Calhoun, Ada

Ada Calhoun is the New York Times bestselling author of St. Marks Is Dead, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, and Why We Can’t Sleep. She has written for The New York Times, The New Republic, and The Washington Post. After stumbling upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O’Hara, she set out to finish the book he had started 40 years earlier. As a lifelong O’Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun. But the deeper she dove, the more she had to face – not just O’Hara’s past, but also her father’s and her own. Her memoir Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me (Grove Press) weaves compelling literary history with a moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond, and explores what happens when we want to do better than our parents yet fear what that might cost us.