About Us

Great Dog Literary was founded by Liz Nealon in May 2017. We are interested in work shaped by attention to craft, enlivened by a unique voice, and focused on the potential to clarify the reader’s own humanity.

In adult books, we are looking for fresh and diverse voices in the areas of literary fiction, women's fiction, and poetry, as well as narrative non-fiction in the areas of food/cooking/gardening, memoir, pop culture, science and technology, true crime, travel.

In children's books we particularly seeking diverse authors, illustrators, characters, voices and stories. We represent picture books (with an emphasis on non-fiction, strong literary titles, or works by author/illustrators), middle grade, and YA. Liz’s particular love is middle grade. She is drawn to coming-of-age stories and is a sucker for a good middle grade mystery. Mona is especially drawn to the interweaving narratives of words and text in picture books.

Authors represented by Great Dog Literary include Don Bolognese, Susan Champlin, Lynn Curlee, Diane deGroat, Naila Farouky, Emma Fick, Kermit Frazier, Hardie Gramatky (estate), Marti Hill, Jonathan Hollingsworth, Johanna Hurwitz, Emily Perl Kingsley, Kathryn Lefroy, Stan Mack, J.A. Marley, Lisa N. Peterson, Nicole Quinn, Ron Roose, Eric Rosenblum, Shelley Rotner, Seymour Simon, Crystal Simone Smith, Erica Simone Turnipseed, A. Wild (a.k.a. Ashley Wilda), Jessica Wolf.

We also represent an extensive list of well-known authors and illustrators who control the rights to their backlists, and who have converted their catalogs to digital. We work to find distribution, both domestic and international, trade and educational, for these valuable digital collections.

We have extensive expertise in all aspects of self-publishing, and work with our authors both to build their books and to market them.

We are tech savvy and always on the lookout for innovative outlets and approaches to help our clients reach the widest possible audience.

Liz is the former Publisher of StarWalk Kids Media, an award-winning digital publishing company that she co-founded with author Seymour Simon (2012). She has unique and specific experience in children's digital publishing, with extensive knowledge of the US Schools & Libraries sector. She is also experienced in working with international partners, generating international reprint and sub-rights deals for dozens of books. 

In her previous life Liz was an award-winning executive producer and children's media industry leader who played an integral role in shaping the indelible youth brands Sesame Street, Kidz Bop, and MTV. She served as Worldwide Creative Director for Sesame Street, and traveled the world as Senior Vice President of MTV International Programming, reconceiving the popular music brand for Europe, Brazil, Japan and Australia. 

Drawn to the imaginative challenges of content creation, Mona spent 25 years designing, writing, and producing non-fiction media for broadcast, non-broadcast, print, and the web. She became a producer through writing. Mona helped to define audiences and matched the message to the medium for, among others, The Human Genome Project, Weston Woods, several of the Discovery Channels, and PBS. Her work won top national awards.

Before she was a producer, Mona was a librarian at the Boston Public Library and for several years managed a small book shop in Washington, D.C. Throughout, she sought to forge connections—between the visual and the textual, between trust and the collaborative process, between content and true emotion. She believes in the power of books to create more empathic human beings and is thrilled to be focused on the literary arts now.