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Naima Coster

Biography

Naima Coster

Naima Coster is the New York Times bestselling author of WHAT'S MINE AND YOURS. She is also the author of HALSEY STREET and a finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction, and was a 2020 National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 honoree. Naima's stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Kweli, the Paris Review Daily, Catapult, the Rumpus and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, as well as degrees from Fordham University and Yale. She has taught writing for over a decade, in community settings, youth programs and universities. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Books by Naima Coster

Take What You Can
by Naima Coster - Fiction

Val and Milly fell in love with France at the same time they fell in love with each other and became immediate best friends. Now they are in their 30s, each married and with a baby girl on the way. When Milly suggests Val move to New York so they can raise their daughters together after a decade apart, it’s a resounding yes. Despite their excitement, the pair secretly wonders if their friendship has always worked best as a trio. On that first trip to France, these two motherless daughters were taken under the wing of an older woman named Helene. But now, without Helene and her guidance, who are Milly and Val? The realities of class and social capital, of strained marriages and the demands of motherhood, serve as constant reminders of how far apart they’ve grown. And no matter how much they try to avoid it, everything comes back to the rift that began all those years ago in France.

What's Mine and Yours
by Naima Coster - Fiction, Women's Fiction

A community in the Piedmont of North Carolina rises in outrage as a county initiative draws students from the largely Black east side of town into predominantly white high schools on the west. For two students, Gee and Noelle, the integration sets off a chain of events that will tie their two families together in unexpected ways over the span of the next 20 years. As love is built and lost, and the past never too far behind, WHAT’S MINE AND YOURS moves between the years, from the foothills of North Carolina, to Atlanta, Los Angeles and Paris. It explores the unique organism that is every family: what breaks them apart and how they come back together.