Taking Friendship Seriously: Writing the Relationships that Sustain Us with Rhaina Cohen, Lilly Dancyger, & Emefa Addo Agawu

We’re so excited to see you at the Baltimore Book Festival, where you can find us at our booth on Sept. 28-29. On Sunday, September 29th, we are thrilled to be hosting the 31st St. Stage!

For this 2pm panel, we’re so excited to be joined by Rhaina Cohen, author of The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center, and Lilly Dancyger, author of First Love: Essays on Friendship, who will discuss their recent works of nonfiction in conversation with Baltimore-based writer and editor Emefa Addo Agawu.

Rhaina Cohen is the bestselling author of The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center and an award-winning producer and editor for NPR’s Embedded podcast. Her writing about social connection has been published by The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME and other outlets, and her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Program. Cohen lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband and close friends.

Lilly Dancyger is the author of First Love: Essays on Friendship, and Negative Space. She lives in New York City, and is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. She teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA programs at Columbia University and Randolph College, and her work has been published by The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Elle, and more. Find her on Twitter and Instagram at @lillydancyger, and on Substack at The Word Cave.

Emefa Addo Agawu is a Baltimore-based writer and editor and a 2024 Moynihan Public Scholar at The City University of New York. Previously, Agawu produced The Ezra Klein Show at The New York Times and wrote editorials at The Washington Post as a member of the paper’s editorial board. For her reporting on public safety, Agawu won the 2022 Burl Osborne Editorial and Opinion Award and was a finalist for the 2021 Online Journalism Awards Excellence in Social Justice Reporting. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about attention.