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A Writer At Risk, Working in New York City
What is home, and how do you know where you truly belong? These are questions that Kanchana Ugbabe, an Indian-Nigerian writer currently living at Westbeth Artists Housing in New York City as a Fordham...
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What One Person Can Do to Get People Reading
Alvin Irby never wanted to become a teacher, the same profession his mother held for over 30 years in the Little Rock, Arkansas school district in which he grew up. But the adults in Irby’s life saw...
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Bright Lights, Big City, New Bookstore
The first thing you notice as you walk into Brooklyn’s brand new Center for Fiction, which opened in February, is the bookstore. 1,800 square feet of floor-to-ceiling windows, all stacked to the brim...
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A Writing School for Working People
It’s a cold Saturday in early February 2019. In the white-and-red-painted offices of PEN America in Soho, I’m sitting around a table with actors, taxi drivers, domestic workers, and visual artists....
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Open Secrets at the PEN World Voices Festival
It’s the first day of the 2019 PEN World Voices Festival and I’m 30 minutes late to see Tara Westover talk with Min Jin Lee about her bestselling memoir Educated. Something came up at work, and as I...
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Providing Help to Booksellers, When They Need It
Maeve Noonan still owns the first book she ever purchased. It was Anne of Ingleside, the sixth book in the Anne of Green Gables series. “I bought it with my own money when I was in second grade,” she...
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Urgency and Inspiration at the 2019 New York City Poetry Festival
There’s a spot on Governor’s Island where, if I stand still, I can hear two poems at the same time. It’s at an intersection on Colonel’s Row, a street lined with Victorian houses that feels disarmingly...
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Fourteen-Year-Old Marley Dias, Tireless Promoter of Diversity in Literature
Two minutes into a conversation with Marley Dias, it’s easy to see why her star has risen so fast. In the last few years, she’s appeared on CBS This Morning, The View, and has spoken at the United...
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Creating Literary Community for Writers Raising Children
On November 12, at the Pen Parentis Literary Salon in Lower Manhattan, I hear author Jimin Han say something I’ve never heard a writer admit before. “I didn’t really commit to being a writer until I...
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The Book Industry Charitable Foundation Has Never Been Busier Helping Bookstores
Last August, I wrote about the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, or “Binc,” a Michigan-based non-profit created to support booksellers who have fallen on hard times. If a bookseller winds up in the...
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