Jonah Straus is founder of Straus Literary, a boutique literary agency based in San Francisco with an office in New York. He specializes in literary fiction, journalism, history, narrative nonfiction, and the culinary arts.

Jonah got his start in publishing in the warehouse of Atrium Publishers Group, an independent book distributor in Northern California and over the subsequent ten years held positions in sales, production, editorial and marketing at several publishers in the San Francisco area.

He moved to New York in 2005, where he worked on the Selected Shorts NPR reading series at Symphony Space. He established Straus Literary there in 2007, and moved the agency back to San Francisco in 2015, keeping a satellite office in Manhattan.

Notable fiction clients include Achy Obejas (Pulitzer and Lambda winner, Days of Awe, Ballantine), John Keene (Whiting Award, Counternarratives, New Directions), David Hollander (L.I.E., Ballantine), Adriana Lisboa (Saramago Prize, Crow Blue, Bloomsbury), celebrated Canadian writer Clark Blaise (The Cruelest Gift, forthcoming, Knopf), Granta Best Brazilian writer Tatiana Salem Levy (The House in Smyrna, Scribe), and Eric Gamalinda (Man Asian Prize finalist, The Descartes Highlands, Akashic).

Nonfiction writers include political journalist Alvaro Vargas Llosa (Liberty for Latin America, FSG), Brazilian bestseller Drauzio Varella (Lockdown, Simon & Schuster), Sarah DiGregorio (Early: What Premature Birth Tells Us About Being Human, forthcoming, HarperCollins) environmental whistleblower E.G. Vallianatos (Poison Spring, Bloomsbury Press) and UN spokesperson Gordon Weiss (The Cage, Random House) as well as a select group of chefs, artisans, and food and travel writers.