The Critic and Her Publics

Zakiya Dalila Harris received her MFA in creative writing from The New

School. Her debut novel, The Other Black Girl, was an instant New York

Times bestseller and is now a critically acclaimed Hulu Original Series.

Her essays and book reviews have appeared in Cosmopolitan, The

Guardian, The New York Times, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in

Brooklyn with her husband.

Fergus McIntosh is the head research editor at The New Yorker and runs the magazine's fact-checking department.

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The Critic and Her Publics

Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by

Leanne Shapton • Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf

The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub.

Jackson Howard is an editor and writer from Los Angeles who lives in Brooklyn.

He’s Senior Editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and its imprints MCD and AUWA (headed by Questlove), where he acquires and edits a broad range of fiction and nonfiction. Writers he has published include Judith Butler, Brontez Purnell, Catherine Lacey, Bryan Washington, Laura van den Berg, Sarah Schulman, Jonathan Escoffery, Fernando A. Flores, Susan Straight, Imogen Binnie, Shon Faye, Henry Hoke, Thomas Grattan, Venita Blackburn, Missouri Williams, and many others. Books he has edited have won or been nominated for the Booker Prize, the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the PEN Open Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction.

A longtime Pitchfork contributor, his reviews, profiles, and essays have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Rolling Stone, The Ringer, W., i-D, office, Document, and elsewhere.

In 2023, he was featured in New York magazine’s Power Issue and was named one of Harper’s BAZAAR’s 36 Voices of Now and part of Town & Country’s Creative Aristocracy. In 2022, he was named a Star Watch Honoree by Publishers Weekly.

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The Critic and Her Publics

Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by

Leanne Shapton • Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf

The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub.

Meghan O'Rourke is a writer, poet, and editor. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022); the bestselling memoir The Long Goodbye (2011); and the poetry collections Sun In Days (2017), which was named a New York Times Best Poetry Book of the Year; Once (2011); and Halflife (2007), which was a finalist for the Patterson Poetry Prize and Britain’s Forward First Book Prize. O’Rourke is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Nonfiction Award, the May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes. Currently the editor of The Yale Review, she began her career as a fiction and nonfiction editor at The New Yorker. Since then, she has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate as well as poetry editor and advisory editor for The Paris Review. Her essays, criticism, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry, among others. She is a graduate of Yale University, where she also teaches.

Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by

Leanne Shapton • Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf

The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub.

Kaitlyn Greenidge is the author of Libertie and We Love You, Charlie Freeman, one of the New York Times Critics' Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in the Vogue, Glamour,the Wall Street Journal, Elle, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently Features Director at Harper’s Bazaar as well as a contributing writer for The New York Times.

Recorded October 18, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University

Edited by Michele Moses

Music by Dani Lencioni

Art by Leanne Shapton

Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf

The Critic and Her Publics is a production of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Literary Hub.

Emily Greenhouse is the editor of the New York Review of Books. She is the former managing editor of The New Yorker.

For the full episode transcript, visit the NYRB

Recorded September 17, 2024 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University

Edited by Michele Moses

Music by Dani Lencioni

Art by Leanne Shapton

Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf

The Critic and Her Publics is a production of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Literary Hub.

We've got some exciting news regarding the future of The Critic and Her Publics—and here to bring it to you is the latest episode of Literary Hub's The Lit Hub Podcast.

If you don't know The Lit Hub Podcast, it's the in-house show at Lit Hub, hosted by podcasts editor Drew Broussard. This week features Merve Emre talking about what's next for TCAHP as well as Lit Hub's editor-in-chief Jonny Diamond on why supporting independent media is important and a raucous round-table of Lit Hub staff talking about awards season.

Be sure to subscribe to The Lit Hub Podcast for more bookish fun—and to stay tuned for the return of The Critic and Her Publics in January 2025!

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

Andrea Long Chu is a Pulitzer Prize–winning essayist and critic at New York magazine. Her book Females, an extended annotation of a lost play by Valerie Solanas, was published by Verso in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her writing has also appeared in n+1, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Bookforum, Boston Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4Columns, and Jewish Currents.

Recorded September 26, 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

Introducing The Critic and Her Publics, a new podcast series from The New York Review of Books and Lit Hub. Hosted by Merve Emre.

New episodes every other week beginning Tuesday January 30th.