Join us at the Woodbridge Main Library as we welcome local author Nina Sharma!
Nina will discuss her hilarious and moving memoir, The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown, written in a series of interconnected essays about love and allyship, told through one Asian and Black interracial relationship.
Registration is required! Please register online or by calling 732-634-4450.
About the Book
In The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown, Nina Sharma chronicles in a series of interconnected essays her and Quincy’s love story. In doing so, she examines how their Black and Asian interracial relationship becomes the lens through which she understands the world and what allyship truly means.
Coming of age in the 90s and early aughts, Sharma recalls her parents talking about the racism they encountered as immigrants, but as she enters adulthood, she confronts the paradox of her family’s disappointment when she starts dating a Black man.
As the essays move through her meeting Quincy, their falling in love, and eventually marrying, she traces the Afro-Asian history that precedes and informs them, from reflecting on Mira Nair’s ground-breaking film Mississippi Masala, revolutionary in its time for depicting a love story between an Indian woman and a Black man on screen; to drawing parallels between the violent death of Steven Yeun’s character in The Walking Dead and the brutal murder of Vincent Chin in 1982. In the essay “Shithole Country Clubs,” she explores questions of caste and anti-Blackness through her father’s membership to Trump’s Bedminster golf club; and in “We Can Neither Confirm nor Deny That Kamala Harris Is Our Time-Traveling Daughter,” she reflects on Vice President Harris’ Black and Indian parents as she grapples with her own ambivalence about having children. Written with a keen critical eye and seamlessly weaving in history, pop culture, and politics, THE WAY YOU MAKE ME FEEL marks the arrival of a wonderful thought-provoking new voice and an engaging storyteller.
About the Author
Nina Sharma’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Electric Literature, Longreads, and The Margins. A graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University, she served as the programs director at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and currently teaches at Columbia and Barnard College. She is a proud cofounder of the all–South Asian women’s improv group Not Your Biwi. She lives in New York City.
Check out her interview with Penguin Random House where she shouts out the Woodbridge Public Library HERE!