Shelly Romero is a literary agent with Azantian Literary Agency.
Shelly began her publishing career in 2017 at Scholastic where she rose up the ranks from editorial assistant to associate editor, where she acquired her own titles and assisted on series publishing for The Bad Guys and Goosebumps. She later joined Cake Creative as Lead Editor and she was most recently a freelance editor. She graduated from Stephens College with a bachelor’s degree in English and attended the 2017 NYU Summer Publishing Institute. Shelly was selected as a 2020 Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree and is a member of Latinx in Publishing & People of Color in Publishing. Born and raised in Miami by Honduran parents, she now resides in New York City where she might be found at a movie theatre viewing the latest release from her Letterboxd watchlist.
She is seeking: science fiction; speculative fiction; horror (almost all subgenres & especially for all age categories); Honduran authors; stories by Latine/x authors from Central America and the Caribbean (including Afro-Latine & Indigenous Latine stories); playing with formatting such as mixed-media & epistolary novels that give the story a “found footage” type of vibe; anything comped to Guillermo del Toro, David Cronenberg, Clive Barker, John Carpenter, or Wes Craven; Catholic horror; gothic romance; grounded fantasy (comps to: NINTH HOUSE & HELL BENT by Leigh Bardugo; THE WITCHERY by S. Isabelle; A DISCOVERY OF WITCHES by Deborah Harkness; & LEGENDBORN by Tracy Deonn); midwestern gothic; southern gothic; vampires; Jewish stories especially if they are intersectional with BIPOC and/or queer characters; thrillers/mysteries (with non-cop protagonists); commercial fiction; slice-of-life a la One Tree Hill, OG Gossip Girl, The Sandlot, Real Women Have Curves, What We Do in the Shadows; historical fiction set during: Regency, Edwardian, & Victorian eras; post-WWII; 80s – 00s…but featuring BIPOC and/or queer characters; adult erotic fiction, especially featuring BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA characters in kink spaces; set during college and non-college bound post-high school.
She is NOT seeking: books over 100K words; picture books, chapter books, or graphic novels & nonfiction books; epic/high fantasy; second-world fantasy; cozy fantasy; military fantasy; historical fantasy; historical fiction set during WWII; stories featuring: Nazis; ICE; republicans; cops/detectives; Zionists; military; deportation; “clean teen”; antebellum era and/or plantation settings; novels-in-verse; cozy “horror”; stories comped to the MCU/DCU; anything AI/android related; thinly veiled billionaire antagonists; westerns; BIPOC women who are being trafficked; murdered; honor killed; etc.; super gritty dramas; comped to John Grisham, James Patterson, Colleen Hoover, Dean Koontz.