Organized and curated by Sarah Schulman, First Mondays prioritizes one of the great advantages of living in New York City: hearing new ideas as they are being created, long before they are published and on the shelves.

For five years, this free event has given audiences access to our most exciting established and emerging writers as they present new, unpublished work-in-progress. In a relaxed atmosphere, a vibrant community is being built as audience members, often writers and artists themselves, return every month to deepen their knowledge of contemporary literature as it is being born.

This year’s First Mondays features dynamic new work from playwrights, composers, novelists, poets, critics, biographers, scholars, memoirists, performance artists and beyond with well loved writers such as Mary Gaitskill, Marlon James, Dennis Cooper (author of THEM from PS122 1973), provocative adventures in new forms with David Velasco, Phoebe Legere, M Lamar, contemporary stand-outs like Parul Seghal, Melissa Febos, Alexander Chee, Danzy Senna, debut work from Bobuq Sayed, Matthew Rodriguez, and the chance to hear emerging voices that everyone should know like Julian Delgado Lopera, Grace Cho, Cheryl Tan, Sa’ed Atshan, and George Abraham plus much, much, more.