Featured
Authors
All events Saturday, September 27, 2025.
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List of Authors: Megan Abbott | Samiya Bashir | Molly Beer | Jordan Castro | Kristie Frederick Daugherty | Tembe Denton-Hurst | Paul Elie | Chantal Fernandez | Roxane Gay | Kimiko Hahn | Lindsay Hall | Randall Horton | Luis Jaramillo | Sandeep Jauhar | Min Jin Lee | John McWhorter | Debbie Millman | Honor Moore | Ta-Sean C. Murdock | Urayoán Noel | Tracy O’Neill | Julia Phillips | Bridget Read | Ambika Sambasivan & Suhani Parikh | Minita Sanghvi | Christopher Shaw | Russell Shorto | Leah Umansky | Niobe Way | Dana A. Williams | Natasha Williams | Tamani Wooley
Megan Abbott “Pyramid Schemes”
In conversation with Bridget Read, Moderated by Jimmy Vielkind
1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
Megan Abbott, bestselling crime novelist, has been called a “superstar of the suspense genre” (NPR) and “The Queen of Noir” (People). Her new novel is El Dorado Drive (2025), about a group of middle-aged women who— facing reduced prosperity and a changing economy— launch a dangerous pyramid scheme in suburban Detroit. Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) called it, “suspenseful, beautifully written and, quite simply, exquisite.”
Samiya Bashir “Poets Respond to Taylor Swift”
In conversation with Kristie Frederick Daugherty and Leah Umansky,
Moderated by Rae Muhlstock
2:15 p.m. - 3:15 p.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
Samiya Bashir, poet, performer and multimedia artist— the daughter of a Somali immigrant father and African American mother— has been called a “dynamic, shape-shifting machine of perpetual motion” (Diego Báez, Booklist). Winner of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, she previously served as Poet Laureate of the University of California system. Her new collection is I Hope This Helps (2025). Terrance Hayes called it, “an illustrated, illuminated guidebook, a lantern of language for surviving dark times.”
Molly Beer “Becoming New York”
In conversation with Russell Shorto, Moderated by Jessie Serfilippi
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 a.m., Campus Center West Auditorium
Molly Beer is the author of Angelica: For Love and Country in a Time of Revolution (2025), a revelatory biography of Albany’s own Angelica Schuyler Church (1756-1814), daughter of General Philip Schuyler, flirtatious sister-in-law of Alexander Hamilton, and a key member of Thomas Jefferson’s “charming coterie” of artists in Paris. Angelica retells the U.S. origin story from the perspective of a woman situated at the heart of the American Revolution.
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Jordan Castro “Masculinity”
In conversation with Niobe Way, Moderated by Mark Koplik
10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m., Campus Center West Boardroom
Jordan Castro is the author of the novel, Muscle Man (2025), a metaphysical thriller about an unhappy English professor at a liberal arts college who becomes obsessed with bodybuilding. Publishers Weekly said, “This captures male loneliness in all its funk and fury.” Castro’s debut novel was The Novelist (2022), an NPR Best Book of the Year about a young man, beset by the distractions of social media, who struggles to write his first novel.
Kristie Frederick Daugherty “Poets Respond to Taylor Swift”
In conversation with Samiya Bashir and Leah Umansky,
Moderated by Rae Muhlstock
2:15 p.m. – 3:15p.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
Kristie Frederick Daugherty, poet and English professor, is the editor of Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift (2024), an anthology that brings together an astonishing range of notable American poets to explore the remarkable cultural impact of Taylor Swift. Featured poets include the 23rd US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, Pulitzer Prize winners Diane Seuss, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carl Phillips, Rae Armantrout, Paul Muldoon, and Gregory Pardlo, and many more.
Tembe Denton-Hurst “Beauty and Its Discontents”
In conversation with Chantal Fernandez, Moderated by Janell Hobson
11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Campus Center West Boardroom
Tembe Denton-Hurst, New York magazine beauty and lifestyle journalist, is the author of Homebodies (2023), an acclaimed debut novel about a young Black writer whose world is turned upside down when she loses her coveted job in media and pens a searing manifesto about racism in the industry. Denton-Hurst is also the author of Fresh Sets: Contemporary Nail Art from Around the World (2025), a globe-spanning book that collects the work of some of today’s most creative manicurists.
