Linda Epstein spent most of her life in the suburbs of New York City. Now she lives in upstate New York in a small town in the Hudson Valley with her best friend, Gertie Gertstein, a very silly hypoallergenic designer mutt. Besides writing novels, Linda also works as a senior literary agent at Emerald City Literary, a boutique agency representing books for children and teens. Somehow, she also seems to fit in teaching classes and workshops about writing and the publishing industry.
Although Linda considered herself a writer since she was a teenager, she didn’t become a published author until later in life. Most of her life she’d written poetry, which went unpublished. In her mid-40s she had a literary midlife crisis and started dabbling in fiction. After being an agent for many years Linda went to The New School in New York City where she earned her MFA in 2018. It was there that she started writing what would become her first published novel, Repairing the World (Simon & Schuster, 2022). Her second novel, The Other March Sisters (Kensington, 2025), co-written with Ally Malinenko and Liz Parker, was inspired by a 2019 Twitter conversation among authors that slid into DMs and eventually produced the novel.
As someone who came out later in life, Linda not only writes books that include or feature queer characters, she has also spent her career as a literary agent with a strong commitment to getting more books by and about LGBTQ+ people onto bookstore shelves.
When she’s not writing, teaching, or doing agenty things, Linda’s favorite thing to do is—you guessed it—read books. Some of her other favorite things are travelling to warm beaches in winter, travelling to interesting cities in spring, summer, and autumn, looking at and talking about art, cooking and eating fabulous meals, and spending time with family and friends. She is extremely lucky to have some of the most extraordinary people in her life in both of those categories. Linda tries very hard not to kill her houseplants, but statistically speaking if you’re a houseplant she’s not a good risk, even if you’re a succulent.
