Kaitlyn Greenidge Books in Order

Kaitlyn Greenidge was born in Boston and grew up in nearby Somerville and Arlington. Books and libraries gave her room to follow whatever caught her interest, while family life made space for storytelling, play, and big imaginative leaps.

That permission to imagine has stayed at the center of her work.

Greenidge did not treat writing as an easy career choice. She has spoken about growing up with economic precarity and knowing how uncertain a writer's life could be. Before entering the MFA program at Hunter College, she worked for three years at the Weeksville Black history museum in Brooklyn, an experience that kept her close to the histories and communities that would inform her fiction.

At Hunter, she studied fiction with Nathan Englander and Peter Carey while building a community with other writers. She also wrote nonfiction, with essays and criticism appearing in magazines and newspapers. That mix remains important to her career. Research, reporting, and close attention to the ways people describe their lives all feed the novels.

In 2016, she published her debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman. The book follows a Black family recruited to join a sign-language experiment involving a chimpanzee at an institute in Massachusetts. Greenidge uses the unusual premise to explore family language, race, science, secrecy, and the unsettling ways institutions can shape private lives.

The story helped establish concerns she returns to: what families tell one another, what they leave unsaid, and how history sits in ordinary rooms. Its pages move across viewpoints and time, letting a teenage daughter's hopes and embarrassments sit beside the adults' tangled plans.

Her next novel went backward in time, but kept asking about freedom.

In Libertie, published in 2021, Greenidge turns to Reconstruction-era Brooklyn and Haiti. The novel was inspired in part by Susan Smith McKinney Steward, the first Black woman physician in New York State, but Greenidge creates her own central pair: Libertie Sampson and her mother, Dr. Kathy Sampson. Libertie admires her mother's work yet resists being handed a future, and the novel follows her search for an independent life amid questions of color, class, marriage, healing, and community.

Across both books, Greenidge is interested in the gap between the life someone plans and the life they can actually claim. Her characters face pressure from families, institutions, and the larger stories their societies tell about race and belonging. The tension is serious, but the people on the page remain complicated, funny, stubborn, and full of hope.

Greenidge has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a Whiting Award for Fiction. She is based in Brooklyn and works as features director at Harper's Bazaar, alongside her fiction and essay writing.