Dive into lively conversations at Barnard Authors’ Shelf, where Barnard alumnae and faculty bring their books to life with the stories, questions, and ideas behind them. Across the year, join us in person or online to discover new voices, revisit familiar ones, and be part of the conversations their work is shaping right now.

Spring '26 Offerings

Janet Burroway ‘58 – Simone in Pieces

Date and Time: Thursday, March 12 | 6:30 to 7:30 pm ET

Format: On campus and online on Zoom

Readers first meet Simone Lerrante, a Belgian war orphan, as a child refugee in Sussex, England, her memory damaged by trauma. The novel offers a kaleidoscopic vision of Simone’s fractured life and piecemeal understanding of self across multiple points of view. Following her from Cambridge to New York City and across the United States, through a disastrous marriage, thwarted desire, and the purgatory of academic backwaters, the novel charts Simone’s unexpected reconnection with her past, which provides both autonomy and inspiration for her future.

Cait Levin ’12 – Imposter

Date and Time: Tuesday, March 31 | 6:30 to 7:30 pm ET

Format: On campus and online on Zoom

High school sophomore Cam has always created techie things, like a ring she implanted with an NFC chip. This semester, she finally gets the chance to take a computer science elective. Cam tries to ignore the obnoxious boys who don’t believe she should be in the class at all.

Cam conspires with her quick-witted best friend, Viv, and they engineer their way onto the extracurricular RoboSub team. That ultimately lands them at a national competition as the only two girls on their team. Will Cam rise to the occasion and confirm, not to others, but to herself, that she belongs?

Anne Marie Chaker ’97 – Lift!

Date and Time: Tuesday, April 7 | 6:30 to 7:30 pm ET

Format: On campus and online on Zoom

In Lift!, Anne Marie Chaker ’97 examines the forces that have led generations of women to internalize the message that they should make themselves smaller. She shows why building muscle supports long term health and offers a powerful source of confidence. Drawing on research that challenges conventional stories about women’s bodies, Chaker argues that strength training can shift how women move through the world, respond to setbacks, and see their own value. Science also shows that increasing muscle mass can help protect women’s bodies as they age and reshape the messages we pass on to the next generation.

Hester Kaplan ’81 in conversation with Alizah Holstein ’98 – Twice Born

Date and Time: Tuesday, April 21 | 6:30 to 7:30 pm ET

Format: Online on Zoom

Twice Born opens with the death of Hester’s father, Justin Kaplan, known for his award-winning biographies of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Despite his relatively prolific output, Justin rarely wrote, or said, much about himself, even to his daughter. Standing at his open casket, Hester has the realization that while alive, her father never looked her in the eyes. Hester takes on the challenge of piecing together as intimate a biography of her own father as possible, comparing his story to the lives of his biographical subjects and dissecting the various personas he presents to the world, from which the name “dad,” “daddy,” or even “father” is conspicuously and painfully absent. Parallel to Justin’s story runs Hester’s own journey of development as a writer and a thinker, which begins in the shadow of not only her talented father, but also her novelist mother, and the fiercely protective union the two of them had built, often to the exclusion of their own children.

Alicia Jo Rabins ’98 – When We’re Born We Forget Everything

Date and Time: Thursday, October 29 | 6:30 to 7:30 pm ET

Format: On campus and online on Zoom

As a self-described ’90s suburban high school weirdo, Alicia Jo Rabins spent her time practicing violin and smoking cigarettes behind the mall while secretly dreaming of setting out on a spiritual quest no one around her seemed to understand. She often found herself drawn to the more ritualistic and rigorous Judaism that her parents had abandoned to assimilate and “become American.” In college, a chance meeting led her on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to study rabbinical texts and play bluegrass fiddle on the street for cash. But that two years of immersing herself in traditional observance was only the start of a journey full of twists and turns.

Registration: Registration will go live this summer. Please check back in July.