Kashana Cauley

Kashana Cauley is the author of the newly released The Payback, a student loan industry heist novel.

She is also the author of The Survivalists, which was published in January 2023 and named a best book of 2023 by the BBC, the Today Show, Vogue, and many other outlets. She’s 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.

Recently I asked Cauley about what she was reading. Her reply:

I just finished Great Black Hope, by Rob Franklin, and loved it. It’s paced how the most relaxing part of summer feels, languid as our narrator drifts into more and more situations that cause him trouble. I also loved the book because it asks the fundamental question of how Black people deal with the fact that our Americanness is often conditional, and dependent on how much we subsume ourselves into the dominant culture, and how unsatisfying it can be to shoehorn ourselves into the sort of respectability politics that we think might save us, but really don’t.

Visit Kashana Cauley's website.

Q&A with Kashana Cauley.

--Marshal Zeringue