KAA Writers Retreat in Tuscany

Over the course of her three decades in the publishing industry, Jennifer has acquired multiple New York Times bestsellers, including the #1 NYT bestsellers You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero (more than 4 million copies sold) and the vegan manifesto Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin.

Jane von Mehren has spent four decades working in publishing—as an editor and publisher at Crown, Houghton Mifflin, Penguin Books, and Random House, and literary agent at Aevitas Creative Management, where she is a Senior Partner. She has worked with multiple New York Times bestselling authors, and her writers have been nominated or awarded the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Pulitzer Prize, Whiting Award, PEN/Hemingway and PEN/Faulkner awards, among others. Her list includes narrative nonfiction, science, history, economics, health & wellness, pop culture, psychology, literary, historical, and book club fiction, thrillers, YA, and, of course, memoir. Among the memoirs she has represented are They All Went to Barneys by Gene Pressman, You Never Know by Tom Selleck, Admissions by Kendra James, The Widowers Notebook by Jonathan Santlofer, and The Mother Code by Ruthie Ackerman.

An award-winning journalist, Ruthie Ackerman’s writing has been published in Vogue, Glamour, O Magazine, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Salon, Slate, Newsweek, and more. Her Modern Love essay for the New York Times became the launching point for her memoir, The Mother Code: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Myths That Shape Us, which was published by Random House in May 2025.