Paul Elie “Toni Morrison and America in the 1980s”
In conversation with Dana A. Williams, Moderated by Paul Grondahl
2:30 p.m. - 3:30 p.m., Campus Center West Auditorium
Paul Elie, son of Latham, NY, is a major chronicler of American Catholic experience. He is a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Life You Save May Be Your Own (2004), about Catholic writers searching for God, and Reinventing Bach (2012), about Bach in modern musical culture. His newest is The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s (2025), featuring a chapter on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, written while she taught at UAlbany from 1984-89.
Chantal Fernandez “Beauty and Its Discontents”
In conversation with Tembe Denton-Hurst, Moderated by Janell Hobson
11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Campus Center West Boardroom
Chantal Fernandez, fashion journalist, is coauthor (with Lauren Sherman) of Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon (2024). The book recounts how a tiny chain of boutiques became a dominant global brand, eventually colliding with scandal, bad decisions, and changing cultural norms. Fortune’s Jason Del Rey said, “One of the great cautionary tales of modern retail, Selling Sexy packs an MBA's worth of lessons into a riveting page-turner punctuated by personal tragedy and corporate excess.”
Roxane Gay Love Letter to a Garden
In conversation with Debbie Millman, Moderated by Paul Grondahl
1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Campus Center West Boardroom
Roxane Gay, celebrated public intellectual, is the author of many books that have been hailed as modern-day classics, including Bad Feminist: Essays (2014), which Time magazine called, “a manual on how to be human,” and Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017), a “work of staggering honesty” (New Republic) that explores her relationship with food, weight, and body image. She contributes a variety of garden-to-table recipes to a new book of words and pictures, Love Letter to a Garden (2025), created by her wife, designer Debbie Millman.
Kimiko Hahn “State Poet and Author in Conversation”
In conversation with Min Jin Lee, Moderated by Paul Grondahl
10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m., Campus Center West Auditorium
Kimiko Hahn is the newly named State Poet of New York (2025-27). Her work explores contemporary womanhood, desire, death, conflicting identities, the mysteries of science and nature, and traditional Japanese and Western poetic forms. Her collections include The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems (2024), Foreign Bodies (2020); Brain Fever (2014); Toxic Flora (2010); The Unbearable Heart (1996), winner of the American Book Award; and Earshot (1992), winner of the Theodore Roethke Prize. In 2023, Hahn was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Lindsay Hill "New Fiction"
In conversation with Christopher Shaw, Moderated by Bruce McPherson
3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
Lindsay Hill’s Sea of Hooks (2013)—his first novel, published at age 61—received the 2014 PEN Center USA Fiction Award among other significant awards. Composed of fleeting thoughts, flashbacks and very brief narratives, the novel explores the life of a complicated young man. Publishers Weekly named it a “Top 5 Fiction title of 2013” and their “Most Underrated Book of the Year.” Hill’s second novel is Tidal Lock (2024), the story of a mercurial, disoriented young woman who slowly unriddles the truth of her father’s disappearance.
Randall Horton “Poasis and Beyond: Always the Many"
Panel Discussion, Reading and Performance
4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m., Campus Center West Auditorium
Randall Horton, poet, earned his Ph.D. in English at UAlbany, where he studied with late poet and professor Pierre Joris (1946-2025). “The only person in the United States with seven felony convictions and academic tenure” (PEN America), Horton received the 2021 American Book Award for his collection {#289-128}: Poems (2020), a paradoxical exploration of the idea of freedom in a cell. His newest book is Dead Weight: A Memoir in Essays (2022). He sits on the Advisory Board of PEN America’s Prison Writing Program.
