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Kiley Reid

Author of Come and Get It and instant New York Times-bestseller Such a Fun Age

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  • About Kiley Reid

    Kiley Reid is the instant New York Times-bestselling author of Such a Fun Age and Come and Get It, a highly-anticipated new novel that portrays a residential assistant and her messy entanglement with a professor and three unruly students. Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue and Elle, and a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by TIME and Entertainment Weekly, this tension-filled story about money, indiscretion, and reckless abandon is a “blistering send-up of academia […] interlaced with piercing moral clarity” (Publishers Weekly [starred review]).

    Reid’s debut, Such a Fun Age, was hailed for its candid look at the complexities of race and class through the lens of the relationship between a Black babysitter and her white employer. A spotlight for Reid’s talent at social satire, Such a Fun Age shines a bright light on the subtle, yet deeply impactful aspects of race and privilege in America.

    An instant hit, acclaimed producer and actress Lena Waithe acquired the film rights to the story over a year before the book’s publication, Such a Fun Age was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author and for the 2020 Booker Prize. It was also a  Reese’s Book Club pick, and was named a best book of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, NPR, Vogue, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal, among many more publications.

    Reid earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been described as an exciting new voice in the literary scene. In honest and compelling talks, Reid weaves together insights into her craft with the process of writing about timely, relevant issues like race and class with unflinching honesty.

    During her time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Kiley Reid was awarded the prestigious Truman Capote Fellowship and taught undergraduate creative writing workshops focusing on race and class. She has had work featured in The New York Times and TIME, and her short stories have appeared in several notable publications like PlayboyPloughsharesDecemberNew South, and Lumina. Reid lives in Philadelphia.

    Contact us for more information about booking Kiley Reid for your next event. 

  • Speaking Topics

    Writing Such A Fun Age

    While her debut novel is not a work of auto-fiction, Reid drew inspiration from her six years as a nanny to the several children in Manhattan. Later, while at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, with time and clarity to draw upon the feeling of working in someone else's home, Kiley had the opportunity to research and analyze domestic work, the anxieties of the liberal elite, and how language and memory can work on the page. With a penchant for awkward moments and a dedication to depicting domestic in its complicated forms, Reid shares the experience of creating two very different perspectives approaching privilege, money, and precocious toddlers.

    Plot and Dialogue: A How-To

    Even the most principle dancers need a refresher of what tools are in their box. This is the equivalent of returning to the basics with a new lens; stopping by a barre class and remembering why you started. From teaching undergraduate workshops at the University of Iowa, to middle schoolers at Savannah, Georgia's Godley Station School, to condensed classes for Iowa Writers' Workshop Alumni, Reid has crafted this interactive lesson for writers at any level, and anyone equally interested in storytelling. In plot, we track how stories move, and how best to break the rules. In dialogue, we discover what exactly language and words are accomplishing, in life and on the page.

  • Video

  • Praise for Kiley Reid

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    Kiley Reid was magnificent – clear, engaging, and thoughtful.

    Sawyer Free Library

    Praise for Come and Get It

    Clever . . . Beginning with an interview of these young women could easily have felt like the laziest kind of exposition, but in Reid’s hands it serves as a brilliant demonstration of her own approach as a novelist: Listen. . . . The key is Reid’s exquisitely calibrated tone . . . She’s so good at capturing both the syrupy support and catty criticism these young women swap, and yet she also demonstrates a profound understanding of their fears and anxieties. Not to mention she gathers accents and verbal quirks like she’s picking delicate fruit. . . . You’re in the presence of a master plotter who’s engineering a spectacular intersection of class, racism, academic politics and journalistic ethics. Reid spots all the grains of irritation and deceit that get caught in the machinery of social life until the whole contraption suddenly lurches to a calamitous halt. Come and get it, indeed!

    The Washington Post

    Masterfully captures the quiet misalignments that stem from a varying sense of what’s at stake. . . . [A] novel of manners that acutely captures the modern moment.

    Vogue

    Juicy—naturally—but poignant, this highly anticipated return from the Such a Fun Age author is sure to get tongues wagging.

