KATE Zambreno admits that being photographed for a magazine doesn’t come naturally to her. “I don’t even take selfies,” she tells me. “If you look at my phone, it’s all photos of my kids.” We’re sitting on the patio of a café in Brooklyn, New York, about an hour after her photo shoot for this profile. Starlings hop around our feet gleaning crumbs, and in the yard next door preschool kids laugh and holler.
During the shoot she was asked to pose at a desk in her home nearby, but Zambreno composed most of her latest book, The Light Room: On Art and Care, out from Riverhead Books in July, sitting on her sofa, not far from where her children play. “We got a lot of photos of me in a flowy dress on the couch,” she says, her lips hinting at a smirk. Then she changed into a buttercup-yellow sweatshirt and black jeans (“My gender sense of self isn’t so femme,” she says) and moved to a setting that better captures both the spirit of the book and her family: Prospect Park. “I showed the photographer the linden tree in the Nethermead [meadow], and of course my kids were scooting down the hill like maniacs, and climbing the tree, chanting, ‘Our tree, our tree.’” A wistful, relaxed look blossoms on her face. “We always feel very happy when we get back to the park.”
, her ninth book, chronicles Zambreno’s life and preoccupations as a teaching artist, avid reader, and mother during some of the most intense seasons of the pandemic, beginning in the fall of 2020. At that point her oldest daughter was three, and her youngest daughter was a newborn. Along with her partner, the painter and critic John Vincler, Zambreno and the girls sheltered in their apartment in Brooklyn and, as for many in the borough, Prospect Park was a life saver, a place to breathe free from the fear of COVID-19. In the first section of
