Tables of Contents February 11th: Goffe! Haslett! Hayes!
Our 2025 season begins with Terrance Hayes, Adam Haslett, and Tao Leigh Goffe
Readers of Content,
Well hello, 2025. January has been…complicated to say the least. We’ve been finding restoration in the post-holiday hush, while at the same time already feeling drained and stretched in too many disheartening directions. We, like so many, are thinking of our friends in LA, breathing a slow and cautious sigh of relief over the ceasefire in Gaza, and searching for the energy to not simply cover our eyes as the inauguration approaches.
With all that swirling around, I’m glad to be spending time planning and looking forward to our 2025 readings. There are so many good books coming out this year, plus more still on our list from years past, and reading some of our upcoming authors’ work has had a very reassuring effect on me.
We’re beginning our 2025 season on a very high note, joined at Insa on Tuesday, February 11th by the incredible Adam Haslett (Mothers & Sons), Terrance Hayes (So To Speak), and Tao Leigh Goffe (Dark Laboratory). It’s quite a bar to set for the year to come, and nice to have something exciting to look forward to. I hope you can join us to kick things off!
Terrance Hayes is the author of How to Be Drawn, a National Book Award finalist, and Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are Wind In a Box, Hip Logic, and Muscular Music. His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a United States Artists Zell Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
Tao Leigh Goffe is a London-born, award-winning Black British writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York. For the past fifteen years she has worked as an academic and has been invited to give keynote lectures in her specialities of colonial histories of race, geology, climate, and media technologies. Her second book Black Capital, Chinese Debt, presents a long history of racialization, modern finance, and indebtedness. It brings together subjects of the Atlantic and Pacific markets from 1806 to the present under European colonialism.
Adam Haslett is the author of Imagine Me Gone, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award; You Are Not a Stranger Here, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Union Atlantic, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. His books have been translated into thirty languages, and his journalism on culture and politics have appeared in The Financial Times, Esquire, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Nation, and The Atlantic, among others. He currently directs the MFA Program at Hunter College.
Each ticket includes three small dishes inspired by the passages, and one complimentary drink. Additional drinks will be available for purchase. Our friends Sammi and Olivia of Cocktails in Color will be mixing up cocktails inspired by the book, so you'll want to make room for a couple! And the good folks at Books Are Magic will be with us selling books, so come ready to pick up a few copies!
We do have a handful of seats reserved for sliding-scale admission to keep these events as financially accessible as possible. Please let us know if this ticket price is prohibitive for you and we’ll find a way to get you a seat at the table. These sliding scale seats are limited, so please be thoughtful about your resources and needs when making a request.
For more information on physical accessibility at Insa or any other questions, please write us at biscuits@tablesofcontents.org.
We can accommodate gluten-free and vegetarian diets with advance notice. If you have other restrictions or aversions you are of course still encouraged to attend, you just may not be able to partake in every course. Please be sure to notify us of any serious allergies in advance and remind us at the event.
Hope to see you at Insa on February 11th,
TOC
On Our Shelves
Nice to open up the NYT Book Review this morning ahead of sending this email to see our February author Adam Haslett answering some literary questions!
TOC alum and our inaugural Regenerative Residency resident Giada Scodellaro’s forthcoming book Ruins, Child — which she worked on during her time at the TOC Residency! — was named to the shortlist of The Novel Prize, one of 5 books shortlisted out of 1100 submissions! So exciting to see the fruits of our fledgling residency ripening so early!
Glynwood, our TOC Residency home, is accepting applications for their vegetable and livestock apprenticeships for the coming season. For the agriculturally curious among you this is an incredible chance for learning and experience on a regeneratively-minded farm in the Hudson Valley.
TOC alum Tyler Wetherall, author of No Way Home and the new novel Amphibian, gave TOC a little shout-out in a piece on NYC literary destinations for British Airways’ in-flight magazine, High Life. New heights in 2025!
