PLEASE JOIN US! Authors Alison Kinney and Jennifer Kabat will be discussing their new work: Alison’s United States of Rejection: A Story of Love, Hate, and Hope (May 2026, U of Georgia Press) and Jennifer Kabat’s twin memoirs: The Eighth Moon (2024) and Nightshining (2025) (Milkweed Editions). Jen’s is a triptych, so we look forward, too, to hearing about the forthcoming volume 3!
ALISON KINNEY is the author of the nonfiction books United States of Rejection: A Story of Love, Hate, and Hope, a cultural history of rejection and acceptance in our nation; Hood; and Avidly Reads Opera. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, Lapham's Quarterly, and other publications. She teaches creative nonfiction at Eugene Lang College, The New School and lives in Brooklyn.
United States of Rejection is a love-hate story about personal and political relationships in the United States, told through the intimate stories of both the rejectors and the rejected: lovers, families, neighbors, and a nation and its people. Although we’re taught not to care about others’ opinions, rejection always hurts, and it hurts some people a lot more than others. To prove it, this book marshals contemporary neuroscience, the Founding Fathers’ rejection advice, and four centuries of personal narratives, many of them hilarious, many more heartbreaking. These rejection and acceptance stories span loving and disastrous American first encounters, soldiers and dancers rejected on front lines and chorus lines, playground bullies invoked before the Senate, and generations of lovers and patriots battling or swiping right to defend their loved ones and their country. Abraham Lincoln wrote, “The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more evil, than of good.” But rejection is often unjust, often deserved, and unusually complicated, depending on who’s rejecting whom and why. In laboratories, diaries, self-help manuals, auditions, lawsuits, and wars, we find models for “getting past” rejections, not just through personal resilience, but also through creating accountability and justice. United States of Rejection begins with heartbreak and ends with hope: an urgent self-improvement program for changing our relationships and the future of our messy nation.
JENNIFER KABAT’s twinned memoirs The Eighth Moon and Nightshining were published by Milkweed Editions in 2024 and 2025. Her writing has appeared in The Best American Essays, Granta, Frieze, 4Columns, New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Believer, among others. Trained as an herbalist, she teaches in the Design Criticism MA at SVA and serves on her rural volunteer fire department.
The Eighth Moon, a debut memoir, features a rebellion, guns, and murder. When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills, she has no idea it was the site of the Anti-Rent War, an early episode of American rural populism […] Threaded with historical documents, the natural world, and the work of writers like Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick, Kabat weaves a capacious memoir, where the past comes alive in the present.
Rich with unexpected correspondences and discoveries, this visionary and deeply compassionate debut gives us a new way of seeing and being in place—one in which everything is intertwined and all at once.