Thursday Sep 10, 2026
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Book.
In 1996, a retired New York City high school English teacher published a memoir that took the publishing world by storm. Angela’s Ashes , the story of Frank McCourt’s childhood in Ireland, was a bold account of poverty and family tragedy, suffused with humor and compassion. It went on to sell more than ten million copies and won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Frank McCourt was suddenly an internationally celebrated memoirist, a writer who had invigorated the genre. But most readers didn’t know that Angela’s Ashes wasn’t Frank’s first published writing. For years, he and his actor brother Malachy contributed a column to a neighborhood newspaper called The West Side Spirit . Malachy, himself a bestselling writer, also contributed to Our Town, Irish America, and The Southampton Review.
Sez I To Myself collects the best of those essays and works of journalism. Here the brothers McCourt tackle parades and pubs, classrooms and churches, the immigrant experience, loss, 9/11, the writing life, and more. This is a charming, tender,
and insightful collection, a welcome new book from two masterful and much-loved writers
About the Editor.
Tom Allon is an award-winning journalist, columnist, media executive, and publisher. A friend and colleague of Frank McCourt’s at Stuyvesant High School, he was the editor of many of the pieces that appear in Sez I to Myself. Allon is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Cornell University, and Stuyvesant High School. He has taught opinion writing at Hunter College and journalism and American literature at Stuyvesant High School. He has four adult children, three cats, and is married to Rebecca Cohen. They live in Dumbo, Brooklyn, and East Moriches, Long Island
About the Moderator.
Mark Chiusano is a journalist and author of The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos, and the story collection Marine Park, a PEN/Hemingway honorable mention. He contributes to places like New York magazine, Politico Magazine, The Nation, and The Drift, and has published fiction in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The Iowa Review, and Electric Lit. He teaches English at CUNY City Tech, and was a New America Fellow for the class of 2026.