“Oh, Ada Calhoun. Ada is wonderful and prolific and smart and funny...” —Emma Straub
In a cover profile, the Village Voice described Ada Calhoun as “cheerful and mannerly.” The New York Times called her “effervescent and conversational.” Publishers Weekly: “With tousled bleach-blonde hair, she gives off a kind of Debbie Harry, circa the 1970s, energy.” Her next book and first novel, Crush, is due out from Viking in February 2025. Advance praise from Molly Ringwald calls it, “a gripping fever dream of a book leading the reader into the beguiling depths of desire, ecstasy, and obsession.”
Journalist, novelist, and memoirist Ada Calhoun is the author of Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, named one of the Best Books of 2022 by The New York Times, Washington Post, Oprah Daily, and NPR; featured on PBS News Hour and the Today show; and longlisted for an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction. Her instant New York Times bestseller Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis, was an expansion of her viral story for Oprah.com about the unique circumstances faced by Generation X women. One of the Amazon Editors’ Best Nonfiction Books of 2020, a Goodreads Choice Award Finalist, and an Indie Next Pick, Why We Can’t Sleep was one of the biggest books of the season according to The New York Times, Parade, and O magazine.
Her prior two books are the New York City history St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street, a New York Times Editors’ Pick named one of the best books of 2015 by Kirkus Reviews, The Boston Globe, Orlando Weekly, The New York Post, and The Village Voice; and the memoir Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, which came out of a viral Modern Love column and was featured twice on the Today show.
In 2018, Ada cofounded the women journalists bar night Sob Sisters; meetings are held four times a year at the 11th Street Bar in the East Village. She’s taught public affairs reporting at Hofstra University, creative non-fiction at the Rutgers Summer Conference, memoir and proposal writing at the Miami Book Fair’s Writers Institute (for which she served as the first Emerging Writer Fellowship nonfiction mentor); and memoir for the past three summers at the Omega Institute in Upstate New York.
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