Laurie-Maude Chenard is a UTA literary agent and multi-disciplinary creative who champions voice-driven fiction and nonfiction from underrepresented writers—especially work that wrestles with identity, culture, and the gray zones where race, gender, and belonging intersect.
In brief
Her stated taste is unusually specific and consistent: she names the same cluster of authors (Adichie, Zevin, Akbar, Batuman, Ozeki, Zauner) across multiple sources, giving writers a clear aesthetic target to aim at.
No confirmed public sales record is available for analysis, so her pitch is built almost entirely on her curated wishlist and taste profile — the named comps are therefore the strongest signal available to querying writers.
Her personal background — born in China, raised in Québec and Massachusetts, educated in Culture and Politics — maps directly onto her editorial lens: she is not performing interest in diaspora and identity narratives, she is living one.
She joined UTA in 2021 and is relatively early in her agenting career, which may mean she is building her list more actively than an agent with a full roster.
Query status was unverified as of April 2026 — writers must check the live submission channel before sending.
Lately
Her public wishlist consistently names the same authors — Adichie, Zevin, Akbar, Batuman, Ozeki, Zauner — as the aesthetic ideal she's actively hunting for. The repetition across multiple sources signals genuine conviction, not boilerplate.
What Laurie-Maude is looking for
Her clearest priority. She wants fiction with a powerful, distinctive narrative voice and characters who are psychologically complex — people caught in difficult internal conflicts and thorny relationships. Coming-of-age arcs are a particular draw. Her taste benchmark is the literary-but-accessible register of writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Elif Batuman, and Gabrielle Zevin: books that are smart and emotionally alive, with the crossover appeal that generates book-club buzz.
She welcomes speculative fiction when it carries genuine emotional and psychological weight — not genre exercise for its own sake but stories where the speculative element deepens an exploration of identity, consciousness, or human behavior. She's drawn to work that blends wit and a light touch of humor with real depth.
Personal memoirs that use an intimate, specific life story as a prism for larger cultural or social truths. She is especially drawn to memoirs that grapple with identity, trauma, and belonging in ways that feel urgent and universal. Her cited touchstones span grief, assault survivorship, queer experience, and diasporic identity — the thread is emotional honesty in service of something bigger than the self.
She is looking for reported or essayistic nonfiction that illuminates the root drivers of human behavior and makes sense of cultural and sociological shifts. Subject areas that interest her include art, fashion, technology, health, work, and urbanism. She wants books with intellectual ambition that still read with the propulsion of a story. Her interest in MONSTERS by Claire Dederer signals an appetite for books that ask morally difficult questions without pretending to easy answers.
This is a values-level priority that cuts across every category. She actively seeks writers from historically underrepresented communities and work that centers BIPOC, LGBTQ+, Asian American, and diaspora perspectives. The themes she gravitates toward — identity fluidity, race, culture, gender, sexuality — should feel intrinsic to the story, not bolted on.
Not the right fit
Taste fingerprint
How to query Laurie-Maude
Use a subject line formatted exactly as: 'Query (MS Wishlist)' followed by your book's title and your name — she specifies this format explicitly.
Include a brief synopsis, an author bio, and the first 30 pages of your manuscript (or a book proposal for nonfiction).
She only responds if interested, so no reply means a pass — do not follow up expecting a confirmation.
Lead your query letter with voice. Her entire wishlist is organized around narrative voice as the primary criterion; a flat, generic pitch letter will undercut a strong manuscript.
Name one or two of her cited touchstone titles and explain precisely why your book occupies the same emotional or thematic territory — not 'it's like AMERICANAH' but what specific quality you share.
Anchor your bio in your cultural perspective and community, especially if you are writing from a historically underrepresented background — this context matters to her editorially, not just demographically.
For nonfiction, make the cultural or sociological argument of your book clear in the query itself: she wants to understand the big idea and why it matters now.
Verify that her submission channel is currently active before sending — status was unconfirmed as of April 2026.