Should MFA students think about finding an agent before graduating? How should they approach agents? And what do agents think about working with MFA grads? We asked literary agent Dorian Karchmar of the William Morris Agency, whose client list includes Helene Cooper, Guy Fieri, Kate Jacobs, Jennifer Haigh, and Jennifer Vanderbes, these questions and more.

Where do you find your new talent?
Referrals are the primary thing—mostly clients who recommend me to friends of theirs who are writing. Also editors refer promising people to me. Sometimes an editor will go to an MFA program or a conference. Editors are, for the most part, not going to sign up a writer without an agent, so oftentimes they will put my name into the mix if they are interested in someone.

What do you look for in a query letter?
Doing a query correctly is important. When writers query me, and it’s clear they’ve done their homework—they know who I am, have listened to my interviews, and know my list—then, of course, I will take them very seriously. I get queries all the time from people who graduated from Iowa, Michigan, Columbia, The New School, five years or ten years prior and have been working on things ever since. That’s always very exciting to me. I really like seeing work from people who show a real writer’s level of commitment—people who are ready now, years after receiving their MFA, because they have the passion and the patience. Writing requires tremendous patience.

Are you wary of working with freshly graduated MFA students?
I am not wary of it at all. While certainly a number of students need to work harder and longer on what it is they have to say and how to say it, there are plenty of MFA students who have been out of school and working and also working on their writing before going back for their masters. These are not all twenty-one-year-olds.

Should MFA students even be thinking about agents?
MFA students shouldn’t be thinking about agents. They shouldn’t be thinking about what other people are doing. They shouldn’t be thinking about any of it. They should be thinking about the project they’re working on.

What’s the most important thing to take away from an MFA program?
One or two really trusted readers—people who are particularly good readers for your work and are tactful but ruthless about what is and is not working. Agents and editors are looking for work that has been taken as far as it can go. If you can come out of a program with a couple of people who really understand what you’re trying to do with a project and who can dig into the work and solve the problems, it is probably the single greatest value aside from being given a couple of years of time.

In publishing nonfiction, is it better to first publish a nonfiction piece in a magazine, and then try to craft it into a book? I think getting a piece in a magazine first can oftentimes be extremely helpful in raising the author’s profile and sousing out if the subject matter deserves a book. A lot of the time, a story can be told in a piece and doesn’t necessarily need to be a book.

You’ve said that critiquing is about the person’s work being as good as it can be, and that a true professional will embrace negative criticism. What about questions in workshops that seem to be more of a matter of taste? Should a student listen more to the professor? The students? Her friends? Whose opinion matters?
I think the question is, Do they seem to understand what it is you’re trying to do? Do they seem to understand the book or the story in the fundamental spirit of the thing? If the answer is yes, then they may have a pretty good idea about why it’s not working. Very often writers know what is working and what is not. Sometimes we don’t want to believe it because that might mean starting something over. And sometimes the answer lies in putting it aside for a while. Take great notes while people are giving you feedback and come back to it a little while later with those different notes in hand and see what seems to click.

No writer ever feels 100 percent about her work. How can she know when it's ready to be shown to an agent?
Whatever your self-criticism is, you can feel when you’ve taken a work as far as you can take it. Obviously you want your key readers to read it and feel it’s working, but the thing has to have its basic shape. It needs to be very clean; you need to understand what it is. It should never be, “I think there’s something here, and I want to get an agent’s take on it.” That’s a mistake. An agent is not your professor.

Along with its CreateSpace self-publishing platform and Penguin Group, Amazon once again will sponsor a prize for an unpublished or self-published novel. Works that have never been under contract and are written in English by authors in the United States and Canada (excluding the province of Québec), as well as twenty-one other countries, are eligible.

Past winners of the contest, which includes a fifteen-thousand-dollar prize and publication by Penguin, are Patricia McArdle for Farishta, James King for Bill Warrington's Last Chance, and Bill Loehfelm for Fresh Kills.

To enter, writers must first complete the free registration for CreateSpace. Then, between January 24 and February 6, 2011, the service will accept submissions of full novel manuscripts of 50,000 to 150,000 words each, along with an excerpt of and pitch for each work. There is no cost to submit, but once five thousand entries have been received, Amazon will close the contest.

Judging will take place in five rounds, commencing with Amazon editors reviewing pitch submissions. Titles whose pitches pass muster will advance, and excerpts of those works will be read by a selection of Amazon's customer reviewers. Reviewers for Publishers Weekly will then read the highest-rated 250 titles.

Fifty semifinalists will have their manuscripts assessed by editors at Penguin, and three finalists' works will advance to being read and reviewed by a group of literary professionals. This year's panelists are New York City author and book critic Lev Grossman, agent Jennifer Joel, and Putnam editor Marysue Rucci.

Finally, the public will have a chance to read the panelists' reviews and vote for a winner beginning in late May. The winner will be announced in June.

While entries for the novel contest (and the second-annual young adult novel contest) will not be accepted for another eight weeks, full guidelines and eligibility information are available now on the Amazon and CreateSpace Web sites.

The video below is a book trailer for King's winning book, which was published last August.

The Minnesota-based Bush Foundation, created in 1953 by Edyth Bassler Bush and 3M executive Archibald Granville Bush, announced last week that it will no longer administer its longstanding individual fellowship programs, including one targeted to artists. Instead of discipline-specific awards—grants had been offered specifically to artists, medical doctors, and nontraditional students—the organization will now run a single fellowship competition open to innovators of any stripe who are invested in social change in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

"We need 'all hands on deck,'" the foundation says on its Web site, "every social entrepreneur, business owner, artist, public sector employee, community volunteer, and the like—to embrace the opportunity to learn and grow so others in our communities can have the hoped for future." The foundation says it will focus on tackling "tough problems through building individual leadership capacity," particularly in schools and with Native American nations working to rebuild their governments.

Since it began in 1976, 431 artists from Minnesota and the Dakotas received funds from the fellowship program, including poets Robert Bly and David Mura and memoirist Patricia Hampl. Guidelines for fellowship application and information about the new initiative will be posted on the Bush Foundation Web site tomorrow.

In the video below, Bly reads his poem "Driving Through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings" in an excerpt from the 1978 documentary on the poet, "A Man Writes to Part of Himself." (The film was released the same year that Bly received his first Bush Foundation artist fellowship).