Join us for an evening of readings by Tara Isabella Burton, Maisy Card, Simeon Marsalis, Diane Mehta, and Helen Betya Rubinstein, with music from Lauren Gregory & Matthew Ward.

Readers’ books will be for sale and refreshments will be available but feel free to BYOB.

Tara Isabella Burton's debut novel, 2018's Social Creature, was named a "book of the year" by The New York Times, New York's Vulture, and The Guardian. Her second novel, The World Cannot Give, will be published by Simon & Schuster this week. Her first nonfiction book, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (2020), was praised by Tim Shriver as "the most thoughtful analysis of our current spiritual crisis anywhere." She is working on a history of self-creation, Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, to be published by Public Affairs in 2023.

Maisy Card is the author of the novel These Ghosts are Family, which won an American Book Award, the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize in fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the LA Times Book Prizes Art Seidenbaum Award. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, AGNI, The New York Times, Guernica, and other publications. Maisy was born in Portmore, Jamaica and raised in Queens, NY. A graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA in Fiction program, she lives in Newark, NJ.

Simeon Marsalis is a writer from New Rochelle, NY, who received an MFA in 2019 from Rutgers University-Newark, where he was the Henry Rutgers Fellow. As Lie Is to Grin, his first novel was published by Catapult in 2017 and shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's first novel prize. His short story, "The Exterminator" appears in the Fall 2021 Founder's Issue of Lampblack, a magazine and literary organization he co-founded. Marsalis is currently at work on his second novel entitled, End Times, and works as a part-time lecturer at Rutgers University-Newark.

Diane Mehta's poetry collection Forest with Castanets was published in 2019. Last fall, she was a fellow at Civitella Ranieri in Italy. Her recent poems and essays are in The New Yorker, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The American Poetry Review, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, A Public Space, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, The Common, and VQR. She works with arts organizations on commissions, including a poem for the NYC Ballet on Christopher Wheeldon’s DGV: Danse à Grande Vitesse, and a sonnet about Hamlet for the Theater for a New Audience. She is currently shopping a new poetry manuscript, along with an essay collection and a novel. She grew up in Bombay and New Jersey, and lives in Brooklyn.

Helen Betya Rubinstein's essays and fiction have appeared in Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere, and her opinions in Jewish Currents, LA Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New York Times. Her book Feels Like Trouble—transgressive takes on writing, teaching & publishing—will be published by the University of New Orleans Press. She teaches at The New School, and works one-on-one with writers as a coach.