The first thing you notice when speaking with Alia Hanna Habib, a vice president and literary agent at the Gernert Company, is her deep curiosity and desire to continue learning. You see it when she talks about her hard-won path to becoming an agent to some of the biggest nonfiction thinkers publishing today—Hanif Abdurraqib, Clint Smith, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, among others—and in how she still discovers new writers of memoir, literary fiction, and narrative nonfiction.