Adjunct Associate Professor Kate Zambreno will release her latest work, The Light Room: On Art and Care (Riverhead Books), on July 4, 2023.
The Light Room is a candid chronicle of life from a mother of two young daughters in a moment of profound uncertainty about public health, climate change, and the future we can expect for our children. Moving through the seasons, returning often to parks and green spaces, Zambreno captures the isolation and exhaustion of being home with a baby and a small child, but also small and transcendent moments of beauty and joy. Inspired by writers and artists ranging from Natalia Ginzburg to Joseph Cornell, Yūko Tsushima to Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan to David Wojnarowicz, The Light Room represents an impassioned appreciation of community and the commons, and an ecstatic engagement with the living world.
“[Zambreno’s] mastery of imagery—particularly as it pertains to light and nature—provides welcome moments of transcendence,” Publishers Weekly reports. “It adds up to an arresting snapshot of caregiving in a time of uncertainty.”
Associate Professor and Fiction Concentration Head Rivka Galchen ’06, author of Little Labors (New Directions Publishing, 2016), adds that “The Light Room is a marvelous and marvel-filled book. Zambreno’s mind is like a magic filter discovering secrets when turned on any sort of item—a tiny toy, a loom, an artist, a mortality. A wonderful book, a companion for all the varieties of days.”
Zambreno has another book due out in November 2023, entitled Tone. To be published by Columbia University Press, Tone is a collaboration with Sofia Samatar. You can read a conversation between the two authors and creative collaborators from The New Inquiry here.
Read more about The Light Room and Zambreno’s other projects here.
Kate Zambreno is the author of eight books, including the novel Drifts (Riverhead) and a study on Hervé Guibert, To Write as if Already Dead (Columbia University Press). Her fiction and reports have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, Astra, The White Review, and VQR. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and also the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
