Spring 2026

There are so many things to look forward to this spring, not the least of which is the launch of my new podcast. For over a year, I have been speaking to authors and scholars across the fields of History, African American Studies, American Studies, Literary Studies, and more on the New Books Network. Beginning this spring, I will be launching my own channel on the network, Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer, with a fantastic lineup of guests including Dr. Jason Young (The Mask of Memory: White Racial Fantasy After the Civil War); Dr. Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor (Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me); Steven Thrasher (The Overseer Class: A Manifesto); and Kyra Davis Lurie (The Great Mann).

I’m excited also to host another virtual reading group through the Center for Fiction, this one called Novelists Writing Novelists, where we’ll explore line between truth and storytelling, pathology, perception, and performance in three metafictional novels with unreliable narrators: Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, Colored Television by Danzy Senna, and The Fabulist by Stephen Glass.

While I have been reading literary criticism for years, since launching Adoption Pop! in December, I find myself increasingly concerned with film and television criticism, as well as the novels that underly much of the media we consume. Reads in preparation for upcoming episodes include Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë); With Love, Mommie Dearest: The Making of an Unintentional Camp Classic (A. Ashley Hoff); and The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood (Kristen Martin).

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: To Save and Destroy (Viet Thanh Nguyen), Needful Things (Stephen King), and The Cider House Rules (John Irving).