The Fun of the Story

In The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown, Nina Sharma chronicles her and her husband Quincy’s love story, and in doing so, examines how their Black and Asian relationship becomes the lens through which she moves through and understands the world. In this lecture, Nina explores how comedy became critical to both understanding and telling this story. How can humor be illuminating?  How can humor be feminist? How can humor be intersectional? How can humor help us tell the hard truths?  Can we laugh at oppression without laughing it off? The fun of the story is sometimes a good joke, sometimes it’s simply that we’ve lived to tell.

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 has 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.

Free and open to the public, BCRW’s lunchtime lecture series offers scholars and writers an intimate space to discuss new works and works in progress with colleagues, students, and engaged community members. Lunch will be provided.