Eroded landscape with lone horse and rider
A Literary Consultancy

Where risk becomes
the work itself.

Helping debut and established authors place experimental novels, memoirs, and hybrid works with innovative publishers.

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Driftless, adj.

Possessing no purpose or perceptible trend; aimless or undirected — by opposition, fiercely intentional.

Drift, n.

A driving movement or force; impulse; impetus; pressure. Navigation: the component of movement due to the force of wind and currents.

Our mandate

We are a process-driven consultancy set on embracing risk and defying the marketplace. We work closely with writers to place work that is uncompromising, rigorously crafted, and impossible to ignore.

The Consultancy

The people behind
the work.

Jaclyn Gilbert

Jaclyn Gilbert

Founder

Jaclyn Gilbert is the founder of Driftless Literary. She began her career in sales and marketing at Workman Publishing before joining Janklow & Nesbit's foreign rights team—where she helped secure translation rights to works by Jhumpa Lahiri, Tom Wolfe, Laura Hillenbrand, Sarah Manguso, Maggie Nelson, and many others.

Jaclyn holds a B.A. from Yale and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. In 2018, her debut novel, Late Air, was published by Little A, and her stories, essays and reviews have appeared in Post Road Magazine, Tin House, Long Reads, The Paper Brigade, Lit Hub, and elsewhere.

Currently seeking: experimental fiction, literary novels, memoir, essay collections.

Adrian Shirk

Adrian Shirk

Agent

Adrian Shirk is an agent at Driftless Literary. She brings over ten years of experience as an author, editor and career mentor to dozens of emerging writers. She has two books of creative nonfiction, And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Stories from the Byways of American Women and Religion and Heaven is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia, both from Counterpoint Press.

Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Lit Hub, and others. She teaches in the Writing Department at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Currently seeking: creative nonfiction, memoir, essay collections, hybrid work.

Christine Kalafus

Christine Kalafus

Agent

Christine Kalafus calls on her decade of leading writing workshops, private editing services, as contributing editor for literature magazines. Previously a seamstress for the interior design industry, her work appeared in Vogue.

Christine holds a BA in interior design from the University of New Haven and an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College. Her memoir Flood will be published by Woodhall Press June 2025.

Currently seeking: memoir, narrative nonfiction, debut novels, short story collections.

Our Process

For the experimental.
For the uncategorizable.
For the work that refuses to compromise.

Driftless Literary is a boutique literary consultancy founded by and for authors. We exist because the current publishing marketplace is no longer able to serve the kind of writing we believe in most.

We represent experimental literature across novels, memoirs, essay collections, and poetry — work that takes risks, resists easy categorization, and insists on its own vision. Rather than chasing commissions or bending manuscripts to fit market trends, we take the dream, the existential core of a given work, and find it the home it deserves — with a special focus on independent and small presses, domestically and internationally, who are hungry for exactly that.

01
Placement-focused, not profit-driven

We work on a fee-based retainer model rather than commission, so our editorial guidance is never distorted by what we stand to earn.

02
Your earnings stay yours

Every royalty. Every subsidiary rights sale. Every film option. If your book is picked up, your upfront investment is applied against your advance and future earnings — and you keep all of it.

03
Independent & small press focus

We have deep relationships with independent and small presses domestically and internationally who are hungry for exactly the kind of work we represent.

04
A partnership in your present

Ours is not a cut of your future. We invest ourselves fully in bringing the work to the right home — on terms that serve the writer, not the consultancy.

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Our Authors

The work we
stand behind.

Driftless Literary 2026-2027 Catalogue

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Submissions

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