Jo Livingstone is a medieval literature scholar, a critic, and the 2020 National Book Critics Circle recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. After receiving a BA in English literature from the University of Oxford and a PhD in medieval literature from New York University, Livingstone went on to write cultural criticism for The New Republic and currently manages the editorial website The Stopgap with Daniel Lavery. They are currently a visiting professor at Pratt...

Moira Donegan is writer in residence for the Clayman Institute, where she participates in the intellectual life of the Institute, hosts its artist salon series, teaches a class in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, and mentors students, while continuing her own projects and writing. Her criticism, essays, and commentary, which cover the intersection of gender, politics, and the law, have appeared in places such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books,...

Anahid Nersessian is a literary critic and Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her first book, Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment, was published by Harvard University Press in 2015, and her second, The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life, by the University of Chicago Press in 2020. Her latest, Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse was released in 2022. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, and her writing has also appeared in...

Hannah Goldfield is a staff writer at The New Yorker, covering restaurants and food culture. Previously, she was a fact checker at The New Yorker and an editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Her writing has appeared in New York magazine and the Times, among other publications. Recorded November 7, 2023 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University Edited by Michele Moses Music by Dani Lencioni Art by Leanne Shapton Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and...

Sophie Pinkham is a writer, journalist, and critic specializing in Russian and Ukrainian literature, culture, and politics. She is the author of Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine (2016) and the forthcoming The Spirit in the Trees, for which she has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar grant. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, Pinkham writes primarily (though not exclusively) about Russia and Ukraine. Her work has also appeared...

Andrea Long Chu is a Pulitzer Prize–winning essayist and critic at New York magazine. Her book Females, an extended annotation of a lost play by Valerie Solanas, was published by Verso in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her writing has also appeared in n+1, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Bookforum, Boston Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4Columns, and Jewish Currents. Recorded September 26, 2023 at the Shapiro Center at...

Introducing The Critic and Her Publics, a new podcast series from The New York Review of Books and Lit Hub. Hosted by Merve Emre. New episodes every other week beginning Tuesday January 30th.