The Critic and Her Publics

Christine Smallwood is the author of La Captive (Fireflies Press, 2024) and the novel The Life of the Mind (Hogarth, 2021), which Time magazine named one of the top ten fiction books of the year. Her essays, reviews, and profiles have been published in Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. She holds a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a core faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where she teaches courses on the nineteenth-century novel and other topics.

Recorded April 16, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University

Edited by Michele Moses

Music by Dani Lencioni

Art by Leanne Shapton

Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf

Carina del Valle Schorske is a writer, translator, and wannabe backup dancer. Her debut essay collection, The Other Island, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books. It was recently awarded a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. She writes about Caribbean culture, literary politics, diasporic dramas, and the songs she can’t stop singing to herself. Her essays have been published many places including The Believer, The Cut, The Point, and the New York Times Magazine, where she is now a contributing writer. As a translator, she focuses on Puerto Rican poetry, especially the work of Marigloria Palma. Her own poetry has been featured in a variety of small journals and anthologies, and supported by fellowships from CantoMundo, MacDowell, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Recorded October 17, 2023 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University

Edited by Michele Moses

Music by Dani Lencioni

Art by Leanne Shapton

Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf

Maggie Doherty is the author of The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s (2020), which won the Marfield Prize for Arts Writing and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the Nation, among other publications. 

Recorded April 9, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University

Edited by Michele Moses

Music by Dani Lencioni

Art by Leanne Shapton

Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf

Doreen St. Félix has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2017. Previously, she was a culture writer at MTV News. Her writing has appeared in the Times Magazine, New York, Vogue, The Fader, and Pitchfork. St. Félix was named on the Forbes “30 Under 30” media list in 2016. In 2017, she was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, and, in 2019, she won in the same category.

Recorded March 26, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University

Edited by Michele Moses

Music by Dani Lencioni

Art by Leanne Shapton

Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf

Lauren Michele Jackson is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of the essay collection White Negroes and is currently working on a second book, with Amistad Press. She is part of New America’s 2022 class of National Fellows.

Recorded March 5, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University

Edited by Michele Moses

Music by Dani Lencioni

Art by Leanne Shapton

Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf

Jo Livingstone is a medieval literature scholar, a critic, and the 2020 National Book Critics Circle recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. After receiving a BA in English literature from the University of Oxford and a PhD in medieval literature from New York University, Livingstone went on to write cultural criticism for The New Republic and currently manages the editorial website The Stopgap with Daniel Lavery. They are currently a visiting professor at Pratt Institute.

Recorded February 20, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University

Edited by Michele Moses

Music by Dani Lencioni

Art by Leanne Shapton

Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf

Moira Donegan is writer in residence for the Clayman Institute, where she participates in the intellectual life of the Institute, hosts its artist salon series, teaches a class in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, and mentors students, while continuing her own projects and writing. Her criticism, essays, and commentary, which cover the intersection of gender, politics, and the law, have appeared in places such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and Bookforum. Donegan has been an editor at the New Republic and n+1, and currently she writes a column on gender in America for The Guardian. Her first book, Gone Too Far: MeToo, Backlash, and the Future of Feminist Politics, is forthcoming from Scribner. 

Recorded February 6, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University

Edited by Michele Moses

Music by Dani Lencioni

Art by Leanne Shapton

Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf

Anahid Nersessian is a literary critic and Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her first book, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment, was published by Harvard University Press in 2015, and her second, The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life, by the University of Chicago Press in 2020. Her latest, Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse was released in 2022. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, and her writing has also appeared in The Paris Review, New Left Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and n+1. She co-founded and co-edits the Thinking Literature series at the University of Chicago Press.

Recorded November 14, 2023 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University

Edited by Michele Moses

Music by Dani Lencioni

Art by Leanne Shapton

Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf

Hannah Goldfield is a staff writer at The New Yorker, covering restaurants and food culture. Previously, she was a fact checker at The New Yorker and an editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Her writing has appeared in New York magazine and the Times, among other publications.

Recorded November 7, 2023 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University

Edited by Michele Moses

Music by Dani Lencioni

Art by Leanne Shapton

Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf

Sophie Pinkham is a writer, journalist, and critic specializing in Russian and Ukrainian literature, culture, and politics. She is the author of Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine (2016) and the forthcoming The Spirit in the Trees, for which she has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar grant. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, Pinkham writes primarily (though not exclusively) about Russia and Ukraine. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Economist 1843 Magazine, The New Yorker, New Left Review, The Washington Post, and many other publications.

Recorded October 10, 2023 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University

Edited by Michele Moses

Music by Dani Lencioni

Art by Leanne Shapton

Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf