Valentina (she/they) is an associate agent at JABberwocky assisting Eddie Schneider. She also handles all merchandise and third-party licensing proposals.
They graduated from Cal Poly SLO with a B.A. in English and have lived in New York City ever since. Outside of her literary interests, Valentina is a dancer of many different styles, a video game lover, and a ~very~ amateur digital artist.
Before joining JABberwocky, Valentina worked as an Events Manager with Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side, where they hosted a huge variety of author events, book clubs, children’s activities, and more. She has also interned at Foundry Literary + Media, Folio Literary Management, and the Feminist Press at CUNY.
How to Query Me
Please visit my submissions page over on Query Manager: http://QueryManager.com/ValentinaSainato. I do not take queries over email or on the phone, so this is the best (and only) way to submit to me.
What I’m Looking For
Horror: Horror is my favorite genre to read, and I’m looking for lots of different flavors here. If it’s spooky, eerie, disorienting, thrilling, existential, or horror-lite, I want to read it. Blends with sci-fi/fantasy are also welcome, but it should still feel at home on the horror shelf!
I love stories featuring monsters, witches, and demons, but I really want to see fresh takes on them with unexpected twists. A good ghost story or haunted house will always catch my attention; Carmen Maria Machado’s work is among my all-time favorites. Other elements I enjoy: body horror, cults or secret societies, natural phenomena like fungi and flora, and settings that make me feel claustrophobic.
While I tend to gravitate more to supernatural or suspenseful horror over serial killers, I do like self-aware homages to slasher & cult films like Stephen Graham Jones’ brilliant My Heart is a Chainsaw. Survival horror or horror with thriller elements are also categories that I like but don’t read as often.
Horror media I love:
- Books: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix, My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones, Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, The Route of Ice and Salt by José Luis Zárate, The Honeys by Ryan La Sala
- Film/tv: Get Out, Scream, Hereditary, Ringu / The Ring, Midnight Mass, The Haunting of Hill House
- Other media: video games like Oxenfree and Slay the Princess, podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale and The Magnus Archives
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Science fiction / speculative fiction: I’m more selective about science fiction and speculative fiction; I’m a big character reader and want stories with an emotional core that drives them. I was absolutely blown by Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark as well as Simon Jimenez’s The Vanished Birds; projects in those vein are what I’d love to work on. I also love narratives that play with time and/or space as part of the plot. Sci-fi books that deep-dive into spaceship mechanics or battle sequences generally are not for me.
I also like reading more grounded contemporary books that have a speculative or off-beat twist such as Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks. Absurdity is also welcome but it has to mesh well with the voice, like in Hilary Mantel’s Temporary.
Sci-fi / speculative media I love:
- Books: How High We Go In the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu, The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez, Exhalation by Ted Chiang, A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, This is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, Scythe by Neil Shusterman, Temporary by Hilary Mantel, We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry
- Film/tv: Everything Everywhere All At Once, Severance, The Twilight Zone, Gravity Falls, Sense8
- Other media: video games like I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, Outer Wilds, and Neo Cab
