Each year at the library lunch, Library supporters gather under the historic glass dome of the Celeste Bartos Forum to enjoy lunch in the company of friends and hear from today’s most prominent writers. Past Lunch programs have featured such luminaries as Hilton Als, Nora Ephron, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gary Shteyngart, and Zadie Smith, and have covered a wide range of topics including art and politics, humor writing, and poetry. This year, we ask guests to join us for an afternoon of lively literary discussion about the art
of the memoir.
The library lunch is Generously sponsored by iconic British luxury brand, Asprey, and is presented with Literary Partner, The New Yorker.
Elizabeth Alexander, renowned poet, essayist, memoirist, and scholar, is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She was recently appointed President of the Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation. She previously served as the inaugural Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University, where she taught for 15 years and chaired the African American Studies Department. Professor Alexander is the author of six books of poems and two books of essays, and was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her latest book, the memoir The Light of the World, was named by Michelle Obama as her favorite book of 2015.
Daniel Mendelsohn is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. His books include the international best seller The Lost, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and many other honors; a memoir, The Elusive Embrace, a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; a translation, with commentary, of the complete poems of C. P. Cavafy, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and two collections of essays. He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York.
David Remnick was named the editor of The New Yorker in 1998. He joined the magazine in 1992, after ten years with the Washington Post, where he was a Moscow correspondent. He is the author of several books, including The Bridge, King of the World, and Lenin’s Tomb, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Under Remnick’s leadership, The New Yorker has become the country’s most honored magazine, winning forty-one National Magazine Awards and, in a first for a magazine, three Pulitzer Prizes.
To learn more about the 2018 Library Lunch, please email librarylunch@nypl.org or call 212.930.0889.
