Our Clients

Sumayya Usmani is a food writer and educator who grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. Sumayya moved to London in 2006, where she lived for ten years before she made Glasgow home. She followed her father’s second career as a lawyer and practised the profession in both Pakistan and London. She eventually quit her twelve year legal career to follow her passion for sharing and writing about the flavours of her homeland, with a view to highlighting Pakistani cuisine as a distinct one. Sumayya's writing reminisces about food and memories of growing up in Pakistan, and she advocates cooking by "andaza" (sensory and estimation cooking), which is how she learnt to cook from her mother and grandmothers, from a very young age. Sumayya has worked with some of the biggest names in the food world, including Madhur Jaffrey, Sophie Grigson, Claudia Roden, Rachel Allen and Vivek Singh. She writes for and appears in many publications such as Delicious, Olive, BBC Good Food (naming her the go-to expert in Pakistani food), Saveur, Guardian, Sunday Herald, New York Times, Telegraph and Food 52. Sumayya has been on the Good Food Channel (with Madhur Jaffrey), BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour and Saturday Live, as well as BBC Radio 2, BBC Asian Network and BBC Worldwide. She is also a panelist on BBC Radio 4's Kitchen Cabinet panel with Jay Rayner.

For over 17 years, Brandi-Ann Uyemura has written for national, local, and regional publications and worked as a copywriter for various companies including Hawaii Life, Intuit, Nerd Wallet, Toyota Hawaii, Tiny Prints, WalmartLabs, and Art.com. Her debut picture book illustrated by Amy Matsushita-Beal and published by Holiday House, comes out summer of 2025.

Uyemura has been an online columnist for "The Writer" magazine, associate editor for Psych Central, and her articles have been published on various sites including Beliefnet, Spirituality & Health, Yoga Journal, MindBodyGreen, and US News Money. She has a graduate degree in counseling psychology and health, and has a passion for using her storytelling skills to help solve, support and encourage others to heal the earth and write books for kids which you can read more about on her website brandi-annuyemura.com/blog

Dana Vachon is a novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of the novel Mergers & Acquisitions (Riverhead, 2007) and the co-author, with Jim Carrey, of the New York Times bestseller Memoirs & Misinformation (Knopf, 2020). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair and Slate.

Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh was born in Singapore in 1977. He is currently Editor-in-Chief at Jom, a new weekly digital magazine covering arts, culture, politics, business, technology and more in Singapore, and is a freelance contributor to the Economist’s Intelligence Unit.

From 2006-13 he worked for the Economist in Singapore, first as Associate Director at the Economist Corporate Network, then Senior Editor at Economist Insights. He has written for a variety of publications, including the Economist and the Straits Times.

Sarah Vallance has an MFA in Creative Writing from City University in Hong Kong. She was a Harkness Fellow at Harvard, and holds a doctorate in Government and Public Administration. Her essays have been published in The Gettysburg Review, The Sun, The Pinch and Post Road, among others, and have earned her a Pushcart prize.

Vicki Valosik is a writer, a competitive synchronized swimmer, and a faculty member at Georgetown University, where she teaches graduate-level writing courses. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, American Scholar, Slate, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book on the history of women’s swimming and aquatic performance, from vaudeville mermaids to Olympic synchronized swimming.

Donna VanLiere is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 13 books, including The Christmas Shoes, The Christmas Hope, and The Good Dream (St. Martin’s Press). Four of her books have been adapted into movies for CBS, Lifetime, and The Hallmark Channel. She has won a Retailer’s Choice Award for Fiction, a Dove Award, a Silver Angel Award, and two Audie Awards for best inspirational fiction and has been nominated for a Gold Medallion Book of the Year. She also serves on the board of directors for the National House of Hope.

Dana VanderLugt is a writer and teacher who believes firmly in the power of stories to change hearts and minds. In addition to her writing for middle grade readers, Dana’s work has been published in Longridge Review, Relief: A Journal of Art & Faith, the Michigan Reading Journal, and The Reformed Journal, where she is also a frequent contributor on its daily blog.

A former middle school English teacher, Dana now works as an instructional coach and has an MFA in Creative Writing from The Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. She lives in Michigan with her husband, three sons, and a spoiled golden retriever.

