Cocktail Hour: Authors Ada Calhoun & Jessica Anthony in Conversation

The Festival was very excited to host Jessica Anthony and welcome back Ada Calhoun for this intriguing literary conversation on Thursday, February 12, 2026.

Ada Calhoun is the New York Times–bestselling author of Crush: A Novel, hailed on the Today Show as the month’s Best Romance, praised by the Washington Post for its "whirlwind of desire and possibility," and named by TIME as one of the 100 Must-Read Books of 2025. Her memoir Also a Poet was named one of the best books of 2022 by The New York Times, NPR, and The Washington Post; and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. A review in the NYTBR called it “a big valentine to New York City past and present, and a contribution to literary scholarship, molten with soul." Past books include Why We Can’t Sleep, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, and St. Marks Is Dead.

Jessica Anthony is the author of four books of fiction, most recently the novel The Most (longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction, and a finalist for the Prix Fitzgerald). Her novel Enter the Aardvark was a finalist for the New England Book Award in Fiction. Anthony’s novels have been published in over a dozen countries, and were featured in The New York Times Book Review as an Editors’ Choice. Anthony served as the 41st Bridge Guard in Literature, in Štúrovo, Slovakia. Anthony won the inaugural Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award from McSweeney’s, and she is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award for Literature. Her story “The Death of Mustango Salvaje,” originally published by McSweeney’s, is currently in development with A24 for a limited TV series, filmed in Spain.