Fall 2025

Why is it this season always seems associated with calendars and syllabi, so long after departure from school? I am gearing up to lead another reading group at the Center for Fiction this fall, entitled Fierce at 50: Feminist Novels of 1975. In it, we will be looking at four novels published during that year by women across cultures, and exploring the ways in which women’s stories have changed–and have not–in the last 50 years. The novels we will be reading together are Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Judith Rossner), Women at Point Zero (Nawal el Saadawi), Wife (Bharati Mukherjee), and Corregidora (Gayl Jones).

Some books are more joyfully read in community, I am looking forward to my local Literary Society’s fall line-up, which includes Jessie Redmon Fauset’s There is Confusion, in celebration of the centennial anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance. Fauset’s is just one book I will be reading from the era, as I also prepare for The Gay Harlem Renaissance exhibit (on view October 10, 2025 – March 8, 2026) at the New York Historical, where I am a volunteer.

I have several fantastic author interviews coming this fall for the New Books Network, including those with historians Dr. Ronald Angelo Johnson (Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution), Dr. Robert D. Bland (Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry’s Lost Political Generation), Dr. Shatema Threadcraft (The Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy, and Morrisonian Democracy), and Professor Gloria J. Browne-Marshall (A Protest History of the United States).

Finally, and as usual, I have maxed out my hold limit waiting patiently for three audiobooks from the New York Public Library, which I will soon have my turn with: Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (Eric Foner), The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990 (Jonathan Mahler), and Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV (Emily Nussbaum).