Luis Jaramillo “Fairy Tales for Adults”
In conversation with Julia Phillips, Moderated by Moriah Hampton
11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
​​Luis Jaramillo is the author of The Witches of El Paso (2024), a tale of witchcraft, time travel, U.S. Latino history, and coming of age. Reyna Grande said, “Luis Jaramillo weaves a captivating tale of family, tradition, and the enduring power of love.” Mira Jacob said, “Sexy, smart, and soulful, Luis Jaramillo’s The Witches of El Paso pulls us across borders and time to get to the essence of what it means for families to survive this beautiful, fractured world.”
Sandeep Jauhar “Dad’s Brain”
In conversation with Natasha Williams, Moderated by Mark Koplik
2:15 p.m. – 3:15 p.m., Campus Center West Boardroom
Sandeep Jauhar, cardiologist and bestselling medical writer, is the author most recently of My Father's Brain: Life in the Shadow of Alzheimer's (2023), an intimate account of his father’s descent into dementia, and an exploration of what we know about the brain—from ancient conceptions of the mind to the most cutting-edge neurological research. It was named a “Book of the Year” by The New Yorker, and a “Top Ten Science Book of 2023” by Smithsonian magazine.
Min Jin Lee “State Author and Poet in Conversation”
In conversation with Kimiko Hahn, Moderated by Paul Grondahl
10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m., Campus Center West Auditorium
Min Jin Lee is the newly named State Author of New York (2025-27). Her work explores life in the Korean diaspora, as well as Korean American identity, assimilation, and the complexities of navigating multiple cultures. Her novel Pachinko (2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, and one of the New York Times "Ten Best Books of 2017." Her debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires (2007), was named one of the best books of the year by the Times of London, NPR's Fresh Air, and USA Today.
John McWhorter Pronoun Trouble
Moderated by Robert Boyers
10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
John McWhorter, New York Times columnist, iconoclast, and America’s best-known linguist, is the author of Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words (2025). He argues that many of today’s hot-button controversies about language are “nonsense,” and many “iron-clad” rules of grammar are up for debate. With regard to the history of English, he vindicates the singular usage of the pronoun “they”— a practice as old as Shakespeare. Malcolm Gladwell said, “The only thing better than reading Pronoun Trouble would be sitting next to McWhorter at a dinner party.”
Debbie Millman Love Letter to a Garden
In conversation with with Roxane Gay, Moderated by Paul Grondahl
1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Campus Center West Auditorium
Debbie Millman, one of America’s most influential graphic designers and branding consultants, is a UAlbany alum (’83). Launched in 2005, her podcast Design Matters is one of the world’s first and longest-running podcasts, and was named one of the best podcasts ever by Business Insider and Vanity Fair. Millman is the creator of a new book of words, photos and pictures, Love Letter to a Garden (2025), featuring garden-to-table recipes by her wife, Roxane Gay. Oprah Daily called it, “A poignant, visual ode to the natural world’s power to sustain, inspire, and regenerate.”
Honor Moore “Secrets”
In conversation with Tracy O’Neill, Moderated by Peg Boyers
1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m., Campus Center West Boardroom
Honor Moore, poet and memoirist, earned wide acclaim for The Bishop’s Daughter (2008), about her complicated father, Bishop Paul Moore, the best-known Episcopal clergyman of the 1970s and ‘80s. Her new book is A Termination (2024), about an abortion she had in 1969 at age 23. She begins, “I did not tell. Not my lover, not my parents, and they said I couldn’t tell a friend.” Publishers Weekly called it, “an artful battle cry against backsliding into the secrecy of previous generations.”
Ta-Sean C. Murdock I Am Brave and Bright
Children’s Author Spotlight
12:00 p.m. - 12:45 p.m., Campus Center West Multi-Purpose Room
Ta-Sean C. Murdock, is an entrepreneur, youth advocate and children’s book author. His newest book is I Am Brave and Bright: Affirmations for Overcoming Bullies (2024), which seeks to offer a safe space for children ages 6-12 to explore feelings, embrace uniqueness, and find strength in challenging times. Murdock attended Giffen Elementary, Hackett Middle and Albany High School. He currently serves as Executive Director of the Center for Law and Justice, a civil rights organization founded by the late Dr. Alice Green.
