her manuscript aligned just right. Her accepting my offer was, honestly, an emotional moment for me! As a new agent, you don’t have a public track record to show off to potential clients, so her choosing to entrust me with her work and her writing career was an honor I can’t begin to articulate. What do you wish querying writers knew? That my surname is spelt M-E-L-I-L-L-O. (I joke. Mostly.) In all seriousness, I’m more likely to lock in on queries that are a bit personalized. It’s not a dealbreaker if they’re not, but a personal touch does grab my attention in the crucial opening lines of your letter. Including a sentence about why you’ve chosen to query me can go along way—check agents’ profiles on their agency websites or MSWL for inspiration on what to add. Any exercise to help understand who you’re querying is key to positioning yourself for success. What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever heard? Once you finish your first draft, no matter how much you want to dive into revising, throw the manuscript in a locked drawer for a few weeks and forget about it. Even a short time away from a project is plenty to give you the perspective you may need to look at it with a more objective, editorial lens. Also, you just finished the whole first draft! You deserve a break! Describe your dream client. Hmm…about five-foot-ten, brown eyes, speaks a minimum of three languages…oh, sorry. Wrong question. My dream clients are those truly seeking a partnership with their agent. I do my best work when I understand my client and their work on such a level that I can advocate for it as if it were my own. Clicking with the individual is just as important as connecting with their work. I’m also a theatre kid at heart, so collaboration and community will always be at the forefront to me in artistic settings. The life of a writer can be lonely, but it doesn’t have to be. What project would you love to see come across your desk? As a product of the 2010s internet, I’d adore a project set in that golden era of YouTube vloggers (think Dan and Phil, Zoella, Tyler Oakley, etc.) or early BuzzFeed-style content generation companies. I’m also interested in the K-pop industry and fandom culture, and desperately want a thriller novel about sasaeng fans. More broadly, I’m always thrilled to receive queries from Pacific Islanders. While there are many representation gaps in this industry, this one is deeply glaring, and I want to be an active ally in supporting these authors’ success. What interests or hobbies do you have that you’d love to see in a book? I majored in Theatre directing along with English, and spent a few years working off- and off-off-Broadway in NYC before becoming an agent. Anything set in that world (or centered around theatre in general) is a huge plus for me. What author would you love to have dinner with? Kurt Vonnegut or Octavia Butler. If I could somehow get them together at the table at the same time, even better. Imagine that conversation! Their writing is tapped into what it means to be human and coexist in a way I’ve never read elsewhere. My perspective on life has been shaped by them both in countless ways, and I am certain I’d walk away from that dinner with a new understanding of the universe and my place in it. What book world would you like to live in? Reading this question had me frantically scanning my bookshelf for any title that might be a suitable answer! This might be my wake-up call to buy a lot more cozy fantasies and rom-coms. I’ll go with Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde series, but only if I, too, get to be a reclusive fairy researcher who has a loyal familiar and a handsome fairy royal who is obsessed with me.  This post was complied by Brandy Vallance, a literary agent with Barbara Bova Literary Agency, and an award-winning author. She is the winner of two national writing awards, one of which included a $20,000 prize. Her novel, THE COVERED DEEP, has been featured in USA Today & Writer’s Digest. Romantic Times called WITHIN THE VEIL “passionate and riveting” and Publisher’s Weekly encourages those who like sweeping Scottish sagas to dive in because “the journey is wonderful.” Brandy loves helping writers break the chains of fear and self-doubt. You can find out more at brandyvallance.com.  Attend a writers conference in 2025 - 2026:
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