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Lisa Varchol Perron is the author of several books and over seventy poems for kids. Awards and recognition for her books include state lists and being named a JLG Gold Standard Selection, NSTA Outstanding Science Trade Book, Golden Kite Award Finalist, and Best Science Book for Kids (NPR's Science Friday). She lives with her family outside of Boston, Massachusetts, where she also works as a psychotherapist. To learn more about Lisa's books and poetry, please visit her website: lisaperronbooks.com. She can also be found on Instagram and Bluesky: @lisavperron.

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Academy Award nominated writer and actress, Vardalos is best known for her films My Big Fat Greek Wedding, My Life in Ruins, and for her work as co-writer with Tom Hanks for Larry Crowne.

Allison Varnes taught English in special education for eight years, and once had to convince administrators that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was not an actual endorsement of witchcraft. She is currently a Ph.D. student in English Education at The University of Tennessee, where she also supervises beginning English teachers during their internship year.

Georgios Varouxakis is Professor of the History of Political Thought in the School of History, Queen Mary University of London, and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought.

His work to date has focused primarily on nineteenth- and twentieth-century political thought (British and French). He has also written on political thought on nationalism and cosmopolitanism, empire, and on the intellectual history of ideas of ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’ and attitudes towards the EEC/EU. Previously, he has been Research Fellow at University College London, Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University and Senior Research Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.

He grew up in Crete and was educated at the University of Athens (BA) and University College London (MA and PhD).

Jeevan Vasagar is a writer and award-winning journalist, and Contributing Editor at Tortoise Media. From 2015 to 2017, he was Singapore and Malaysia correspondent for the Financial Times, travelling the region to report on demands for political reform, technological innovation and the growing influence of China.

Before that he was the FT’s Berlin correspondent, reporting on a period in which a vast influx of refugees transformed German politics and society. He also led coverage of the German backlash against Silicon Valley. He spent 12 years at the Guardian, in a range of roles including East Africa correspondent in Nairobi, and education editor in London. His reporting on undergraduate admissions at Cambridge University won a CIPR Education Journalism award.

His writing has also appeared in the Economist, the LA Times and the New Statesman.

Illustrator Eric Velasquez was born in Spanish Harlem and he grew up in Harlem. Eric graduated from the High School of Art and Design and earned his BFA from the School of Visual Arts. He also completed a year of studies with Harvey Dinnerstein at the Art Student’s League.

Eric is the illustrator of over 30 acclaimed picture books and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award and an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature for Children. He lives and works in New York. He teaches book illustration at FIT (The Fashion Institute of Technology) in NYC.

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Michael Veltri helps organizations and individuals perform at their best, deliver high-impact results without burnout, and drive transformation in their businesses and lives.

Sam Venis is a journalist and an independent strategist working with startups and executives on their narrative strategy, brand positioning, cultural manifestos and growth.

He has written on technology, art and culture for publications including the Guardian, the New Republic, Spike Art Magazine, The Block, Airmail, and Document Journal. His work with executives and startups focusses on the ways that economics, technology and cultural systems intersect, and he also writes the newsletter Technical Personae.

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He is based in Brooklyn.

Dr. Vivek Venkataraman is a leading anthropologist, researcher in hunter-gatherer studies and a popular science writer. He runs a large world-class laboratory and is published in top journals such as Science, Proceedings of theNational Academy of Sciences USA, and Proceedings of the Royal Society. His own popular articles about hunter-gatherers have reached hundreds of thousands of readers through venues such as Sapiens, Aeon, and The Conversation.

Audrey Vernick writes nonfiction and humorous fiction picture books and middle-grade fiction. Her books include the New York Times Notable Book Brothers at Bat, She Loved Baseball, First Grade Dropout, and Is Your Buffalo Ready for Kindergarten? She is also co-author of six books—six with Liz Garton Scanlon and two with Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich. Audrey has received three writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Her books have been translated into a dozen languages. A frequent presenter at schools throughout the country, she lives near the ocean with her family. You can visit her at www.audreyvernick.com.

P. J. Vernon was born in South Carolina and has been called “a name to watch in the thriller genre” (Booklist). Library Journal and Book Riot compare his critically-acclaimed Gothic debut When You Find Me to Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects. His most recent thriller, Bath Haus, was published in June 2021 (Doubleday). Vernon is represented by Aevitas Creative Management and Sugar 23 (TV/film). He lives in Canada with his partner and two wily dogs.