    Elle

    Kiley Reid is an expert at teasing apart the messy, complicated, nuanced layers of social dynamics, and has a rare gift for making the unknown feel intimately familiar and the familiar feel brand-new. In Come and Get It, she’s crafted a story that moves with the momentum and inevitability of a snowball rolling down a mountain. I couldn’t put it down, and I didn’t want to either.

    Emily Henry, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Happy Place

    Praise for Such a Fun Age

    A complex, layered page-turner…This is a book that will read, I suspect, quite differently to various audiences—funny to some, deeply uncomfortable and shamefully recognizable to others—but whatever the experience, I urge you to read Such a Fun Age. Let its empathetic approach to even the ickiest characters stir you, allow yourself to share Emira’s millennial anxieties about adulting, take joy in the innocence of Briar’s still-unmarred personhood, and rejoice that Kiley Reid is only just getting started.

    NPR

    Kiley Reid has written the most provocative page-turner of the year….[Such a Fun Age] nestl[es] a nuanced take on racial biases and class divides into a page-turning saga of betrayals, twists, and perfectly awkward relationships….The novel feels bound for book-club glory, due to its sheer readability. The dialogue crackles with naturalistic flair. The plotting is breezy and surprising. Plus, while Reid’s feel for both the funny and the political is undeniable, she imbues her flawed heroes with real heart.

    Entertainment Weekly

    Reid’s acerbic send-up of identity politics thrives in the tension between the horror and semiabsurdity of race relations in the social media era. But she is too gifted a storyteller to reduce her tale to, well, black-and-white….Clever and hilariously cringe-y, this debut is a provocative reminder of what the road to hell is paved with.

    O, The Oprah Magazine

    Lively…[A] carefully observed study of class and race, whose portrait of white urban affluence—Everlane sweaters, pseudo-feminist babble—is especially pointed. Attempting to navigate the white conscience in the age of Black Lives Matter, Reid unsparingly maps the moments when good intentions founder.

    The New Yorker

    Such a Fun Age is blessedly free of preaching, but if Reid has an ethos, it’s attention: the attention Emira pays to who Briar really is, and the attention that Alix fails to pay to Emira, instead spending her time thinking about her….The novel is often funny and always acute, but never savage; Reid is too fascinated by how human beings work to tear them apart. All great novelists are great listeners, and Such a Fun Age marks the debut of an extraordinarily gifted one.

    Slate

    [A] funny, fast-paced social satire about privilege in America…Beneath her comedy of good intentions, [Reid] stages a Millennial bildungsroman that is likely to resonate with 20-something postgraduates scrambling to get launched in just about any American city.

    The Atlantic

    Provocative…Surprisingly resonant insights into the casual racism in everyday life, especially in the America of the liberal elite.

    The New York Times Book Review

    Fun is the operative word in Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid’s delectably discomfiting debut. The buzzed-about novel takes a thoroughly modern approach to the timeless upstairs-downstairs trope….Told from alternating points of view, the novel loops through vibrant vignettes set in reggaeton nightclubs and Philadelphia farmers markets before landing firmly on one side of the maternal divide….This page-turner goes down like comfort food, but there’s no escaping the heartburn.”

    Vogue

    Buoyed by a tight narrative structure, Such a Fun Age is a compulsive read whose dark humor comes at the expense of Emira, who often finds herself sitting in the wormy discomfort of a social faux pas.

    Elle

    [Such a Fun Age] grapples with racism and nods to titans of literature….[A] vivid page-turner [that] explores agency and culpability through the entangled lives of Emira and her employer, Alix.

    Vanity Fair

    Such a Fun Age keeps it real on race, wealth, and class….Subtly illustrat[es] the systemic racism in America and the ways that we’re routinely perpetuating it or being subjected to it on a daily basis. The question that will sit with readers for days after finishing the book: What role do I play?

    Marie Claire

    If you don’t read [Such a Fun Age] soon, you will have nothing to talk about at book clubs, dinner parties, playgroups, or friend drinks. Kiley Reid’s debut novel…is getting raves and making waves.

    Glamour
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