100 Days of Creative Resistance Live

As part of the Fall of Freedom, a nationwide creative resistance action, Writing Co-Lab, an online teaching cooperative, presents a live version of 100 Days of Creative Resistance featuring authors Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Nicole Chung, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Melissa Febos, Robert Jones Jr., Celeste Ng, and Denne Michele Norris, hosted by Writing Co-Lab director Brian Gresko.

The 100 Days of Creative Resistance program provided an email of encouragement, opposition, and commiseration -- a reminder of why we write and create -- during the first hundred days of the Trump regime. In this live event, each author will read their 100 Days post (or something of a similar political nature), after which we'll discuss the emotional toll of the past year, strategies for remaining creative, and how concerned artists and writers can direct their resources, energy, and attention to resist and assist others in resisting the terrible reach of this authoritarian regime.

About the Participants

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah was raised in Spring Valley, New York, and now lives in the Bronx. His debut collection, Friday Black, was a New York Times bestseller, won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. His first novel Chain-Gang All-Stars was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Books Are My Bag Awards, and selected as a New York Times Top Ten Books of the Year. Adjei-Brenyah is a National Book Foundation’s ‘5 Under 35’ honoree.

Nicole Chung is the author of the award-winning memoir A Living Remedy, which was named a Notable Book by The New York Times and a Best Book of the Year by over a dozen other outlets. Her 2018 debut All You Can Ever Know was a national bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Chung has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Time, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, and many other publications. Previously, she was the digital editorial director of Catapult and editor-in-chief of its National Magazine Award-winning magazine; before that, she was the managing editor of The Toast and an editor for Hyphen magazine. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she currently lives in the Washington, DC area.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her debut novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California.

Melissa Febos is the national bestselling author of five books, including Girlhood—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, and the memoir The Dry Season. She is a Guggenheim and NEA fellow, and a Professor at the University of Iowa.

Robert Jones, Jr. (formerly known as “Son of Baldwin”) is a Brooklyn, New York-based writer and public speaker. He is the author of The New York Times bestselling novel, The Prophets, which was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction. His writings have been featured in The New York Times, Essence, Variety, and The Paris Review. Subscribe to Robert's newsletter, Witness, at robertjonesjr.substack.com.

Celeste Ng is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts. Her writing has been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian, and many other publications, and has been translated into more than thirty languages. Celeste has been awarded the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the ALA’s Alex Award, and the Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Denne Michele Norris is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, winner of the 2022 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. She is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and Kimbilio for Black Fiction, and appears in McSweeney's, American Short Fiction, and ZORA. She co-hosts the critically-acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot, and her debut novel, When The Harvest Comes, will be published by Random House in April, 2025.

About the Host

Brian Gresko (they/he) is a writer, illustrator, literary journalist, and educator based in Brooklyn. Their most recent book is You Must Go On: 30 Inspirations on Writing & Creativity. They co-run Pete’s Reading Series, Brooklyn’s longest running literary venue, and during 2020 hosted The Antibody, an online reading and conversation series. Gresko co-founded Writing Co-Lab, a teaching cooperative, through which they conceived and curated 100 Days of Creative Resistance.