Vanessa Veselka is the author of the novel Zazen, which won the PEN/Robert Bingham prize for fiction. Her work has been published in GQ, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Tin House, Zyzzyva and in Best American Essays. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress, and a mother, and her second novel The Offshore Grounds is out now from Knopf.

Marga Vicedo is a professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Nature and Nurture of Love (University of Chicago Press), an acclaimed book about the maternal instinct and attachment parenting, and is currently writing about the history of the autism diagnosis.

Zachary Tyler Vickers is the author of the award-winning story collection Congratulations on Your Martyrdom! He is the recipient of the Richard Yates Prize, judged by novelist Adam Haslett, and the Clark Fisher Ansley Prize for excellence in fiction, and he was a finalist for the Graywolf Press Fiction Prize and the Italo Calvino Prize. His work has appeared in the Iowa Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies, the KGB Lit Bar Journal, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Elaine/E.B. Vickers is an award-winning author of picture books, middle grade, and young adult novels that aim to help readers of all ages find connection and belonging. She grew up in a small town in the Utah desert, where she spent her time reading, playing basketball, and exploring. Several years and one PhD later, she found her way back to her hometown, where she now spends her time writing, teaching college chemistry, and exploring with her family.

Senior Vice President and Creative Director of Jujamcyn Theaters, and Artistic Director of Encores!, Viertel has worked on such acclaimed shows as Jersey Boys, Fela!, and The Book Of Mormon. He also teaches at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Cassandra Vieten, PhD is a university professor, licensed clinical psychologist, mind-body medicine researcher, and internationally recognized workshop leader and public speaker. She is Director of Research at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UCSD, and works at the Centers for Integrative Health at the University of California, San Diego, where she serves as the Director of the Center for Mindfulness, while also being a Clinical Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Cassi is co-founder and Psychology Director at the Psychedelics and Health Research Initiative at UCSD.

In addition, Cassi is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), and she is Senior Advisor at the John W. Brick Mental Health Foundation. Cassi is a blogger at Psychology Today, and is an internationally recognized workshop leader and keynote speaker, most recently at the American Psychological Association, and the Esalen Institute.

Lynx Vilden has been practicing and teaching primitive living skills with passion both in the US and in Europe since 1991. She has traveled, explored, and researched the nature and traditional cultures of arctic, mountain, and desert regions from Hudson Bay to the Kalahari Desert; in 2001 she started the Four Seasons Prehistoric Projects program dedicated to learning and sharing the ancient skills of primitive living and in 2011 created Living Wild.

Anthony Vinci was the first Chief Technology Officer and Associate Director for Capabilities at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), one of the ‘big five’ US intelligence agencies. As CTO, he was tasked with bringing artificial intelligence into NGA and connecting the agency with commercial technology in Silicon Valley. As Associate Director he managed the agency’s technology, R&D, contracting, procurement, strategy and budget. Earlier in his career, he served as an intelligence officer in Iraq, Asia, and Africa.

He is currently a Managing Director at Cerberus Capital Management, where he invests in next generation national security technologies and businesses that shore up supply chain vulnerabilities. He is also an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a leading national security think tank. He is a former member of the Core Management Team at Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, and was also the Founder and former CEO of Findyr, a technology company that crowdsources data from around the world, as well as Leviathan Analytics, an AI and geospatial data analytics company.

He received his PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics and studied Philosophy at Reed College and the University of Oxford.

Jessica Vitkus is a writer and television producer living in New York City. She has written craft stories and developed craft projects for Martha Stewart magazines and television, and has worked as a writer/producer for MTV News, Pop-Up Video,The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, andLate Night with Stephen Colbert.

With dual degrees in film and theology, Sara Vladic has enjoyed a lifetime of storytelling at the highest level. In addition to the success of the bestseller INDIANAPOLIS, co-written with Lynn Vincent, Vladic worked as a feature film writer at 20th Century Fox and on the sets of blockbuster movies, including The Sixth Sense.

Meg Vondriska is a writer and social media manager best known for the creation of the gone-viral Twitter account @MenWriteWomen. Originally from rural Wisconsin, she currently resides in Austin, TX.

