Professor Naima Coster to read from her new novel Halsey Street on Feb. 28

Naima Coster, author and Visiting Assistant Professor in Creative Writing and Writing, will read from her new novel, Halsey Street, for the Dillon Johnston Writers Reading Series on Wednesday, February 28. The reading will begin at 6 p.m. in Hanes Art Gallery in Scales Fine Arts Center and be followed by a book signing and reception.

This event is open to the campus community and the wider public.

Naima Coster is the author of Halsey Street, a story of family, loss, and renewal, set in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Arts & Letters, Lit Hub, Catapult, The Rumpus, Aster(ix), A Practical Wedding, and Guernica, and has been anthologized in The Best of Kweli and This is the Place: Women Writing About Home. Naima is the recipient of numerous awards, most recently the 2017 Cosmonauts Avenue Nonfiction Prize, judged by Roxane Gay. Naima studied creative writing at Yale, Fordham University, and Columbia University, where she earned her MFA. She has taught writing to students in prison, youth programs, and universities. She currently teaches at Wake Forest University and is a Senior Fiction Editor at Kweli. Naima tweets as @zafatista and writes the newsletter, Bloom How Must.

Praise for Halsey Street:

A quiet gut-punch of a debut, Coster’s novel is a family saga set against the landscape of gentrifying Brooklyn…Absorbing and alive, the kind of novel that swallows you whole. ★.”— Kirkus Reviews

“NaimaCoster’s first novel is rich and flavorsome, a portrait of a Brooklyn neighborhood in decline and renewal, and of a young woman—a risk-taker, fierce and yet loving. First novels rarely come as skilled, touching, and real as Halsey Street.”—John Crowley, author of Ka and Little, Big

“Halsey Street introduces NaimaCoster as an important new voice—wise, elegant and utterly engaging. Her protagonist Penelope is a fierce yet tender heroine who must navigate modern-day Brooklyn, must learn to move between classes and countries. Coster captures the ache and longing of living life as an outsider, while also illuminating the force of history and family. A remarkable, heartbreaking debut.” —Rebecca Godfrey, author of The Torn Skirt andUnder the Bridge

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The Dillon Johnston Writers Reading Series, named after the founder of Wake Forest University Press, brings to campus established and emerging fiction writers, poets, and writers of creative nonfiction each year to give literary readings and visit creative-writing workshops in the Creative Writing Minor and other courses at Wake Forest.