Tuesday, December 14, 6:00pm

Purchase the Book!

From the quiet of Westbeth comes Behind the Mask: Living Alone in the Epicenter, a memoir in essays by Kate Walter that includes personal but universal stories from the pandemic. The normally lively community of Westbeth Artists Housing was gearing up to celebrate its 50th anniversary when New York went into lockdown. Westbeth turned into a ghost town, and like all of us, Kate’s life changed in a day. Lonely and scared, Kate did what she knows how to do best: she wrote about it. Join us for this special book talk with Kate, who will reflect on this time and share some of her writing and writing prompts for understanding the ways that we and our neighborhoods are forever changed.

Kate Walter is the author of Looking for a Kiss: A Chronicle of Downtown Heartbreak and Healing. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, New York Daily News, AM-NY, Next Avenue, the Village Sun, and many other outlets. She taught writing at NYU and CUNY for three decades. Walter has documented her life in downtown Manhattan since 1975. She has been dubbed “that world’s Samuel Pepys.”