About the People at My Day Job (and Why I Started Hyponymous Literary)

When I can manage it, I write here about religion and culture — how religious life shapes us, how it evolves, and how it shows up in our personal and collective journeys. Thinking and hopefully writing about these things animates me, gives me a chance to breathe easier, and, in small, incremental ways, helps me imagine and perhaps create a bigger, more inclusive world.

I don’t usually write about my work in book publishing here, even though that’s what occupies most of my professional hours. I will sometimes mention it when relevant, but today I’d like to talk about it directly, and do so in a way that better links something that animates me with something that is my gainful occupation. The two should be linked, shouldn’t they? Can’t my day job connect to questions like, How do people grow? What stories guide us? How do our words — and the worlds they create — reflect what we hold sacred?

A few years ago, I started two ventures almost side by side: Hyponymous Literary and Lake Drive Books.

One is a literary agency, the other an independent publishing house. From the beginning, and although I didn’t exactly plan it this way, they’ve been in conversation with each other. Each has helped me see the other more clearly: how to be a better publishing professional, and how to connect authors across networks.

So I want to talk about my day job. And I want to link what is animating, what is life-giving, not just to the work, but to some special people who recently joined me in this work, in their own unique ways.

Today I want to fill you in on some news about Hyponymous Literary.

At Hyponymous (high-PON-uh-muhs), we guide culturally creative authors who are exploring questions of identity, belief, and belonging. We aim to help writers resist generic, mass-culture thinking and focus instead on what makes their work distinct, particular, and true.

The name of the agency is a derivative of the word hyponym, which is “a quality of a word of a more specific meaning than a general or superordinate term applicable to it.” For example, a rose is a hyponym of the broader category, or hypernym, “flower,” and a “dog” is a hyponym of “animal.” Each is something more specific than the broader category to which it belongs.

We create categories to function as humans, but often we don’t see them, and perhaps even more often, we don’t see the specificity within them. That is book publishing: uncovering patterns, but also specificity.

Now let’s get specific. Let me introduce the new team — three remarkable agents who embody that vision:

Author, editor, and literary scholar Audrey Clare Farley bridges academia and creative nonfiction (and maybe some fiction) with an incisive yet compassionate voice. Her books — The Unfit Heiress and Girls and Their Monsters — demonstrate her ability to uncover the untold histories of women within larger, dominant narratives in American life. Audrey loves narrative that peels back the layers of cultural mythology, revealing what’s been hidden in plain sight. She’s drawn to memoirs and histories that are intimate yet culturally resonant, particularly those exploring religion, gender, and social change.

A longtime editor and author (Disabled Witchcraft, Undead Faith), Ivy Zeller (she/they) brings a deep understanding of both craft and voice. Their work explores the intersections of spirituality, creativity, and justice, and that’s exactly what they seek in their authors — voices questioning the boundaries of belief and belonging. Ivy is especially interested in nonfiction that reimagines spirituality outside traditional frameworks: essays, guides, and hybrid works that help readers navigate life “after faith” with imagination and integrity. They champion writers who blend the sacred and the strange, the personal and the communal.

A writer, scholar, and cultural producer whose work sits at the crossroads of theology, art, and liberation, lenny duncan (they/them) is the author of Dear Church, United States of Grace, Dear Revolutionaries, and Psalms of My People. Their agenting vision will be as bold as their writing: to bring forward prophetic, transformative voices who refuse easy categorization. lenny seeks authors working at the intersections of race, queerness, spirituality, and art — those who imagine new futures through memoir, public theology, and cultural criticism. Their focus is on books that challenge, illuminate, and heal.

I’m excited for these three individuals, each aspiring to bring authors to the publishing world that it didn’t know it needed. And that publishing world, if it’s doing its job, will bring you books by these authors that you didn’t know you needed. That’s what we do in publishing when we are doing our best: we articulate unarticulated needs. We help readers see their world more clearly, discover curiosity and care, and recognize patterns and specificity.

You can meet our agents and our authors at Hyponymous.com (where you can also find our submission guidelines and each agent’s email). It’s a great joy to know each of them, to learn from them, and also to serve as a home base for understanding and navigating the publishing and agenting business. We’re already in conversation with some remarkable additional authors, so I hope you’ll follow any of our agents or authors on social media, on Substack (see the links above), or check out their books. You following them matters. It counts. It makes a difference.

And one note: We’re not in a hurry. Publishing done well takes time — and so does cultural change.

David Morris

Agent, Hyponymous Literary

Publisher, Lake Drive Books