Naima Coster

I have always thought of writing as a process of transition. Books, obviously, chronicle changes in characters, but they also transform readers and writers. My insights as a writer are keener at the end of every one of my own drafts; words shift during the creative process, too, becoming alchemical in the hands of a writer. My first novel, Halsey Street, is about loss, renewal, and change in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn.

I have been deeply formed by transitions in my own life. I grew up in Brooklyn and, at twelve, I matriculated at a private school, where I met other New Yorkers whose families and stories differed greatly from my own. I adjusted to a new school and culture by writing fiction, inadvertently chronicling the reorientations occurring within me–new speech patterns, tastes, and an emerging view of myself as a young adult. I spent summers in the Dominican Republic, where I was especially aware of myself as a person born out of a momentous transition: my family’s emigration from that island to New York City.

In my fiction, I seek to make meaning out of transitional moments. Whether I am exploring the awkward in-betweenness of adolescence, the split consciousness of life as an immigrant, or the changing face of a neighborhood, I am interested in how we engineer change or grapple with it, in our communities and our inner lives.

https://www.naimacoster.com/

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