Dream Streets and Brief Encounters

Vivian Gornick has spent most of her working life writing memoirs and personal essays. At the same time, she has written critical work much influenced by her absorption in modern American feminism, the development in nonfiction writing of personal narrative, and the idea of the “persona” as a control in all serious nonfiction writing. She has published eleven books including the ­memoirs Fierce Attachments (1987), about her childhood in the Bronx and her lifelong ­antagonism with her ­mother; Approaching Eye Level (1996), a collection of essays about her life as one loner among many in Manhattan; and her 1997 collection of essays, The End of the Novel of Love, which explores how the subject of love and marriage had lost its dramatic potential for novelists after the 1960s.

Ada Calhoun is the author of Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, named one of the Best Books of 2022 by The Washington Post, NPR, and Oprah Daily. The New York Times named it one of the year’s 100 Notable Books. Previous books include the New York City history St. Marks Is Dead, the essay collection Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, and New York Times bestseller Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis. Her next book, Crush, a novel, will be published by Viking in Spring 2025.

Tricia Romano is the author of The Freaks Came Out To Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture. During her eight- year career at the Voice,, she wrote features and award-winning cover stories about culture and music. Her reported column, Fly Life, gave a glimpse into the underbelly of New York nightlife. She has been a staff writer at the Seattle Times and served as the editor in chief of the Stranger, Seattle’s alternative newsweekly. A fellow at MacDowell, Ucross and Millay artist residencies, her work has been published in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Daily Beast, Men’s Journal, Elle, Alta Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, among others.