Urayoán Noel “Poasis and Beyond: Always the Many"
Panel Discussion, Reading and Performance
4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m., Campus Center West Auditorium
Urayoán Noel is a former UAlbany English Department faculty member who worked alongside the late poet and professor Pierre Joris (1946-2025). Noel is a is a noted Puerto Rican poet, performer, translator, and preeminent scholar of Nuyorican poetry. His most recent collection is Transversal, a New York Public Library Best Book of 2021. Written in Spanish and English, and featuring bold experiments in “self-translation,” Transversal was longlisted for the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award.
Tracy O’Neill “Secrets”
In conversation with Honor Moore, Moderated by Peg Boyers
1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m., Campus Center West Boardroom
Tracy O’Neill is the author of Woman of Interest (2024), a memoir of the search for her Korean birth mother, written in the form of a 1940s noir detective novel. The New Yorker called it, “Dark, deeply funny,” and categorized it as “Dashiell Hammett meets Fleabag.” Publishers Weekly said, “Readers will be riveted.” A National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, O’Neill is also the author of two novels, The Hopeful (2015), about a figure skating prodigy, and Quotients (2020), about love in the world of Big Data.
Julia Phillips “Fairy Tales for Adults”
In conversation with Luis Jaramillo, Moderated by Moriah Hampton
11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
Julia Phillips is the author of the national bestseller, Bear (2024), about two sisters living with their mother on an island off Washington State. When a massive bear crosses the channel, their lives are changed in unexpected ways. Ann Patchett said, “Thrilling and propulsive, glorious and terrifying…. Julia Phillips is a brilliant writer.” Her debut novel, Disappearing Earth (2019), set among women living on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, was a National Book Award finalist and one of the New York Times “Ten Best Books of the Year.”
Bridget Read “Pyramid Schemes”
In conversation with Megan Abbott, Moderated by Jimmy Vielkind
1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
Bridget Read, journalist, is the author of Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America (2025), a work of history and reportage that unveils the stranger-than-fiction world of multilevel marketing— a massive scam that has remade American society. The NY Times Book Review said it “reads like a thriller [and] masterfully illuminates the tricks and sleights of hand that in multilevel marketing are simply the rules of doing business.” Read is also a features writer at New York magazine.
Ambika Sambasivan & Suhani Parikh
Children’s Bookmaking Presentation
1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Campus Center West Multi-Purpose Room
Ambika discovered her love for crafting books as an illustrator and launched Yali Books with her mother Kala Sambasivan in 2014. Ambika is passionate about shaping stories that reflect and validate the experiences of children of color, particularly those of South Asian descent, through relatable and inspiring stories.
Suhani is a second-generation Indian-American mom of three and author based in Upstate New York. Her experience growing up with alopecia areata led her to write her debut book, Shreya's Very Own Style. She launched Modern Marigold Books in 2019 to publish stories that promote social and emotional growth while amplifying early-generation diasporic voices.
Minita Sanghvi “New Romance”
In conversation with Tamani Wooley, Moderated by Lakia Green
3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m., Campus Center West Boardroom
Minita Sanghvi, Commissioner of Finance for Saratoga Springs, NY, is the author of Happy Endings (2022), the first lesbian romance novel to be published in India, her birth-country. Set in a world of Bollywood glamor and literary stardom, the novel was longlisted for the AutHer awards, cosponsored by The Times of India. Assistant Professor of Marketing at Skidmore College, Sanghvi is also the author of Gender and Political Marketing in the United States and the 2016 Presidential Election: An Analysis of Why She Lost (2019).
