Author: Kashana Cauley in conversation with Audrey Willams

Experience an engaging conversation with Kashana Cauley and Audrey T. Williams as they discuss Cauley's novel The Survivalists.

The Survivalists by Kashana Cauley is a sharp, darkly funny novel that explores ambition, friendship, and the uneasy pursuit of security in uncertain times. The story follows Aretha, a driven lawyer whose carefully planned life veers off course when she moves in with her gun-dealing boyfriend and his doomsday-prepping roommates in Brooklyn. Blending satire with social insight, the book examines race, class, and the modern hustle with wit and heart—raising timely questions about what we sacrifice to feel safe and successful. 

Kashana Cauley is the author of the new novel The Payback, a NYT Editor's Choice, and the novel The Survivalists, which was named a best book of 2023 by the BBC, the Today Show, Vogue and many other outlets. She’s also a TV writer who has written for The Great North, Pod Save America on HBO and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and a former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. She has also written for The Atlantic, Esquire, The New Yorker, Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, among other publications. 

Audrey T. Williams is a Black American and Indo-Burmese poet and wellness facilitator whose work bridges ancestral wisdom, storytelling and community healing. Her “Words for Wellness” programs draw from literary arts and speculative fiction as medicine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts and is completing a certificate in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. Her writing appears in Lightspeed Magazine, Space & Time Magazine, Peregrine Journal and Conjuring Worlds: An Afrofuturist Textbook. She lives in the San Francisco East Bay with her husband, mother and two grumpy chickens, and is working on a memoir, a speculative flash fiction collection and a poetry chapbook on caregiving. 

This program is sponsored by Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.