The penultimate Sunday Salon of the season lands on May 31, with an evening of bold work from five remarkable writers: Zeeva Bukai, Serkan Görkemli, Sara Lippmann, Denne Michele Norris, and Sarah Wang. New books, urgent voices, and fiction that cuts close — family, faith, desire, and the selves we can’t outrun. 5pm. Von Bar, 3 Bleecker St.
Zeeva Bukai is the author of the novels, The Anatomy of Exile, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction, and The World Between. Her stories have appeared in Smashing the Tablets: A Retelling of the Hebrew Bible, Frankly Feminist; Short Stories by Jewish Women, CARVE, The Master’s Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and elsewhere. Her honors include fellowships at the Center for Fiction, Hedgebrook, and Byrdcliff Artist in Residence program. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
Serkan Görkemli is the author of two books: Sweet Tooth and Other Stories (University Press of Kentucky; 2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards silver winner in LGBTQ+ fiction and finalist in short stories; 2025 Housatonic Book Awards finalist in fiction) and Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey (SUNY Press; 2015 Lavender Rhetorics Book Award winner). His writing has appeared in Image, Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, Epiphany, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Joyland, Foglifter, and Chelsea Station. Originally from Türkiye, he has a Ph.D. in English from Purdue University and is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut.
Sara Lippmann is the author of the novels Lech and Hidden River and the story collections Doll Palace andJerks. Her fiction has won the Lilith Fiction Prize and has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her essays have appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. With Seth Rogoff, she co-edited the anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible. She is a co-founder of Writing Co-lab, an artist-run online teaching cooperative, and the editor in chief of Epiphanymagazine. She lives in Brooklyn.
Denne Michele Norris is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, winner of the 2022 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. She is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction, and appears in McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and ZORA. She is co-host of the critically-acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot, and her debut novel, When The Harvest Comes, was released by Random House in April 2025.
Sarah Wang is the author of New Skin (Little, Brown, 2026). She has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Harper’s Bazaar, n+1, McSweeney’s, and BOMB, among other publications. Wang is a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow, the winner of a Barbara Deming Award, and a finalist for the Nelson Algren Prize. She teaches creative writing at Barnard College and lives in New York City.