Stephen Policoff launches "A Ribbon For Your Hair," with Susan Choi

Stephen will be joined by critically aclaimed writer Susan Choi for a reading, conversation and Q&A, followed by a reception and signing.

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How do you go on when your world shatters twice?

When Stephen Policoff’s adopted daughter Anna was four, a freak accident landed her in the ER. Seven months and countless tests later, the Mayo Clinic delivered a devastating diagnosis—Niemann-Pick Type C, a rare and fatal genetic illness; most children with it do not live past thirteen. As Anna’s illness progressed, so did her buoyant personality and love for Broadway musicals, her younger sister, and song. Then tragedy struck again when Stephen’s wife Kate was diagnosed with late-stage cancer, leaving Stephen to raise terminally ill Anna and her sister alone. At once heartbreaking and life-affirming, A Ribbon for Your Hair weaves together memoir, medical intrigue, dark humor, and deep tenderness. It is about what it means to endure, to remember, and to love.

Advanced Praise for A Ribbon For Your Hair

“Stephen Policoff is so singular in so many ways—as the first writing teacher I ever had; as a seer of the ineffable, the unbearable, and the unexpectedly comedic…a joy to know and to read. So just read him and know!” —Susan Choi, National Book Award winner for Trust Exercise

“Every page resonates as Policoff tells the story of four lives, all so completely normal and yet so marvelous, until two of them are yanked out of the story forever. How do we go on? Intertwining the wonderful with the terrible, Policoff shows us that, however imperfectly, we can.” —Stacy Horn, author of seven books, including The Killing Fields of East New York and Imperfect Harmony: Finding Happiness Singing with Others

“A Ribbon For Your Hair is a primer on a cruel neurogenetic disorder, and on the joy of ties that bind.” —Kathleen Watt, author of Rearranged: An Opera Singer’s Facial Cancer and Life Transposed

“Policoff is a master of observation, of humanity’s frailties and foibles.” —Lisa Del Rosso, California Review of Books

Stephen Policoff’s first novel, Beautiful Somewhere Else, won the James Jones Award and was published by Carroll & Graf in 2004. His second novel, Come Away, won the Dzanc Award and was published by Dzanc Books in 2014. His third novel, Dangerous Blues, was published in 2022 by Flexible Press. He is clinical professor of writing in Liberal Studies at NYU. Several pieces of this memoir were first published in december, Riddlebird, Entropy Literary Journal, and Oyster River Pages. A section on Anna’s joyous experience in music therapy won the Fish Short Memoir Award in 2012, and subsequently appeared on music therapy websites around the world.

Susan Choi is the author of Flashlight, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, Trust Exercise, which received the National Book Award for fiction, and the novels The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest, and My Education. She is a recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, a Lambda Literary award, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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