Alina Adams Media

04/21/2025

For parents looking for a different education than what's available in the United States, a chance to check out British boarding school options on Thursday, May 1 in NYC via Boarding Schools Show at:

Join the Boarding Schools Show New York on May 1st at Pratt Mansions. Meet top UK boarding schools, speak with admissions directors, and get expert advice. Tickets are free, register now!

04/21/2025

Kindergarten 2025 application season is over. Which means Kindergarten 2026 admissions season has officially begun! Thursday, May 8 at 7 PM, find out everything you need to know about raising the odds of getting into your first choice public, private, charter, religious and Gifted & Talented Kindergarten. To make sure everybody gets the chance to ask their questions, space is extremely limited. RSVP at:

Archives It may be hard to believe, but it’s true – the 2025 Kindergarten admissions season is over… which means the 2026 Kindergarten admissions season has officially begun! Are you hoping to send your child to a public Gifted & Talented program in September 2026? Hunter College Elementary Sc...

04/14/2025

I absolutely loved "Colored Television" by Danzy Senna. It covered all the topics I'm interested in: The crazy world of making TV, the equally crazy world of book publishing, in*******al families, mixed marriage, quirky kids the medical and educational establishment is desperate to label, and all in a tone that my own kids would describe as my "resting sarcasm voice." I had to regularly stop my husband from doing whatever he was doing so I could read him excerpts. Check this one out, ASAP!

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK A WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024 “A laugh-out-loud cultural comedy… This is...

04/11/2025

"Phillip Loeb, he was in The Goldbergs on Broadway, then on television. Red Channels called him a Communist and General Foods insisted Gertrude Berg fire him or they’d drop their sponsorship. Pert Kelton had to leave The Honeymooners. Jackie Gleason covered for her, said it was heart trouble, but she was listed in Red Channels, too. Lucille Ball only got away with keeping her show because Desi claimed she was too dumb to know what she was doing when she registered as a Communist.”

“You’ve been keeping a close watch.”

Rose shrugged. “I had to. The Hollywood 10, they were all writers, all blacklisted.”

“Any colored folks on that list of theirs?”

“Paul Roebson, Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, Harry Belafonte, Hazel Scott, Canada Lee,” Rose rattled off. She hadn’t realized she’d been keeping track.

“So we all can’t claim to be too stupid? Hardly seems fair, seeing as how we’re judged too stupid to do anything else.”

Books, Book Reviews, Historical Fiction, Romance, Authors, Writing, Reading, History, Novels, Interviews, Tips, Query, Book Promotion, Scrivener,

04/03/2025

NYC public Kindergarten placements came out yesterday, and many parents are either distraught that their child didn't get a spot in a gifted program, or are agonizing whether G&T truly offers something General Ed doesn't. Why they're both right... and they're both wrong. I explain (my favorite part is where the Department of Education spokesperson doesn't seem to know which are the gifted programs in their own system) at:

New York City public schools offer two types of gifted and talented education.

03/30/2025

I came, I saw, I listened:

Adams: Even after 3 kids & 4 decades of conversations, it's still important to go. Strategies for when to talk to teachers & kids, and when to listen.

03/27/2025

“It’s so obvious,” Rose announced upon her eighth straight reading of Othello in three days. “The entire play is a Marxist critique of a capitalist view of the world! Iago's hatred for Othello is symbolic of the class struggle. Iago is passed over for a promotion because he is of a lower social class than Cassio. Iago's revenge is class consciousness. It’s an attack on the cult of individualism. Othello is an individualist, and we are meant to think that he is the hero of the play. But if he is the hero, then why does he have fewer lines than Iago? I counted! Obviously, Othello represents capitalism and feudalism, and Iago is the new, socialist man.”

“Obviously,” Jonas deadpanned, accustomed by now to Rose’s enthusiasm and aware nothing could derail it.

