Nick Courage is a children's book author and a publishing professional who—before co-founding the Courage Literary Agency with Rachel Ekstrom Courage in 2023—worked with award-winning poetry, fiction, and non-fiction (for adults) at Big Five publishing houses like Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Picador as well as consulting with small presses, PR companies, and literary nonprofits. While working in-house, Nick ran campaigns for bestselling and award-winning authors such as Hilary Mantel, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Cunningham, Jeffrey Eugenides, Marilynne Robinson, George Packer, Paul Auster, Ishmael Beah, and more. He also enjoyed working on movie tie-ins (for books like Silver Linings Playbook and Limitless) and learning the ins-and-outs of UK publishing at Pan Macmillan's old offices near King's Cross station in London. He was the digital consultant for events like Lorca in New York, the largest-ever festival in North America celebrating the work of acclaimed Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, and designed websites and secured national media for non-profits like Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum, a sanctuary for exiled writers. As a publishing and marketing consultant, Nick has worked with Workman Publishing, Algonquin Young Readers, Hub City Writers Project, The Telling Room, Alice James Books, Shared Worlds, literary agents and freelance book publicists, New York Times bestselling as well as small-press authors, and a number of book PR companies. Nick regularly speaks at writers' conferences, elementary and middle schools, and colleges and graduate programs, during which he'll talk about his own books or offer marketing and publishing advice to aspiring and published authors.He's recently spoken at the Brooklyn Book Festival, The Texas Book Festival, The Louisiana Book Festival, The Authors Guild, Creative Nonfiction’s Writers’ Conference, Erma Bombeck’s Writers' Workshop, Chatham University’s Summer Community of Writers, Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures, and other larger scale events; he's guest lectured at NYU’s publishing course and Seton Hill’s MFA program; he's key-noted a SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators) conference, spoken about zines in The New School’s graduate program, and taught writing at the collegiate level (most recently at the University of Pittsburgh, where he designed and taught a “Writing Youth Literature” seminar). In addition to writing his own books for young readers, Nick is a partner and creative director at Courage Literary (where he takes on select developmental and editing projects).