As part of the Fall 2026 Red Dragon Reading Series at the SUNY College at Oneonta, Margaretville author Jennifer Kabat will read from her work on Tuesday, October 6, at 7:00 pm in the Martin-Muller Art Gallery on the SUNY Oneonta campus. Her reading will be followed by a Q & A session and a reception. Admission to the event is free, and members of the community are invited to attend.
Jennifer Kabat is the author of two memoirs THE EIGHTH MOON and NIGHTSHINING, both published by Milkweed Editions. Her books explore socialism, uprisings, and the climate crisis. Her essays are sweeping histories that interleave socialism, modernism and science with her own longing for a way to understand socialism and democracy today. THE EIGHTH MOON recounts Kabat’s move to the Catskills in 2005—a place “where the land itself holds time.” As she forges friendships with her new neighbors and explores the countryside on logging roads and rutted lanes, and confronts the impacts of the housing crisis of 2008, she discovers the history of the Anti-Rent War, the1840s uprising when poor tenant farmers fought to redistribute their landlords’ vast estates. In the farmers’ socialist dreams, she discovers connections to her own parents’ collectivist values, as well as to our current moment. In NIGHTSHINING, Kabat does a deep dive into the Catskill region’s fraught environmental history, she discovers it was more than once the site of Cold War weather experimentation. She traces connections across history, following a technology that spirals up from a 1950 flood in her town to the Vietnam War, the Reagan presidency, and a present day “fix” for climate change. It is a propulsive, layered examination of the conflict between the course of nature and human legacies of resistance and control. Novelist Jonathan Lethem describes her work as “sublime.”
Jennifer Kabat’s work has been included in Best American Essays, her writing has also appeared in McSweeney’s, BOMB, The New York Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, Granta and The White Review, among others. She frequently writes for Frieze and has contributed to artists’ monographs and museum catalogues including London’s Victoria & Albert museum.

More information about the Red Dragon Reading Series is available from Dr. Roger Hecht of the SUNY Oneonta Department of English at (607) 436-3033.