Jennifer Kabat

media release:  A Room of One's Own welcomes author Jennifer Kabat for a reading and discussion on her debut book The Eighth Moon. Join us to for a conversation on the self, the rural natural world, and the populist battle to redistribute land to redistribute wealth in the Catskills.

This is an in person event at A Room of One's Own.

About the Book

A rebellion, guns, and murder. When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills, she has no idea it was the site of the Anti-Rent War, an early episode of American rural populism. 

As she forges friendships with her new neighbors and explores the countryside on logging roads and rutted lanes—finding meadows dotted with milkweed in bloom, saffron salamanders, a blood moon rising over Munsee, Oneida, and Mohawk land—she slowly learns of the 1840s uprising, when poor tenant farmers fought to redistribute their landlords’ vast estates. In the farmers’ socialist dreams, she discovers connections to her parents’ collectivist values, as well as to our current moment. Threaded with historical documents, the natural world, and the work of writers like Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick, Kabat weaves a capacious memoir, where the past comes alive in the present. 

Rich with unexpected correspondences and discoveries, this visionary and deeply compassionate debut gives us a new way of seeing and being in place—one in which everything is intertwined and all at once. 

Jennifer Kabat’s diptych The Eighth Moon and Nightshining are being published by Milkweed Editions in 2024 and 2025. She’s been awarded a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism, and the books were supported by grants from the Silvers Foundation and NYFA. Her essays and criticism have appeared in 4 Columns, Frieze, Granta, The White Review, BOMB, Harper’s, The Believer, and McSweeney’s as well as Best American Essays. She lives in rural New York, serves in her local fire department and teaches in the Design Research MA program at SVA.