Author at the Library, Author Talks: Author Talk: Ada Calhoun on St. Marks is Dead and Also a Poet

Join us as we welcome New York Times-best selling author Ada Calhoun who will discuss her books St. Marks is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street and Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father and Me. 

St. Marks is Dead: St. Marks Place in New York City has spawned countless artistic and political movements, providing a backdrop for social and cultural revolutionaries from Leon Trotsky to Andy Warhol, the Ramones to the Beastie Boys, W.H. Auden to Keith Haring, Allen Ginsberg to the skaters of the movie Kids. Every group has maintained that their era, and no other, marked the street's apex, and that after they left--whether "they" were the Beats, the hippies, the punks, or the hardcore kids--the street was dead.

Also a Poet: When Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O'Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started forty years earlier. As a lifelong O'Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not just O'Hara's past, but also her father's, and her own. The result is a groundbreaking and kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond.

Calhoun will present an accompanying slideshow and there also will be a Q&A session at the end.