Joan Brookbank

Joan Brookbank is a literary agent and book publishing adviser. She is the director of Joan Brookbank Projects, an agency representing and advising writers and visual artists, and is also a producer of special projects, including museum exhibition tours. Previously, she served as head of U.S. operations for French, British, and Swiss companies, including the Centre d’exportation du livre français (CELF, a French book publishers’ consortium) and the art book publisher Merrell. Her publishing background spans sales, marketing, distribution, editorial acquisitions, project development, and list building.

She has negotiated a wide range of contracts for projects including adult and children’s books, translation rights, speaking engagements, image licensing, paper goods (from journals to notecards and decks), museum and institutional co-editions, and museum exhibitions.

Her agency has placed titles with a broad spectrum of publishers, from Abrams to Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Notable published works represented by Joan Brookbank Projects include The Flowering: The Autobiography of Judy Chicago by Judy Chicago, with a foreword by Gloria Steinem (Thames & Hudson); The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution by Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams (Nation Books); The Wall of Birds by Jane Kim and Thayer Walker (HarperDesign); and Bernoulli’s Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science by Aubrey Clayton (Columbia University Press).

Forthcoming titles include adult and children's books by writer/photographer Traer Scott, as well as adult and children's books by historian Yohuru Williams, founder of the Racial Justice Initiative.