Names of New York: Joshua Jelly-Schapiro with Suketu Mehta

Discover the city's past, present, and future through its place-names.

In place-names lie stories. That's the truth that animates Joshua Jelly-Schapiro's journey through the names of New York City's streets and parks, boroughs and bridges, playgrounds and neighborhoods. Jelly-Schapiro traces the ways in which the native Lenape, Dutch settlers, British invaders, and successive waves of immigrants have left their marks on the city's map. He interviews the last living speakers of Lenape, visits the harbor's forgotten islands, lingers on street corners named for ballplayers and saints, and meets linguists who study the estimated 800 languages now spoken in New York.

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro speaks with Maximum City author Suketu Mehta about how the names that stick to the city function not only as portals to explore the past but also as a means to reimagine what is possible now. 

This program will be streamed live on the NYPL event page.

ACCESSIBILITY NOTES
A live transcript will be provided. ASL interpretation is available upon request. Please submit your request at least two weeks in advance by emailing accessibility@nypl.org. A pre-filled Gmail template is available by clicking here. Any media will be accompanied by alt text to reference before the program or by audio description.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and Harper's, among many other publications. He is the author of Island People: The Caribbean and the World, the co-creator (with Rebecca Solnit) of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, and a scholar-in-residence at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, where he also teaches. 

Suketu Mehta is the New York-based author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, which won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award, and was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, the Lettre Ulysses Prize, the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize, and the Guardian First Book Award. He has won the Whiting Writers' Award, the O. Henry Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction. Mehta's work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harper's Magazine, Time, and Newsweek, and has been featured on NPR's Fresh Air and All Things Considered. Mehta is an Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University. His book about global migration, This Land is Our Land, was published by Farrar Strauss & Giroux in 2019. He is also working on a nonfiction book about immigrants in contemporary New York, for which he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Mehta has written original screenplays for films, including New York, I Love You. Mehta was born in Calcutta and raised in Bombay and New York. He is a graduate of New York University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. 

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Joshua Jelly-Schapiro © Mirissa Neff