U.S. Army Colonel Tom Vossler (retired) taught military history, strategy, and leadership at the U.S. Army War College and is a former director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle Barracks, PA. He has published several books on the battles of Gettysburg and Antietam, and has acted as a consultant to the History Channel and other media companies, advising them on Civil War history.With Jeffrey D. McCausland, he is the author of the forthcoming book Battle Tested.

Hope Wabuke is a poet, academic, and essayist. The author of the poetry collections The Leaving, Movement No.1: Trains, and Her, her work has been published in various journals and magazines, including NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Magazine, Ms. Magazine online, The Daily Beast, The Hairpin, and others. She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her forthcoming memoir Please Don't Kill My Black Son Please is forthcoming from Vintage.

James Waddell is a writer and critic. He writes about visual art, theatre, the early modern period, and the intertwined histories of ideas, books, libraries and emotions.

His writing has appeared in the Economist, Times Literary Supplement, 1843, Prospect and elsewhere. He has appeared as a guest on the TLS’ podcast and the Economist's 'The Intelligence' podcast, and in 2019, he won the Telegraph/Benjamin Franklin House Literary Prize and the Art Fund writing competition. He is a graduate of Pembroke College, Oxford, and completed a PhD at University College London.

Lizzie Wade is an award-winning journalist and correspondent for Science, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals, where she covers archaeology, anthropology, and Latin America for the magazine’s print and online news sections. Her work has also appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times, Aeon, Smithsonian, Archaeology, and California Sunday, among other publications.

Michael Wade is a Professor of Innovation and Strategy at IMD (Lausanne, Switzerland) and holds the Cisco Chair in Digital Business Transformation. He is the author of Digital Vortex and Orchestrating Transformation.

A globally recognized voice in education, Tony Wagner is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Learning Policy Institute; prior to this appointment, Tony held a variety of positions at Harvard University for more than twenty years, including four years as an Expert in Residence at the Harvard Innovation Lab. Tony’s influential and widely read books on schools and education include The Global Achievement Gap and Creating Innovators.

Benjamin Wagner is a writer, singer/songwriter, filmmaker, consultant, coach, and founder of Essential Industries Incorporated, a boutique consulting firm specializing in individual and organizational strategy and transformation. His career spans print (Rolling Stone, The Saratogian), radio (WCZN-AM, KOTO-FM), broadcast and digital (Lifetime, MTV), and social media (Facebook, Instagram). As half of the filmmaking duo Wagner Brothers, he researched, interviewed, wrote, voiced, scored, co-directed, produced, and marketed the 2012 documentary Mister Rogers & Me. The film unearths the roots of Mister Rogers' values, unmasks the forces acting against depth and simplicity, and helps viewers develop the means to lead deeper, simpler lives. His 2023 documentary, Friends & Neighbors, an adaptation of his weekly podcast, “looks for the helpers” in post-pandemic America, the people who are working to make themselves and the communities around them whole and help heal a deeply anxious and uncertain America. The film is slated for wide release in May 2025.

Megan Wagner Lloyd is the writer of the kids' graphic novels ALLERGIC,  SQUISHED, and WINGING IT, co-created with illustrator Michelle Mee Nutter, and the SUPER PANCAKE series, co-created with illustrator Abhi Alwar. She's also the author of HAVEN: A SMALL CAT'S BIG ADVENTURE, and several picture books. She lives with her family in the Washington, D.C. area.

Sign up for her newsletter: meganwagnerlloyd.com

Find her on Instagram: @meganwagnerlloyd

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Martha Wainwright is an internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter based in Montreal. She is the daughter of folk legends Loudon Wainwright and Kate McGarrigle and the sister of Rufus Wainwright.

A producer on the eight-time Emmy Award winning animated show Family Guy, Evan Waite has written for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, NBC’s Sunnyside, Comedy Central’s The President Show, Adult Swim’s Three Busy Debras, Amazon’s Fairfax, and Kevin Hart’s Guide to Black History. In the print humor world, he contributes frequently to The Onion, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the New Yorker’s “Shouts and Murmurs” section.

Elijah Wald has been a folk blues guitarist since childhood and a writer for more than thirty years, and his work has appeared in publications such as the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, TheTower Pulse, Songlines, Sing Out, Living Blues, and The Boston Globe, where he served as world music critic throughout the 1990s. He won a Grammy in 2002 for his album notes for The Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Box, and has produced several albums and recorded two of his own. He has taught blues history at UCLA and lectured widely on American, Mexican, and world music.

