Zakiya Dalilah Harris on Satire and Sensitivity

HydraGT3 weeks ago

0 21 2 minutes read

Welcome to Season Two of The Critic and Her Publics: The Art of Editing. This season, in a series of live conversations, Merve Emre asks the smartest and savviest editors how the sausage gets made. What happens behind the scenes at a magazine? How does an idea become a book? And how do you work with those strange and difficult creatures we call writers?

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From the episode:

Merve Emre: So far on The Art of Editing, we’ve had five working editors explain how they create the magazines and books that many of us love to read. But what happens when the art of editing and the relationships among editors in a major publishing house become the subject of a withering satire? My guest today, Zakiya Dalilah Harris worked as an assistant editor at Doubleday and is the author of the 2021 novel The Other Black Girl, a work of speculative horror. Its protagonist, Nella, the only black assistant editor at a prestigious publishing imprint, unearths a conspiracy to brainwash black writers into upholding white ideals of respectability in art. The Other Black Girl was a New York Times bestseller. It was adapted into a Hulu original series, which Zakiya co-wrote and co-produced, and which I binged on a rainy day last fall. I recommend you do the same. But first, here’s our wide-ranging conversation about publishing, race, and what has and hasn’t changed from 2021 to today.

For a full transcript, head over to the New York Review of Books.

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Zakiya Dalila Harris received her MFA in creative writing from The New School. Her debut novel, The Other Black Girl, was an instant New York Times bestseller and is now a critically acclaimed Hulu Original Series. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in Cosmopolitan, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband.

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The Critic and Her Publics
Hosted by Merve Emre • Edited by Michele Moses • Music by Dani Lencioni • Art by
Leanne Shapton • Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf

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The Critic and Her Publics is a co-production between the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, and Lit Hub.