No Contact: Writers on Estrangement

Join editor Jenny Bartoy, and contributors Hannah Bae, Lindsey Danis, Stephanie Foo, Monique Laban, Emi Nietfeld, and Domenica Ruta, for the New York launch of No Contact: Writers on Estrangement. Described by Ocean Vuong as a "landmark work around a theme so prominent–and yet so thoroughly ignored–in modern life, this anthology illuminates the realities, nuances, and complexity of family estrangement.

Stephanie Foo is the NYT Bestselling author of What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma. She worked as a radio producer for This American Life and Snap Judgment, and her work has appeared in Invisibilia, Vox and The New York Times. A noted speaker and instructor, she has taught at Columbia University and has spoken at venues from Sundance Film Festival to the Missouri Department of Mental Health.

Domenica Ruta is the NYTimes bestselling author of the memoir With or Without You as well as the novels Last Day, a 2019 NYT Notable book of the year, and All the Mothers. She's published short fiction and essays in the Iowa Review, the Boston Review, the Indiana Review, Epoch, Ninth Letter, The Cut, People, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized a handful of times, most notably in Wanting and No Contact . She publishes personal essays with zero regularity and lots of love for free on her Substack. Check out her website or follow her on Instagram at @domenicaruta .

Lindsey Danis is a queer writer of fiction and essays whose writing has appeared in AFAR, Longreads, Eater, and elsewhere. Lindsey’s first book, (Out) On the Road: The Radical Joy of Queer Travel, is forthcoming from Ig Publishing. Lindsey lives in the Hudson Valley with her partner and two dogs. When not writing, Lindsey can be found hiking, kayaking, or cooking.

Hannah Bae is a freelance journalist and nonfiction writer who is at work on a memoir about healing from childhood trauma and family estrangement. In 2024, she was a New York State Council on the Arts grantee in literature and a nonfiction juror for The Kirkus Prize. Hannah was the 2020 nonfiction winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a 2022 and 2021 Peter Taylor Fellow for The Kenyon Review Writers Workshops and a 2019 fellow at Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Follow her on Instagram at @hannahbae.

Emi Nietfeld is the award-winning author of (Penguin Press ‘22), a memoir of her journey through foster care and homelessness, interrogating the true meanings of resilience, ambition, and success. After graduating from Harvard in 2015, she worked as a software engineer, an experience she wrote about in her viral essay, “After Working At Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again.” Today, Emi writes about fertility technology and inequality for, , , and other publications. She lives in New York City with her family.

Monique Laban is a writer from New York. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, The Offing, Clarkesworld, and elsewhere. She has received support from Hedgebrook, the Center for Fiction, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop, the Tin House Summer Workshop, Viable Paradise, and VONA.

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