A dark-leaning agent building a new list at Starling — drawn to genre-meets-literary suspense, horror, and grounded speculative fiction across adult and YA, anchored by emotionally complicated characters and underrepresented voices.
In brief
Jennifer March Soloway came up through marketing and PR, moved into publishing in 2013, and has agented since 2016 — they describe agenting as their dream job and now co-found and build the list at Starling Literary + Media.
The throughline across everything they want is character: messy, deeply human people making choices for reasons you understand, even when those choices are wrong — and the strain of getting along with family, friends, partners, neighbors, and communities.
Their sweet spot is genre fused with literary craft — psychological thrillers, horror, gothic, and grounded sci-fi where the prose is good enough to stop and savor — and they are an unapologetic horror and suspense fan.
They are open and actively acquiring, but the list has hard limits: no YA fantasy right now, and they are upfront that novels-in-verse are not their editorial strength.
Lately
Announced they were donating a 45-minute Ask-Me-Anything call for writers to a charity auction supporting the Queer Liberation Network, with bidding open the first week of March (3/1–3/7) — an invitation aimed squarely at people actively querying.
What Jennifer is looking for
Their loudest priority. Literary psychological thrillers, horror, gothic, and grounded science fiction — bonus points for dual-timeline stories where a character's youth haunts or brightens their adult life, a dash of bad romance, and line-level writing worth savoring. They love work that blurs the real and the imagined, fraught chosen-or-forced relationships (parent-child, siblings, in-laws, employer-employee, neighbors), and rural settings: woods, farms, ranches, mountains, lonely highways. Two specific obsessions: horror that interrogates motherhood and being mothered (any horror with 'mother' in the title gets a read), and 'horroromance' that turns dating into a nightmare, ideally campy and funny. They note that the scariest monster is usually human.
Horror rooted in the brutal social world of high school, psychological thrillers, dark speculative stories that suggest hidden magic in the real world, and grounded sci-fi (including alternate histories) about how today's good or bad decisions ripple outward. They would specifically love a creepy-doll story.
Grounded coming-of-age fiction about ordinary teens navigating life, family, relationships, sexuality, and mental health. They are particularly looking for an addiction-recovery story told from the climb back up — the hard work of getting and staying sober after deciding to change — and a friendship-breakup story where the bond either shatters or is cemented forever.
Not the right fit
Taste fingerprint
How to query Jennifer
Lead with character: a complicated, deeply human protagonist whose choices make sense even when they're wrong is the surest way in.
If you write dark — psychological thriller, horror, gothic, grounded sci-fi — this is one of their core lanes; literary polish at the sentence level is a real differentiator for them.
Genre-plus-literary is the dream blend; a thread of (bad) romance inside the suspense is a stated plus.
Do not pitch YA fantasy (the list is full) or novels-in-verse (not their strength) — those are explicit passes.
Confirm the query window is open before sending, as their availability can change.