Valerie Smith (1951-2023)

Literary agent VALERIE SMITH, 71, died March 2, 2023 following a brief illness.

Smith was born May 6, 1951 in Newburgh NY. She began her career as an agent in the 1970s at the Virginia Kidd agency before going independent. She represented authors including Steven Brust, Emma Bull, Pamela Dean, Debra Doyle, John M. Ford, James D. Macdonald, Madeleine Robins, Delia Sherman, Will Shetterly, and Pat Wrede, among many others. She gradually left the industry due to family caregiving responsibilities and legal difficulties unrelated to her literary work, dropping out of the field entirely in the early 2000s.