Paul Waldman is an opinion writer at the Washington Post and the author or co-author of four books about media and politics.

The current managing editor of Reason magazine, Walker has also written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Salon, The New Republic, L.A. Weekly, and National Review.

Owen Walker is the Financial Times’ European Banking Correspondent, and an award-winning journalist, who has covered business and investment issues in the US, UK and continental Europe.

He was formerly Managing Editor of Agenda, a Financial Times publication for US corporate directors, and Asset Management Correspondent. He was named joint business journalist of the year by the London Press Club in 2020, and in 2021 won a Society of American Business Editors and Writers award.

Darren Walker is president of the Ford Foundation, an international social justice philanthropy with a $13 billion endowment and $600 million in annual grant making. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been included on numerous annual media lists, including Time’s annual list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, Rolling Stone’s 25 People Shaping the Future, Fast Company’s 50 Most Innovative People, and OUT Magazine’s Power 50.

Devon Walker-Figueroa is the author of the debut poetry collection Philomath, winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series and a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard Prize for Best First Book. Her new collection, Lazarus Species, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2025.  Her writing has appeared in The Nation, Poetry, the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. 

Devon earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  She was the recipient of the 2018 New England Review’s Emerging Writer Award; the 2021 Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Award; scholarships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and Bucknell University; and she was the 2022-2023 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholar.  She is currently a Visiting Faculty member in Literature at Bennington College.  

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WSJ. Magazine is The Wall Street Journal’s award-winning luxury lifestyle magazine, published twelve times a year. WSJ. covers a wide range of cultural topics, from fashion and food to architecture and design and will celebrate its 10th anniversary in the Fall of 2018.

Wanda Wallace is the President and CEO of Leadership Forum, Inc., an international consulting group that works with organizations on issues of talent acquisition, retention and strategic thinking. Prior to founding LFI, she spent was Associate Dean of Executive Education at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and Executive Vice President of Duke Corporate Education, Inc.

Bryan Walsh spent 15 years as a journalist, foreign correspondent, and international editor for TIME magazine. He continues to write and produce science and health stories for outlets including TIME, Bloomberg, and Newsweek, and he lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

Rona Wang is currently a math major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For her short stories, she has been named a HerCampus 22 Under 22 and nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology. She is originally from Portland, Oregon, and as a second-generation Chinese American she loves to write stories that reflect the Asian American experience. You Had Me at Hello World is her debut YA novel.

Dan Wang is Visiting Scholar at the Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center and the Chief Technology Analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, the economics research firm based in Beijing. As the Technology Analyst at Dragonomics, he wrote reports on the country’s technology developments for a predominantly financial audience that includes many of the world’s most prominent endowments, hedge funds, and other asset allocators.

He is a frequent podcast guest, appearing on the ‘Ezra Klein Show’ at the New York Times, Bloomberg's ‘Odd Lots’, Ben Thompson's ‘Stratechery’ and Kaiser Kuo's ‘Sinica’. His essays have been published in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Financial Times, New York Magazine, Bloomberg Opinion, and the Atlantic. Previously, he worked in Silicon Valley and studied philosophy at the University of Rochester.

Andrea Wang is an acclaimed author of children’s books. Her picture book Watercress was awarded the Caldecott Medal, a Newbery Honor, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor. Her other books, Summer at Squee, Luli and the Language of Tea, The Many Meanings of Meilan, Magic Ramen, and The Nian Monster, have also received awards and starred reviews. Her work explores culture, creative thinking, and identity. She also likes to shed light on hidden historical events. Andrea holds an M.S. in Environmental Science and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing for Young People. She lives in the Denver area with her family.

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Jon Ward is Chief National Correspondent for Yahoo News, author of Camelot's End: Kennedy v Carter and the Fight that Broke the Democratic Party (Twelve Books, 2019), and host of The Long Game podcast. He has covered American politics and culture for two decades, as a city desk reporter in Washington D.C., as a White House correspondent who traveled aboard Air Force One to Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, and as a national affairs correspondent who has traveled the country to write about two presidential campaigns and the ideas and people animating our times. He has been published in The Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico Magazine, Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post, and The Washington Times.