PJ Mark moved to NYC in 1990 and used his student loans to start a literary journal to publish his friends. He began his career as an international book scout in 1993, has worked as a journalist covering the book beat and has been a literary agent since 2002.
He is interested in literary fiction and narrative non-fiction. New titles for 2023 include Decent People by De’Shawn Charles Winslow, Sink by Joseph Earl Thomas, An Autobiography of Skin by Lakiesha Carr, Take What You Need by Idra Novey, a “Working Life” by Eileen Myles, The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel, House of Cotton by Monica Brashears, We Are a Haunting by Tyriek White, Ponyboy by Eliot Duncan, Halcyon by Elliot Ackerman, The Blue Machine by Helen Czerski, And Don’t F&%K It Up: An Oral History of RuPaul’s Drag Race by Maria Elena Fernandez, Align Your Planets by Alice Sparkly Kat, The Absolutes by Molly Dektar, Swim Home to the Vanished by Brendan Basham, The Helsinki Affair by Anna Pitoniak, Hell If We Don’t Change Our Ways by Brittany Means, Ten Trips by Andy Mitchell and Same Bed, Different Dreams by Ed Park.
PJ’s authors regularly receive numerous awards and honors, including, on multiple occasions, the cover of the New York Times Book Review, the “5 Under 35” honor by the National Book Award Foundation, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Art Seidenbaum Award by the Los Angeles Times, the Rome Prize by the American Academy in Rome, multiple awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, a “20 Under 40” honor by The New Yorker, The Center for Fiction Prize, The Pulitzer Prize, the Guardian First Book Award, MacArthur "Genius" Grants, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Windham Campbell Prize and National Book Award finalist medals. In 2022, three of his clients’ books—Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv, The Furrows by Namwali Serpell and An Immense World by Ed Yong (with primary agent Will Francis of Janklow UK)—were named on The Ten Best Books of 2022 by The New York Times Book Review.