Images Change Us: On Writing, Art, and Intimacy
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Writers & Books presents three nationally recognized authors with deep ties to Rochester who use visual art to inspire and inform their work. Whether it’s an illustrative sentence in a story, a powerful polaroid, or a vivid portrait-drawing, these writers rely on the “image” to engender understanding, empathy, and intimacy between readers and writers.
Baker, Livingston, and Shah will share short works of nonfiction alongside an accompanying slideshow. A discussion and audience Q&A moderated by Writers & Books Artistic Director, Tyler Barton, will follow, along with a book sale and signing.
Memoirist Sonja Livingston and author Sejal Shah contributed photograph-inspired essays to Snapshots: An Album of Essay and Image (Bloomsbury, 2025), and Nicholson Baker’s most recent book, Finding A Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better At Art (Penguin, 2024), tells the story of how he taught himself to draw after a 30+ year career as a novelist, journalist, and memoirist.
As Writers & Books celebrates the 25th Anniversary of our “one book” city-wide reading program, Rochester Reads, we’re bringing together great authors from Rochester’s present and past to help us communicate the impact of this beloved annual tradition. Sonja Livingston’s memoir Ghostbread, about her upbringing in Rochester, was selected as one of two 2026 Rochester Reads books.
Nicholson Baker has written seventeen books, including The Mezzanine, Vox, Human Smoke, The Anthologist, Baseless, and an art book, The World on Sunday, in collaboration with his wife Margaret Brentano. Several of his books have been New York Times bestsellers, and he has won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a James Madison Freedom of Information Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Herman Hesse Prize. Baker has two grown children; he and his wife live on the Penobscot River in Maine. During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Baker began teaching himself to draw portraits; his latest book Finding A Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better At Art (Penguin, 2024), tells the story of his drawing journey.
Sonja Livingston is the author of four books of creative nonfiction, including the award winning memoir, Ghostbread which has been adopted for classroom use around the country. Her work appears in outlets such as The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Salon. Honors include a NYFA Fellowship, an Iowa Review Award, an Arts & Letters Prize, a VanderMey Nonfiction Prize and an AWP Book Prize. Sonja is an associate professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Virginia Commonwealth University and teaches in the Postgraduate Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Sejal Shah is the author of the debut short story collection How to Make Your Mother Cry: Fictions and the award-winning debut essay collection, This Is One Way to Dance, an NPR Best Book of 2020. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Conjunctions, the Guardian, the Kenyon Review, and Literary Hub, among others. In 2021, she was named an influential AAPI Leader by Good Morning America and ABC News. Sejal lives in Rochester, New York.
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