Alia is a Vice President and literary agent at The Gernert Company, which she joined in 2017 after starting her publishing career as a publicist at HMH and working as an agent at McCormick Literary. Her tastes include narrative nonfiction, memoir and literary fiction. Alia graduated from Barnard College and earned an MA in English Literature with a concentration in the nineteenth-century novel from Rutgers. She lives in Brooklyn.