Kaitlyn Greenidge on Making Artifacts
In Conversation with Merve Emre on The Critic and Her Publics
Welcome to Season Two of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of Editing. This season, in a series of live conversations, Merve Emre asks the smartest and savviest editors how the sausage gets made. What happens behind the scenes at a magazine? How does an idea become a book? And how do you work with those strange and difficult creatures we call writers?
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From the episode:
Merve Emre: Before being appointed features director at Harper’s Bazaar in 2020, Kaitlyn Greenidge worked as a park ranger, a phone banker, and an app designer, while writing the essays and reviews that would launch her monumental career as a novelist and editor.
What’s remarkable about Katelyn’s work is how freely and boldly it cuts across categories. When, as an essayist, she writes in The New York Times about the dangers of cultural appropriation, she casts a cool, critical eye on drafts of her own celebrated first novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman. When she commissions oral histories on Black punk or photo essays on protests and defense of Black trans lives, she edits them with a fine -tuned ear of a novelist who knows how to place different voices in conversation.
And whether she’s profiling Solange or writing historical fiction about Susan Smith McKinney -Steward, the first black woman doctor in New York State, Kaitlyn writes with an alertness to differences of region, race, and class that make the personal indistinguishable from the political.
For a full transcript, head over to the New York Review of Books.
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Kaitlyn Greenidge is the author of Libertie and We Love You, Charlie Freeman, one of the New York Times Critics’ Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in the Vogue, Glamour,the Wall Street Journal, Elle, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently Features Director at Harper’s Bazaar as well as a contributing writer for The New York Times.
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The Critic and Her Publics
Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by
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The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub.
