City Lights in conjunction with the Mechanics’ Institute Library and Alfred Knopf present Leila Mottley in conversation with Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, celebrating her fiction debut "Nightcrawling," published by Alfred A. Knopf. This live event took place at the Mechanics’ Institute Library in San Francisco and was hosted by Laura Sheppard and Peter Maravelis.

You can purchase copies of "Nightcrawling" directly from City Lights here: https://citylights.com/nightcrawling/

Leila Mottley is the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. Her work has been featured in The New York Times and Oprah Daily. She was born and raised in Oakland, where she continues to live. "Nightcrawling" is her first novel.

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, born and raised in New Orleans, studied creative writing at Dartmouth College and law at UC Berkeley. Her most recent novel, "The Revisioners," won a 2020 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work and a George Garrett New Writing Award; was a California and Northern California Book Award finalist, a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award Finalist and a Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing finalist; was nominated for the 2020 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize; and was a national bestseller as well as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her debut novel, "A Kind of Freedom," was long-listed for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, won the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, and was the recipient of the First Novelist Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Zyzzyva, The Paris Review; O, The Oprah Magazine; The New York Times Book Review; and other publications. She lives in Oakland with her family.

This event was made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation: citylights.com/foundation