Fairfield University and the Connecticut Press Club present "The Writer & Agent Relationship" | Press Releases

Fairfield University and the Connecticut Press Club are launching an evening with writers, starting on Oct. 30 with Denise Marcil, president of New York-based Denise Marcil Literary Agency, Inc. and local author Peter Spiegelman. They will discuss the agent-writer relationship and the challenges of getting published.

Marcil represents a wide variety of commercial fiction and non-fiction, from best-selling romances to business books by Diana Henriques, The New York Times' leading business investigative reporter ( White Sharks of Wall Street to practical nonfiction by Dr. William Sears and Martha Sears, R.N. ( The Baby Book and the Pregnancy Book ).

Marcil has been featured in many publications, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, Business Week and Working Woman. She was the featured story in a nationally televised PBS program, Working Women.

She has served on the board of directors of ILAA and the AAR, both professional literary agency associations, for the past 17 years.

Marcil resides in Manhattan and Stamford, Conn.

Spiegelman is a veteran of over twenty years in the financial services and software industries, and has worked with leading banks, brokerages and central banks around the world. In the mid-1990s, Spiegelman left his position as a Vice President at a major Wall Street firm to become a partner in a banking software company. The company's product soon became a leader in its marketplace, and in the late-1990s Spiegelman and his partners sold their business to a larger, publicly traded firm. Spiegelman retired from the software industry in 2001, to write.

Spiegelman's first novel, Black Maps, is a literary thriller featuring private investigator John March, on the trail of a serial blackmailer on Wall Street. It was published in August, 2003, by Alfred A. Knopf, and will be published internationally in 2004. Black Maps has been nominated for the Book-of-the-Month Club's Prize for First Fiction.

The Washington Times recently said: "This is a most promising debut and at least one reader is eager to see March again. What a painless way to get a lesson in international finance." And Newsday wrote: "Spiegelman's Black Maps is a stunner wrapped in plain brown paper. This mystery boasts an intelligent plot about white-collar crime on Wall Street".

Spiegelman was born in New York City, and grew up in the New York metropolitan area. He is a graduate of Vassar College, where he majored in English. He lives with his family in Connecticut, where he is currently at work on another John March novel.

The event will be held in the Multimedia Room of the DiMenna-Nyselius Library, starting at 7:30 p.m. Contact Dr. Kim Bridgford, Department of English, Fairfield University, (203) 254-4000, ext. 2795, for further information. For directions to the university click on or visit the following web address. Parking is located in visitors section next to student union.