Celebrating 80 Years of Penguin Classics

Clear

Thursday, 7:00 pm EDT June 25, 2026

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

Join us for an evening celebrating the 80th anniversary of Penguin Classics and its long-standing mission to ignite a universal love of reading, connect writers with global audiences, and publish high-quality literature. We are pleased to welcome Elda Rotor, Vice President and Publisher of Penguin Classics, as the evening’s moderator. In conversation with Rotor, acclaimed writers Nicole Dennis-Benn, Roxane Gay, and Xochitl Gonzalez will reflect on the evolving role of the classics and the exciting ways in which contemporary voices continue to expand, challenge, and reinterpret the literary canon.

As recent contributors to Penguin Classics editions, Dennis-Benn, Gay, and Gonzalez build upon Penguin Classics’ commitment to new perspectives. In Brown Girl, Brownstones, Dennis-Benn’s foreword highlights the novel’s enduring relevance in conversations about migration and identity. In The Portable Feminist Reader, Gay curates a diverse collection of feminist thought that illuminates the evolution and complexities of the feminist canon. In A Room of One’s Own, Gonzalez’s introduction essay reexamines Virginia Woolf’s call for creative freedom by breaking down gender, race, and class, extending her message to a broader audience. Together with Rotor, whose visionary leadership has helped guide Penguin Classics’ celebrated publishing program and launch several innovative series, the panel will reflect on the lasting legacy of the classics. Space is limited, so reserve your spot today!

Supporter Tickets include a complimentary Penguin Classics tote bag in appreciation of your contribution to The Center for Fiction.

We offer two in-person ticket options: the $10 Standard Ticket and the $40+ Supporter Ticket. Both provide the same access, but if you’re able, we kindly suggest registering for the Supporter Ticket to help sustain our programs. Please note that tickets do not include books; we encourage you to order in advance online or purchase copies at the event.

Featuring

Elda Rotor

Elda Rotor

Elda Rotor (she/her) is Vice President and Publisher for Penguin Classics. She oversees the U.S. classics publishing program including the works of John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Shirley Jackson, William Golding, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, and the Pelican Shakespeare series. Elda originated several series including the Penguin Speculative Fiction Special, Penguin Classics Marvel Collection, Penguin Vitae, Penguin Liberty, Penguin Drop Caps, Penguin Orange Collection, Penguin Horror with Guillermo del Toro, Penguin Civic Classics, and a series of African American classics curated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. She was a founding member of the PRH DEI Council and led the Penguin Publishing Group Diversity Committee. She is a board member for the Academy of American Poets and an advisory board member of Kundiman, a national organization dedicated to Asian American creative writing. Prior to Penguin, Elda was a Senior Editor at Oxford University Press.

Photo Credit: Elda Rotor
Nicole Dennis-Benn

Nicole Dennis-Benn

Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of the Read with Jenna Book Club pick Patsy, which was a national bestseller and a Lambda Literary Award winner, and Here Comes the Sun, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Lambda Literary Award winner. Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, she is a visiting associate professor at Bryn Mawr College and lives with her wife and two sons in Brooklyn, New York.

Photo Credit: Kevin Peragine Photography
Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She also has a newsletter, The Audacity.

Photo Credit: Emmie America
Xochitl Gonzalez

Xochitl Gonzalez

Xochitl Gonzalez is the author of the national bestseller Last Night in Brooklyn, the New York Times bestseller Olga Dies Dreaming and the Reese’s Book Club pick Anita de Monte Laughs Last. She was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her essays in the Atlantic.

Photo Credit: Mayra Castillo

Featured Books

.

Brown Girl, Brownstones

By Paule Marshall, Nicole Dennis-Benn

Published by Penguin Publishing Group

PURCHASE

Selina Boyce comes of age in 1940s New York as the daughter of two immigrants from Barbados: a free-spirited father she adores and who dreams of returning to his Caribbean island home, and a disciplined, hardworking mother she admires and who is determined to purchase their Brooklyn brownstone. When her father comes into an unexpected inheritance, Selina is torn between his nostalgia for the past and her mother’s ambition for the future, all while negotiating racism, sexuality, Depression-era poverty, and the competing values of African Americans and her West Indian immigrant community.

First published in 1959, Brown Girl, Brownstones opened a window into the rich inner life of Black women and today ranks with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as one of the great New York City novels. With her autobiographical debut, Paule Marshall paved the way for Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Maya Angelou—and took her place in the American literary canon.
.

The Portable Feminist Reader

By Roxane Gay (Editor)

Published by Penguin Publishing Group

PURCHASE

For Roxane Gay, a feminist canon is subjective and always evolving. A feminist canon represents a long history of feminist scholarship, embraces skepticism, and invites robust discussion and debate. Selected writings by ancient, historic, and more recent feminist voices include Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Anna Julia Cooper, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Eileen Myles, Mona Eltahawy, bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, The Guerrilla Girls, and many more. With an introduction, headnotes, and an inspired list of multimedia recommendations, Roxane Gay presents multicultural perspectives, ecofeminism, feminism and disability, feminist labor, gender perspectives, and Black feminism. Through the Portable Feminist Reader, readers explore the state of American feminism, its successes and failures, and what feminism looks like in practice, as a complex, contradictory, personal and political, and ever-growing legacy of feminist thought.

.
.

A Room of One's Own

By Virginia Woolf, Xochitl Gonzalez, Michèle Barrett

Published by Penguin Publishing Group

PURCHASE

In October 1928, Virginia Woolf delivered two lectures to the women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge, arguing with inimitable wit and rhetorical mastery that an income and a room of one’s own are essential to a woman’s creative freedom. These lectures became the basis for A Room of One’s Own, a landmark in feminist thought, in which Woolf imagines the fictional Judith Shakespeare, sister to William and equally gifted but lost to history. How much genius has gone unexpressed, Woolf wonders, because women are not afforded the same privileges as men? A hundred years later, her brilliant polemic reverberates into our own time.

In this edition, Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary and bestselling novelist Xochitl Gonzalez contributes an introductory essay that extends the argument to Woolf’s housekeeper, breaking down divides of not only gender but also race and class in order to include all women in Woolf’s profoundly inspiring call to realize their creative potential.