Great Writers, Great Readings: Past Authors

Spring 2025

CELEBRATING OUR OWN
Faculty, alumni, and students of Hofstra discuss their craft of writing.
Film Screening and Discussion: LOVE, BROOKLYN
Screenplay by
Paul Zimmerman, Adjunct Associate Professor of English

Three longtime Brooklynites navigate careers, love, loss, and friendship against the rapidly changing landscape of their beloved city. With humor and keen observation, first-time feature director Rachael Abigail Holder invitesus into a world where past and present collide, mining Paul Zimmerman’s script and her charismatic cast for a layered, later-in-life coming-of-age story. The film premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Khaholi Bailey
KHAHOLI BAILEY is a writer of fiction and memoir. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Catapult, Breadcrumbs, Midnight and Indigo, and Flapperhouse. Miseducation of a 90’s Baby is her first book. She holds a BA in creative writing from Hunter College.

June Gervais
JUNE GERVAIS is the author of the novel Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair. Her essays and stories have appeared in Lit Hub, Writer’s Digest, Sojourners, The Common, Cordella, Big Fiction, The Missouri Review, The Southampton Review, Image Journal, Consequence Magazine, and elsewhere. She grew up on Long Island and received her MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College in Vermont. Alongside writing, she has worked as a full-time activist/organizer; a freelance graphic designer, writer, and editor; and arts director at a not-for-profit.

Emily Rapp Black
Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir; The Still Point of the Turning World, a New York Times bestseller and an Editor’s Pick; Sanctuary; and Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg. A former Fulbright scholar and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, her work has appeared in numerous publications including VOGUE, The New York Times, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, O, The Oprah Magazine, and The Los Angeles Times.

Emily Rapp Black, will read from and discuss her latest memoir Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg, an account of how the experiences, art, and disabilities of Frida Kahlo shaped Black’s understanding of her own life as an amputee.

Watch Event Video

Fall 2024

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is the author of three novels, Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Americanah (2013), a short story collection, The Thing around Your Neck (2009), and three books of nonfiction, We Should All Be Feminists (2014), Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2017), and Notes on Grief (2021). Ms. Adichie’s work has been translated into more than 30 languages. She has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (2007) and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2008). She has also been named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2015, and in 2017, Fortune Magazine named her one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders.

M.J. Flood
M.J. Flood is the author of Where Are You? Finding Myself in My Greatest Loss, a memoir of loss and healing. Shaped by losses throughout his life, M.J. Flood writes about the deep ache of grief as well as the sought after hope. M.J. Flood is also the writer and director of Too Much Noise — a short film in American Sign Language — which appeared in several American and International film festivals and won the Best Original Idea award at New York City’s 2018 Chain Film Festival. He is currently working on his second book and a documentary on the effects of suicide on family members. He also writes regularly for Medium.com. M.J. Flood is a husband and a father of two girls. He lives on Long Island where he has taught writing for twenty-five years at Kellenberg Memorial High School in Uniondale and at Molloy University in Rockville Centre.

Spring 2024

Elizabeth Schmermund
Schmermund is a poet, essayist, and professor. Her work has appeared in The Independent, Mantis, and Gyroscope Review, among other venues. Her first poetry chapbook, Alexander the Great, is published by Finishing Line Press. She lives in New York with her family and is currently an assistant professor of English at SUNY Old Westbury.

Sigrid Nunez
Sigrid Nunez has published nine novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and, most recently, The Vulnerables. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Nunez’s other honors include a Whiting Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has been translated into more than 30 languages. Photo by Marion Ettlinger.

Fall 2023

George M. Johnson
Award-winning Black non-binary writer, author, and activist. They are the New York Times bestselling author of All Boys Aren’t Blue and We Are Not Broken. They were named to the 2022 TIME100 Next, TIME‘s annual list of rising stars across industries, and they were nominated for an Emmy award for their dramatic reading of All Boys Aren’t Blue.

Adrienne Brodeur
Author of the novel Little Monsters and the memoir Wild Game, which was selected as a "Best Book of the Year" by NPR and The Washington Post and is in development as a Netflix film. She founded the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with Francis Ford Coppola, and currently serves as executive director of Aspen Words, a literary nonprofit and program of the Aspen Institute.

Samuel G. Freedman
Former columnist for The New York Times and a professor at Columbia University. Author of acclaimed books, including the newly-released Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, described by Jon Meacham as “a compelling and important account of Humphrey’s critical role in the freedom struggles of the mid-20th century.”

Kelly McMasters, Martha McPhee, Kristal Brent Zook
Hofstra professors and authors discuss their recently published memoirs. Watch this event.

Spring 2023

Wanting: Women Writing About Desire
Guthart Cultural Center Theater
with co-editor Kelly McMasters and contributors Aracelis Girmay and Domenica Ruta. Watch this reading

Phillis Levin and Christie Ann Reynolds '05
Phillis Levin is the author of five poetry collections, including Mr. Memory & Other Poems, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Levin has completed her sixth collection and is working on a memoir. (Photo ©Sigrid Estrada)

Christie Ann Reynolds is the author of Revenge for Revenge and The New School Press chapbook idiot heart and Girl Boy Girl Boy (Corresponding Society). Watch this reading

Fall 2022

Ralph Savarese
Essayist, poet, scholar and activist, whose most recent book is See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor (Duke University Press 2018). 2007's Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption (Other Press), won an Independent Publishers Gold Medal. Watch his reading

Joanna Rakoff
Author of the international bestselling memoir My Salinger Year and the novel A Fortunate Age, winner of the Goldberg Prize for Fiction, the Elle Readers’ Prize, and a San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller. Rakoff’s books have been translated into 20 languages and nominated for major prizes in The Netherlands and France. Watch her reading

Rachel Hadas
Poet, essayist, and translator. Among the more recent of her many books are two volumes of poetry, Pandemic Almanac (2022), Love and Dread (2021), and a book of essays, Piece by Piece (2021). She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant in poetry, and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Michelle Hart
A member of Hofstra’s Class of 2011, Hart was the assistant books editor at O, the Oprah Magazine and Oprah Daily. Her first novel, We Do What We Do in the Dark (May 2022), received praise from The New York Times, Publishers Weekly and TIME, among others. Watch her reading

Spring 2022

Edwidge Danticat
Recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and author of Claire of the Sea Light, a New York Times notable book; Brother, I’m Dying, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist; and Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection.of the essay collection Trick Mirror.

Jason Schneiderman
Author of four books of poems, including Hold Me Tight (Red Hen, 2020). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he is co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile.

Fall 2021

Larissa Pham
Essayist and critic whose work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Bookforum, Guernica, The Nation, and elsewhere. Her 2021 essay collection, Pop Song, is about love and about falling in love - with a place, or a painting, or a person.
Watch Her Reading.

Joshua Henkin
Author of Morningside Heights (2021), selected by the American Booksellers Association as the #1 Indie Next Pick and named an Editors' Choice Book by The New York Times. He is the author of Swimming Across the Hudson, a Los Angeles Times Notable Book; Matrimony, a New York Times Notable Book; and The World Without You, named an Editors' Choice Book by The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune.
Watch His Reading.

Connie Roberts
A 2010 recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award for her manuscript Not the Delft School. Her poetry collection, Little Witness (Arlen House, 2015), was inspired by her experiences growing up in an industrial school (orphanage) in the Irish midlands. Roberts is a Hofstra Adjunct Assistant Professor of English.
Watch Her Reading.