Author Events

Author Zakiya Dalila Harris alights at Greenlight to launch her debut novel The Other Black Girl, a whip-smart thriller and crackling social commentary on the trials of being a Black woman in an overwhelmingly white industry. Harris talks with Brit Bennett (bestselling author of The Mothers and The Vanishing Half) about navigating the whiteness... Read more »

In his new book Films of Endearment, filmmaker and critic Michael Koresky revisits the important and popular female-driven films of the 1980s he grew up watching with his mother—9 to 5, Terms of Endearment, The Color Purple, and Aliens, to name a few—to trace out a poignant personal history of family, grief, and resilience. Mark Harris (Pictures... Read more »

Award-winning writer and filmmaker Bridgett M. Davis offers an homage to an extraordinary parent in her memoir The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers. She discusses the book (and complicated mothers) with James Hannaham, author of the novel Delicious Foods. (Recorded at the Fort Greene bookstore on February...

Author Brandon Taylor interviews fellow novelist and travel writer Maggie Shipstead about her epic novel Great Circle, a world-spanning tale of women “navigating the ice floes of patriarchy.” From evolving ways of defining (or not defining) gender through the past two centuries, to Hollywood gossip and the perennial challenge of writing... Read more »

This virtual launch event for Joan Silber’s newest novel Secrets of Happiness drew a passionate crowd for her conversation with fellow novelist Margot Livesey about themes of money, love, travel, and spirituality. Livesey and Silber talked about her desire to write “big and small at the same time” with closely observed interiority but wide... Read more »

Bestselling memoirist Stephanie Danler celebrates the paperback release of her most recent work Stray with author Kara Preiss and actor Emma Roberts, co-founders of the literary website Belletrist. The trio talk about writing as a way to survive a troubled home life, the challenges, regrets, and requirements of memoir, and the fascinating... Read more »

Adam Mansbach, best known as creator of the parodic children’s book Go the F*ck to Sleep as well as several award-winning novels, opens up about his memoir of his brother’s suicide I Had a Brother Once in conversation with poet and memoirist Saeed Jones. Their moving and vulnerable conversation circles around the ways that grief runs up against... Read more »

Greenlight neighbor J. Nicole Jones discusses Low Country, her new memoir of her South Carolina family, with Allie Rowbottom, Allie Rowbottom (author of the memoir Jell-O Girls). The two talk about the writing process, the book's grounding in Southern storytelling traditions, and the act of reclaiming stories through the retelling, especially...

Author (and indie bookstore owner!) Michaela Carter discusses her new book Leonora in the Morning Light, a novel of the real-life Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, with fellow author Kate Christensen (The Great Man). The two novelists discuss the intersections of painting and writing, women artists as muses for each other, madness and...

National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award and Man Booker finalist Rachel Kushner discusses her new collection of nonfiction, The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020, with fellow author Hari Kunzru (author of Red Pill and White Tears). The two authors discuss self-examination vs. self-mythologizing in writing about one's own...

Two highly celebrated authors tell the story of race and gender in America through their exquisitely written memoirs. Award-winning author Susan Straight’s memoir, In the Country of Women, is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women. Straight writes of the hardships and...

Andrew Ridker (author of The Altruists) interviews his longtime friend Sanjena Sathian about her epic debut novel Gold Diggers, an Indian American family story with a magical twist. Their conversation encompasses alchemy, the real and metaphorical meanings of gold, the Desi community in Atlanta, various writing workshop experiences, and bucking...

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Poets Victoria Chang and Vijay Seshradi join poet and editor Edward Hirsch to celebrate the publication of the anthology 100 Poems to Break Your Heart. Hirsch, whose exploratory essays accompany each poem in the book, discusses the craft of writing about grief, and each poet reads a poem (Stanley Kunitz's "Halley's Comet, Chang's "Blue Dress",...

Dawnie Walton launches her debut novel, The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, a fictional oral history of a 1970s rock ’n’ roll duo, in conversation with fellow author Kiley Reid (author of Such a Fun Age). The two women talk about the challenges of writing about music and juggling multiple voices, their overlapping experiences with the Iowa...

Acclaimed podcaster and political analyst Ezra Klein of Vox talks with Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me) in front of a packed house about the evolution of America’s broken system as outlined in his book Why We’re Polarized. (Recorded at St. Joseph’s College on February 2, 2020)

Craig Taylor's new book New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time comes to life with local actors portraying some of the 75 fascinating city residents featured in the book! Taylor introduces readings by Craig Geraghty, Maggie Hoffman, Aaron Landsman, Hubert Point-Du Jour, Scott Shepherd, Erika Chong Shuch, Jahmorei Snipes, and Ben Williams,...

Content warning: This episode discusses suicide and death. Reporter Katie Engelhart discusses her compassionate and thoughtful new book The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die with author Larissa MacFarquhar (author of Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help). Their discussion eschews judgement...

Greenlight neighbor Rumaan Alam (Leave the World Behind) talks with returning favorite Hala Alyan about her new novel The Arsonist's City, a rich family story which is also a love letter to Beirut. The two writers discuss the challenges of writing in the pandemic and their own writing routines as well as the differences between writing prose and...

Greenlight neighbor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan interviews bestselling author Carol Edgarian about her cinematic and adventurous novel Vera, set during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Their conversation delves into the history of the event and the parallels of a society teetering on disaster and fraught with political...