Christopher Shaw “New Fiction”
In conversation with Lindsay Hill, Moderated by Bruce McPherson
3:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
Christopher Shaw’s new novel is The Manager: A Tale of the Cold War (2025), a spy story set in Lake Placid two years after the Soviet loss to the U.S. in the “Miracle on Ice” Winter Olympic hockey game. Shaw is a former editor of Adirondack Life and a retired Creative Writing teacher at Middlebury. His other books include The Power Line: A Novel (2020), and a nonfiction account of exploring Mexico’s Usumacinta River, Sacred Monkey River: A Canoe Trip with the Gods (2000), which the Washington Post called, "a magnificent achievement.”
Russell Shorto “Becoming New York”
In conversation with Molly Beer, Moderated by Jessie Serfilippi
12:00 p.m. - 1:00 p.m., Campus Center West Auditorium
Russell Shorto is the author of the surprise national bestseller, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America (2005)— based on archival material at the New York State Library in Albany. His newest book is Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America (2025). Among other things, he demonstrates that “it was the Dutch, not the English, who sowed the seeds of the multiethnic, religiously tolerant, and unabashedly capitalistic metropolis” (The New Yorker).
Leah Umansky “Poets Respond to Taylor Swift”
In conversation with Kristie Frederick Daugherty and Samiya Bashir,
Moderated by Rae Muhlstock
2:15 p.m. – 3:15 p.m., Campus Center Assembly Hall
Leah Umansky is a poet, middle and high school English teacher, curator, collagist, and writer in New York City. Her newest collection is Of Tyrant (2024), about the many tyrants in our political, personal, professional and romantic lives. Hala Alyan said, “Vulnerability is what centers these unflinching, evocative poems: in steadiness, in tenderness, and, yes, even in hope.” Ilya Kaminsky called it, “Beautiful, urgent, memorable, passionate work.” Since 2011, Umansky has hosted the Couplet Reading Series at The Red Room in NYC’s East Village.
Niobe Way “Masculinity”
In conversation with Jordan Castro, Moderated by Mark Koplik
10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m., Campus Center West Boardroom
Niobe Way, developmental psychologist and researcher at NYU, is a world-renowned expert on the emotional development of boys and men. Her new book is Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture (2024), which addresses soaring rates of depression, anxiety, loneliness, suicide and mass violence among boys and young men. Carol Gilligan said, “This is a book for everyone invested in education and children---meaning everyone who cares about the future.”
Dana A. Williams “Toni Morrison and America in the 1980s”
In conversation with Paul Elie, Moderated by Paul Grondahl
2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m., Campus Center West Auditorium
Dana A. Williams is the author of Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship (2025), an account of former UAlbany Professor Toni Morrison’s role as a pioneering editor at Random House, where she championed Black authors and helped reshape American literary culture, one book at a time. Publishers Weekly called it, “A triumphant account of an underexplored aspect of Morrison’s influence on American literature.” The immediate past president of the Modern Language Association (MLA), Williams is currently the Dean of the Howard University Graduate School.
Natasha Williams “Dad’s Brain”
In conversation with Sandeep Jauhar, Moderated by Mark Koplik
2:15 p.m. – 3:15 p.m., Campus Center West Boardroom
Natasha Williams is the author of The Parts of Him I Kept: The Gifts of My Father’s Madness (2025), a memoir about the loving man who was compelled by mental illness to drive the family car on a cold April day into the frigid water of New York Bay with her two-year-old half-sister in the backseat. Nick Flynn called it, "A profound meditation on love and family,” and Abigail Thomas said Williams “writes like an angel.” Williams worked on her memoir during a Community Writers Workshop at the NYS Writers Institute.
Tamani Wooley “New Romance”
In conversation with Minita Sanghvi, Moderated by Lakia Green
3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m., Campus Center West Boardroom
Tamani Wooley, Emmy Award-winning TV journalist, has been the morning news anchor for Spectrum News in the Capital Region since 2016. She is also the author of Do You Dare? (2024), a “high heat” romance novel that “colors outside the lines” of race, featuring a strong, successful woman who has just celebrated her 40th birthday, and a much younger “alpha male.” WNYT anchor-turned-novelist Phil Bayly said, “This is a well written novel. Steamy. Really steamy.” Do You Dare? is the first book in a forthcoming “Dare Series.”