McKinnon Literary
McKinnon Literary represents both first-time writers and established authors, with the goal of supporting writers throughout their careers.
Once our books are under contract, we remain active throughout the life of the book, helping clients to navigate the editorial and marketing process, effectively promote and publicize their work, and guiding them to choose and develop future projects.
We specialize in editing and grooming book proposals to help authors translate their best ideas to the marketplace. And beyond the book itself, we work with established co-agents to represent film and television rights, subsidiary rights, and translation rights throughout the world.
James Baldwin
News & Updates
Brittney Cooper's Eloquent Rage nominated for a Hurston Wright Legacy Award
Imani Perry's Looking for Lorraine wins 2019 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction
A Starred Kirkus for Imani Perry's Breathe
Tanisha Ford's Dressed in Dreams an Essence 10 Best Summer Reads selection
Salamishah Tillet Opinion piece for the New York Times
Starred Booklist review for Imani Perry's Breathe
This mother’s striking and generous admonition to thrive even in the face of white mendacity also is a meditation on parenting.
Imani Perry's Looking for Lorraine wins the Shilts-Grahn award for non-fiction
A starred Booklist and glowing Kirkus Review for Tanisha Ford's Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl's Love Letter to the Power of Fashion
Why the Highlander Attack Matters
The arson attack on the Highlander Center, a longtime leader in racial and social-justice work, is not merely a hate crime—it’s an act of war.
Nipsey Hussle Loved His Blackness
His story is so compelling because love was at the core of his beliefs and behavior.
Grimoire Noir Kirkus Review
In a magical town, a teen boy seeks his missing sister. Bucolic Blackwell is unlike most other sleepy burgs: Here, girls are the sole possessors of magick, but enchanted boundaries keep them constrained within its limits. When Bucky, a reedy boy sporting a trench coat and fedora, learns his young sister, Heidi, is missing, he is immediately on the case.
Brittney Cooper Discusses How Racial Justice Activism Inspires the Feminist Movement
At the 2019 Women in the World Summit, author and associate professor Brittney Cooper explains how America's movements for racial justice lead to feminist uprisings.
Damon Young Is Getting Blacker by the Minute
In a new collection of essays, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker, Pittsburgh-based writer and co-founder of VerySmartBrothas.com, Damon Young, gets very personal and very black. Here he talks with WNYC’s cultural critic Rebecca Carroll about black masculinity, parenting a black girl in an all-pervasive white supremacist country, and being labeled gay as a young high school teacher.
We Live for the We: A New Book on the Political Power of Black Motherhood
In We Live for the We, first-time mother Dani McClain sets out to understand how to raise her daughter in what she, as a Black woman, knows to be an unjust–even hostile–society.
What Civil Rights History Can Teach Kavanaugh’s Critics
The New York Times
A week after the justice’s controversial swearing-in, the African-American activists I study offer a lesson to those who are in despair: Failure is part of the process.
We Forgot What Dr. King Believed In
New York Times
In June 1966, less than two years before he was killed, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached from his Atlanta pulpit of the dynamic dance between Good Friday and Easter, between death and resurrection, between despair and hope.
Brittney Cooper: How Has Time Been Stolen From People Of Color?
TED RADIO HOUR
How Has Time Been Stolen From People Of Color