Distinguished Author Mira Jacob visits Montclair

Montclair State University’s English Department was proud to host novelist, memoirist, illustrator, and cultural critic Mira Jacob on Tuesday, February 10th, 2026. Jacob is best known for her books Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations and A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing. Good Talk has been shortlisted for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, long-listed for PEN Open-Book Award, and named a New York Times notable book. Jacob is currently working on her next book, We Killed Anji Alexander, a novel about the murder of a white-passing Indian actress. It is to be released in 2027 with ECCO Books. Jacob’s work has been recognized in many credible literary outlets such as  The New York Times Book Review, Literary Hub, Vogue, The Telegraph, and many others.

Jacob was born and raised by her Indian Malayali parents in New Mexico, where many assumed she was Native American, as one didn’t find many Indian Americans in New Mexico. She graduated with a BA from Oberlin College in 1996 and earned her MFA from The New School (NSSR) where she is currently a visiting professor at the MFA Creative Writing Program. Not to mention, she is also a founding faculty member of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Randolph College in Virginia.

On February 10th, faculty and students from the English Department as well as several alumni were lucky enough to get the opportunity to listen to Jacob read from her upcoming novel, We Killed Anji Alexander. In the chapter Mira shared, the main character, Anji, has to decide whether to hide behind the white-passing identity that she has created or perform in her Indian heritage because of the way diversity is currently fetishized. The reading was followed up with a Q&A.

Prior to the reading, a small group of students got the opportunity to meet with Jacob. In that period, she had the opportunity to connect with Montclair undergrads while covering topics such as passing and identity as well as the identity crisis faced in this novel. Most of the students who attended had read Mira’s Good Talk and enjoyed the opportunity to meet with the author.

When asked about her writing process during the Q &A, she discussed the concept of letting the characters come to you and tell you who they are. She described the feeling of a character standing over her shoulder telling her what to say and the way she viewed the writing process as a topographic map. Of the diverse projects she’s taken on, she said, “I think of it as divided into quadrants. I have just conquered this quadrant with this project. But what’s in the quadrant that’s diagonal? What’s over there? What’s the little glimmer that I see over there? That honestly just felt like oxygen. This one’s just really fun to write. It’s not about me. It’s not about my husband. It’s not about my boss. But it also feels like bloodletting. And it feels really exciting to be able to give that direction to do that.”

One attendee of the reading was Professor and Chair of the English Department, Dr.Jeremy Lopez, who wrote that “Mira Jacob’s reading – an event made possible by the generosity of a Montclair State Department of English alumna donor – was a true delight and, with an attendance of nearly 50 students, faculty, university administrators, and members of the public, the Department’s most successful event of the year. Students really took advantage of the opportunity to speak with Mira in this informal setting, and got a vivid sense of the nature of [the] writerly process and of how a contemporary novelist sees the relation between her work and the world. Montclair State’s proximity to New York means that we have potential access to a wide variety of working literary artists (earlier this year we hosted writer and musician Howard Fishman), and I think that having authors like Mira come speak to students creates a strong sense of community; it reminds us of how full of vitality and passion are the acts of reading and writing–the twin pillars of the study of literature. We very much hope that Mira’s talk is only the first in an ongoing series of distinguished-author visits and we are, once again, so grateful to the alumna donor for making it possible.”

The English Department also wants to thank the CHSS Administrative Team, especially Justine Soto-Rodriguez, for helping to set up the event and make it a success.

Written by by Bella Dicristina, English major