2024 Faculty

Samantha Palazzi is a Senior Editor at Scholastic, where she acquires and edits middle grade and young adult fiction. She started her career in Scholastic’s Education division before moving to Trade Editorial in 2017. She has worked with bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Cornelia Funke, Jenny Downham, Ruchira Gupta, and Erin Soderberg Downing. She is drawn to immersive stories driven by interesting characters who provide a different way of looking at the same world, and will forever be fascinated with how books have the power to shape young and old readers alike.

Laura Ruby is a two-time National Book Award Finalist and long-time teacher. She writes fiction and poetry for adults, teens and children. She is the author of the Printz Medal Winning novel Bone Gap, as well as Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All and the York trilogy. Her short fiction for adults has appeared in The Florida Review, The Beloit Fiction Journal, and Nimrod International, among others, and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Diode, Sugar House Review, Fantasy Magazine, Poetry South, Passengers Journal, and Clackamas Literary Review. She is on the faculty of Queens University’s MFA program and Hamline University’s MFAC program. She makes her home in the Chicago area.

Jennifer Thompson is an Associate Editor at Scholastic, where she acquires and edits picture books, middle grade, and young adult fiction. She started her career at Rizzoli International Publication before moving to Scholastic in 2021. She has worked across genres and formats within publishing including calendars and novelty books, non-fiction kid series, and numerous fiction titles within Trade Publishing. Some of her favorite activities include reading, traveling, going to music festivals and museums, and watching many, many shows & movies which ultimately shape the varied and voice driven stories she is drawn to.

Jennifer Chen Tran is a literary agent at Glass Literary Management. With over a decade of experience in publishing, Jennifer is passionate about nurturing and championing authors and their creative lives. She represents a wide range of talent, including journalists, physicians, entrepreneurs, thought-leaders, chefs, and graphic novelists, among others.

Prior to joining Glass Literary Management, Jennifer was a literary agent at several top literary agencies and served as Of Counsel at The New Press. She obtained her Juris Doctor from Northeastern School of Law in Boston, MA, and a Bachelors of Arts in English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. She is an attorney in good standing in New York and California.

Jennifer is an editorial agent who believes in the art of collaboration and works closely with her authors from concept to publication, and beyond. As a person of color and daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, Jennifer is committed to amplifying voices from BIPOC, LGBTQ, underrepresented and marginalized communities. Her ultimate goal is to work in concert with authors to shape books that will have a lasting positive social impact on the world – books that illuminate, entertain, and inspire.

She accepts queries via Query Manager at https://querymanager.com/query/jct or by referral only.