Leanne Brown’s wildly popular and NYT bestselling cookbook Good and Cheap: Eat Well on $4/Day showed us that kitchen skill and resourcefulness—not budget—are the keys to great food. Brown returned (virtually) to Greenlight for the launch of her new cookbook, Good Enough: A Cookbook: Embracing the Joys of Imperfection and Practicing Self-Care in the Kitchen. Good Enough champions a different yet complementary approach to food and cooking through the lens of self-care, mental health, and the embrace of imperfection—because who hasn’t eaten a handful of nuts over the sink and cold pizza for breakfast? In conversation with cookbook author, kitchen ingenue, and her real-life friend Hawa Hassan (In Bibi’s Kitchen), Brown held forth on community, the sea change in home cooking over the pandemic, and focusing less on the outcome than the experience of cooking. (Recorded January 13, 2022)

For Greenlight’s first poetry event of 2022, we welcomed Indonesian American poet Cynthia Dewi Oka and acclaimed poet and fiction writer Jenny Zhang (Sour Heart) to share, discuss, and celebrate Oka’s third collection, Fire Is Not a Country. Oka’s poems track how the energies of migration, exploitation, patriarchal violation, and political repression shape and spar with familial love and obligation. Jenny read as well—sweet and cutting poems from her collection My Baby First Birthday—and together she and Oka waxed affectionately and probingly on the meanings of fire, “the little knives that we are made of,” and the connections between a country, the body, and “how okay we are supposed to be.” (Recorded January 11, 2022)

Acclaimed YA author Leah Konen’s second novel for adults, The Perfect Escape, is a pacey, suspenseful, unforgettable thriller about a girls’ weekend in the Catskills turned deadly. For Greenlight’s first virtual author event of 2022, Konen joined us for a scintillating book launch and conversation with bestselling author and NYT journalist Andrea Bartz (We Were Never Here) that explored the craft of mystery, pregnancy and the writing process, and the question of writing mystery as a “plotter” or a (fly by the seat of your) “pantser”. (Recorded January 5, 2022)

In Greenlight’s longstanding tradition of celebrating the debuts of new literary voices, Cara Blue Adams graces our (virtual) stage to present her first story collection, You Never Get It Back—winner of the 2021 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. In these poised and perceptive linked stories set in rural New England and across the country—including Maine, Virginia, and New Mexico—the power of place shines through the journey of a young woman in search of vocation and belonging, grappling with social class and privilege, gender, ambition, violence, and the distance between longing and having. Acclaimed novelist Alexandra Kleeman (You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine) joined Adams for a warm and searching conversation that delved into questions of craft, writing from experience, and what it means to “come of age” for young women today. (Recorded December 13, 2021)

Whiting Award-winning author Amy Leach graces Greenlight’s virtual stage  to present The Everybody Ensemble, her newest collection of short, gloriously inventive essays that invite us to see and celebrate anew the “clattering, sometimes discordant but always welcoming chorus of glorious pandemonium” that is our world. In a discussion covering dragonflies, petunias, and encounters with beavers alongside questions of honesty and precision in writing and the comparative merits of research vs. experience, Leach and acclaimed author Eula Biss (Having and Being Had) concoct a potent and effervescent tonic for our times. (Recorded December 9, 2021)

In The Case for Rage, philosopher Myisha Cherry turns popular prejudices about anger on their head and argues for anger’s utility—and importance—in the fight against injustice. Anger has a bad reputation; s a “negative emotion”, it’s seen by many as counterproductive, distracting, and destructive. But Cherry argues that in fact the transformative and liberatory power of anger—what she terms “Lordean rage”—is crucial to the anti-racist struggle and challenging the status quo. Cherry joined us virtually for a searching, mutually inspiring conversation with celebrated novelist Jacqueline Woodson (Red at the Bone) that paid homage to Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and Ida B. Wells, and made a strong case not just for rage, but for the power of philosophy and asking critical questions. (Recorded December 6, 2021)

Nostalgia is the defining emotion of our age. Political leaders promise a return to yesteryear. Old movies are remade and cancelled series are rebooted. Veterans reenact past wars, while the displaced across the world long for home. But who is behind this collective ache for a home in the past? Grafton Tanner joins us (virtually) alongside Roisin Kiberd (The Disconnect) to present his newest book about nostalgia, that most ubiquitous and enigmatic of affects, in a conversation that traversed emotions, generations, and modern technology and featured a brief nod to the bygone “lumbersexual”. (Recorded November 10, 2021)

In the lengthening shadow of an exceptional year, Greenlight welcomed to its virtu Donald Cohen, founder and executive director of In the Public Interest, an Oakland-based national research and policy center that studies public goods and services, to discuss his new book co-authored with Allen Mikaelian, The Privatization of Everything. Hailed by Naomi Klein as “an essential read for those who want to fight the assault on public goods and the commons,” Cohen and Mikaelian discuss what happens when we subscribe to the theory that public power over essential public goods—such as clean water and air, education, public transportation, and the social safety net—is dangerous, and they lay out a road map for how to put power over public goods back in the hands of the people. Recorded December 1, 2021.

For phenomenal local writer, theatermaker, and educator Diane Exavier’s début collection, The Math of Saint Felix, Greenlight’s own Poetry Salon host Angel Nafis held court with Exavier and fellow poets Carlos Sirah and Shayla Lawz for a powerful, multivocal evening of reading, reverie, and irreverence. Exavier's book-length lyric is an attempt to do the math of a woman, a family, a country, and a diaspora, plotting how the sum of one life reveals permutations of many— daughters, sisters, lovers—and the uncountable cost of a single death. Nafis, Lawz, Sirah, and Exavier held space for one another as well as the invisible multitudes living between their lines, delving into questions of “the math of survival”, of audience and witness, and the duty of the writer to witness and tend to their grief. Recorded November 29, 2021.

To commemorate the 2021 edition of the Best American Poetry anthology, Greenlight invited editor and former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, series editor David Lehman, and contributing poets Chen Chen, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Nancy Miller Gomez, and Dora Malech for a reverent evening. Selected by Smith, this year’s exceptional collection explores and reckons with the difficult emotions exposed by a year of collective upheaval and incalculable loss in a panoply of themes, voices, and styles. We laughed, we mourned, we paged through eternities, we rode Tilt-A-Whirls, and we remembered the sense of connection and healing for which we return, year after changing year, to poetry. Recorded November 9, 2021.