Naima Coster

Born in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NY, Naima Coster holds an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, an MA in English and Creative Writing from Fordham University, and a BA in English and African American studies from Yale University.[2]

Her writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Rumpus, Arts & Letters, Kweli, and Guernica. She is a proud alumna of Prep for Prep, a leadership development program in New York City. She has taught writing to students in jail, youth programs, and universities. She also writes the newsletter, Bloom How You Must.[3] She currently teaches writing in North Carolina, where she lives with her family.

Naima Coster is a rising literary figure that writes and talks about universally relatable themes like family relationships, racial and cultural identity, and gentrification. Not only is her novel, Halsey Street about the strange losses and intimacies created by gentrification, it is also about one woman's homecoming to a changed Brooklyn neighborhood and her reckoning with her difficult familial past. Perhaps one of the most significant aspects of her novel is that it was edited by Morgan Parker, a female African American editor that has made her way into the white world of publishing.[4]

She wrote her first novel, Halsey Street, because she was worried about the appropriation and reconfiguration of Brooklyn cool, its popular image morphing from working class, industrial, multiethnic, and en epicenter of hip-hop, to the hipster Brooklyn of Girls. She worried, too, about the real, material losses of gentrification - displacement from homes, the closing of businesses, the targeting by police of residents who are viewed by newcomers as dangerous. However, it wasn't all valor or moral conviction that drove Coster to write Halsey Street. She wanted a record of her own losses, too. As a scholarship student at an elite private school, she had moved between the Upper East Side and Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a neighborhood of comparatively little value, although certainly not to her or her family. Gentrification meant the part of her life that had been undervalued was becoming valuable as it was remade to resemble her other life of affluence, whiteness, and prestige. She was hurt and angry at this racist system of valuation. She wanted to push back.[5]

• Official website
• Schorske, Carina del Valle (2018-01-25). "Owning Brooklyn: An Interview with Naima Coster". The Paris Review. Retrieved 2018-03-20.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• "An Interview with Naima Coster « Kenyon Review Blog". The International Journal of Literature, Culture and the Arts. Retrieved 2018-03-20.
• "University of Northern Colorado to host 2018 Rosenberry Writers' Conference". GreeleyTribune.com. 2018-02-20. Retrieved 2018-03-20.