Join us for a powerful evening at the October 19th Sunday Salon, featuring four remarkable writers whose work traces the uncertain lines between memory and reinvention, home and exile, intimacy and distance. Belonging is redefined in the blurred spaces where their stories intersect. DJ DubSix returns with a mix that keeps the vibe going. Von Bar, 3 Bleecker St. 5pm.
Lauren Belski’s “exuberant, fiercely funny” (Jenny Offill) debut novel Dark Enough was called a Best Book of June by Bookshop.org and while in-progress was a finalist for both The Carson McCullers Center at Columbus State University and the Faulkner Society’s William Wisdom Award. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in many literary magazines over the years, including Make, Matter, Avidly and StoryQuarterly. She has an MFA from Brooklyn College, and is both grateful and amazed that she’s managed to be a practicing artist in New York City since 2005, where she has waited tables, tended bar, worked as a local Brooklyn reporter, hosted a reading series, been an adjunct, taught middle school, gotten married, had two children, and never stopped finding a space to let the words flow.
Crystal Hana Kim is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Stone Home (2024), a finalist for the Maya Angelou Book Prize and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Award, and If You Leave Me (2018), which was named a best book of 2018 by over a dozen publications. Kim is the recipient of the 2022 National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and the winner of a 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her family.
Nina Sharma’s work has appeared in outlets such as The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar and Electric Literature. Her debut personal essay collection is The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown (Penguin Press 2024). The Washington Post praises, “Sharma’s debut is remarkable for its daring, how unafraid it is to eschew rosy visions of racial solidarity.” She is formerly the Programs Director at The Asian American Writers’ Workshop. She currently teaches at Barnard College and Columbia University and is a proud co-founder of the comedy troupe Not Your Biwi Improv.
Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a multiracial writer, multimedia producer, and nonprofit director. His debut novel, Transplants (Simon & Schuster, 2025), was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. He is the author of the short story collection What Never Leaves, and his writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, HuffPost, Catapult, Literary Hub, Off Assignment, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, he has also received fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Poets & Writers, Bread Loaf, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, and others. Daniel holds degrees from Oberlin College, Yale University, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.