Zelda Fitzgerald: Novelist, Painter, and Socialite, presented by Kelly McMasters, Hofstra University

2025 marks the centennial of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. As the Great Neck Library continues its celebration this month, we invite you to learn about his wife Zelda, a writer and artist known for personifying the carefree ideals of the 1920s flapper.

Kelly McMasters is an essayist, professor, mother, and former bookshop owner. She is the author of the Zibby Book Club pick The Leaving Season: A Memoir-in-Essays (WW Norton) and co-editor of the ABA national bestseller Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult). Her first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, was listed as one of Oprah’s top 5 summer memoirs and is the basis for the documentary film ‘The Atomic States of America,’ a 2012 Sundance selection, and the anthology she co-edited with Margot Kahn, This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017), was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, The American Scholar, Literary Hub, Newsday, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, Romper, and The Rumpus, among others.

She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia’s School of the Arts and is the recipient of a Pushcart nomination and an Orion Book Award nomination. Kelly has spoken about creative nonfiction at TEDx, authors@google, and more, and has taught at mediabistro.com, Franklin & Marshall College, and in the undergraduate writing program and Journalism Graduate School at Columbia University, among others. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies at Hofstra University in NY.

The lecture will be at the Main Library, 159 Bayview Avenue, Great Neck, on Monday, April 14, at 12:00 p.m. Registration is not required. For more information, please contact Great Neck Library at (516) 466-8055 or email adultprogramming@greatnecklibrary.org.