Central Valley Writers’ Workshop has transformed is annual Symposium into a two-day conference to be held April 23 and 24 at the Best Western Yosemite Gateway Inn in Oakhurst.

Award winning editor and editorial consultant Pat LoBrutto, Alanna Ramirez of the Trident Media Group in New York, Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen of Larsen-Pomada Literary Agency in San Francisco and international private investigator turned author Steven Gore are scheduled to speak.

LoBrutto has been an editor, author and anthologist for more than 30 years and has worked in all areas of fiction and nonfiction. His specialties include science fiction, fantasy, horror, thrillers, historical fiction, westerns, mysteries and military history.

He has worked for Ace Books, Doubleday, M. Evans, Random House, Kensington, Internet publisher Stealth Press, and Bantam in positions of editor, senior editor and editor-in-chief.

LoBrutto has worked with authors like Issac Asimov, Stephen King, and Walter Tevis, author of The Hustler and The Color of Money. He has also worked with the Louis L’Amour estate, the Star Wars novelizations, and Dune authors Brian Herbert, Kevin Anderson and Loren Estleman. He is an acquiring editor for Tor/Forge and Quill Driver Books/Word Dancer press, and a scout for the Trident Media Group.

Author Steven Gore spent his career as an international private investigator before settling at the keyboard. His debut thriller, Final Target, is about global finance and arms trade, and takes the reader from San Francisco to London and Kiev as he races against the FBI and Ukraine gangsters in order to clear his friend.

Gore spent decades traveling the globe to places like the North China Sea, a prison in Lugansk, an underground bank in Hong Kong. His work as a PI placed him in meetings with drug syndicates in the Golden Triangle, corrupt police officers in Mexico, sex traffickers in India, and snakeheads in Taipei and San Francisco, according to information obtained from his website.

Agent Alanna Ramirez handles literary fiction, and food and lifestyle, memoirs, pop culture and narrative nonfiction genres. Ramirez accepts queries from authors and is looking for “literary fiction that has the ability to cross into the mainstream market,” according to the agency’s website.

Prior to joining the Trident group, Ramirez worked in the editorial department at Penguin/Berkley Publishing Group, and in the publicity department at HarperCollins.

According to Publisher’s Market Place, Trident Media Group was the top agency in the world for sales of book contracts in 2009. Trident has maintained this top position for nine years. 

Trident has negotiated deals such as selling the second I, Robot movie for the Isaac Asimov Estate to Fox Movie Studio, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy to Columbia Pictures, and Winter Bone, a film based on Daniel Woodrell’s novel of the same name, which has been chosen for the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and Berlin Film Festival.