Barnard Authors' Shelf
Barnard Authors' Shelf
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.
Fall '26 Offerings
Memorists Michelle Friedman '74 and Laurie Stone '68
Date and Time: Thursday, September 17 | 6:30 to 7:30 pm ET
Format: On campus and online on Zoom
Laurie Stone '68 ~ Postcards from the Thing That is Happening
Streaming Now is Laurie Stone at her best—wickedly smart, wide open, and impossible to put down. In fragments she calls "postcards," Stone moves between life during COVID, old friends, glancing love affairs, and the books, films, and shows that catch her eye, all with a spitfire skepticism balanced by a constant hunger for pleasure and joy. Shaped by second wave feminism, her writing pulses with an idea of freedom that's gone missing from our culture: not protection, not safety, but something riskier and more erotic. "Autocracies are always puritanical," writes novelist Vince Passaro (Crazy Sorrow, Violence, Nudity, Adult Content). Stone's sentences, in their quickness and surprise, are an argument against that puritanism, sentence by sentence. What looks like a simple book of pensées turns out to be a vital, distinct cultural point of view. Read it and join us. We're thrilled to have Laurie back to campus!
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Author Website
Michelle Friedman '74 ~ Divine Corners
Michelle grew up on a chicken farm in Divine Corners, a remote hamlet in New York's Borscht Belt, an unlikely home for the cultured, Polish Jewish parents raising her and her siblings there. Her father and mother were Holocaust survivors, and in this illustrated memoir, Michelle braids their harrowing wartime stories with her own vivid, often tender memories of farm life. The result is an unflinching yet deeply loving inquiry into identity, inheritance, and resilience, and a haunting question that runs through every page: what makes one person break while another survives? Rich with illustration and told with clear-eyed honesty, this is a memoir about the long shadow of trauma and the stubborn, complicated love that grows in its wake. Read it and join us. Michelle is back on campus and we couldn't be more excited!
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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
Alicia Jo Rabins was a self-described '90s suburban weirdo, practicing violin and smoking cigarettes behind the mall, all while secretly yearning for a spiritual quest nobody around her could quite understand. Drawn to the ritual and rigor of the Judaism her parents had left behind to assimilate, she found herself, after a chance meeting in college, on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem: two years studying rabbinical texts by day and playing bluegrass fiddle on the street for cash by night. That immersion was only the beginning—the first twist in a journey full of them. Join us as we welcome Alicia Jo back to campus to share the story of where that road ultimately led.
November 13: French Author Rim Battal & Liza Tripp '03
Date and Time: Friday, November 13 | 6:30 to 7:30 pm ET
Format: On campus and online on Zoom
It starts with a cigarette caught out a window in Marrakesh and unravels into a searing coming-of-age story. In Rim Battal's autobiographical novel, translated into English by alumna Liza Tripp '03, seventeen-year-old Rim's mother responds to that small transgression with fury, demanding a gynecological test to certify her daughter's virginity. What follows is a nuanced, unflinching journey through a patriarchal society where generations of women have learned to preserve the very traditions that constrain them; until Rim, confronting betrayal from those closest to her, finally breaks the cycle and dares to become herself. Join us for a conversation with Rim Battal (in the States from France for her book tour!) and Liza Tripp as they discuss the novel, its journey into English, and the courage it took to tell this story.