“Class and race bring about the tragedy of Othello. He’s as much victim as villian, his su***de proves it. Shakespeare is calling for a classless society, where racial prejudice doesn’t lead to murder. What else could he have meant when he has Othello say of Desdemona: When I stop loving you, the universe will fall back into the chaos that was there when time began?”

A Literal Literary Loser Gets Classy... and Classist

03/27/2025

As we get into crunch time for AP tests, my report on how NYC kids are at a disadvantage, via The 74:

Adams: Success may have less to do with when classes begin and more with whether students can afford to learn everything they need outside of them.

03/24/2025

Thank you to Helena Page Schrader for running my guest post on the ethics of historical fiction writers putting words in a real person's mouth:

I went ahead and wrote Irna Phillips into my historical fiction novel. (She joins a handful of “Guiding Light” actors, future creator of “All My Children” and “One Life to Live” Agnes Nixon, and talk show host Phil Donahue, in that regard.)

Even as I was doing it, I kept asking myself, “Do I have the right to do that?” Do I have the right to put words – and attitudes, and opinions – into the mouth of a person who isn’t around to defend herself (against something she never actually did in real life)?

The irony is, Irna Phillips would have likely understood my actions, even if she wouldn’t have liked them. (Then again, Irna liked very, very few things, people, or ideas if they weren’t her own.) Irna believed in doing whatever you needed to, to get your work to be exactly what you wanted it to be – and to hell with anybody else. She may have gotten on the phone and screamed at me. Irna loved getting on the phone and screaming. But, deep down, I like to think she would have understood.

Alina Adams is the NYT best-selling author of soap-opera tie-ins including “Oakdale Confidential,” “Jonathan’s Story,” and “The Man From O...

03/10/2025

My math and physics teacher husband likes to remind that no number is anymore meaningful than any other number. But I am a layperson. And I am kind of tickled that not only did my mailing list pass 4000 subscribers this morning, but that the number currently sits at 4004. It's cute and symmetrical. No matter what the math wonks thinks.

Join the fun at:

Applying your child to NYC Pre-K, Elementary, Middle or High School for 2025 and beyond? You can't have true school choice until you know all your choices - and the inside secrets of how to get them.

03/09/2025

Some states already do this. Via The 74:

Adams: In NYC, bright kids are left hanging. Some states give them Individualized Education Programs and let them work at their own accelerated pace.

03/07/2025

Super excited to announce that my official book launch for "Go On Pretending" will be Saturday, May 3 at 6 PM at MyBiblioteka.com in Brooklyn! Stay tuned for full details (there will be an in-person and a Zoom option), special offers and more! In the meantime, check out what owner Anya Morlan-Stysis suggests for your Russian language reading!

https://youtu.be/7zzQxdF83BY?si=9YOWgGoiH7mNyhBf

A special holiday treat! Anya Morlan-Stysis, owner of Brooklyn's MyBiblioteka Bookstore and lending library, shares Russian, Ukrainian, and translated Englis...

03/06/2025

With public NYC high schools set to notify admission this afternoon, my annual reminder that your child can get into the "best" school, and it can still not work out. And that's OK, too.

This essay is adapted from posts that originally appeared on the New York School Talk blog. At the end of October, I began to homeschool myself in lieu of completing my tenure as a Stuyvesant High School student. There are many reasons I did this, including greater educational and temporal freedom....

03/05/2025

“Well, it’s obviously Shakespeare, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Edmund Bard?” His laugh rolled in like a fog diffusing throughout her senses. “You gave the whole game away right there. He’s Edmund the Bastard from King Lear.” Jonas quoted, “To both these sisters have I sworn my love; each jealous of the other, as the stung are of the adder, which of them shall I take?” When Rose didn’t reply quickly enough; primarily because she’d run out of coughs and gulps and felt pressed to come up with an alternative; speaking was out of the question, his confidence wavered. “Did I get it wrong, then? How terribly embarrassing.”

“No.” Rose found her voice, because his had briefly tottered. “You’re one hundred percent correct. When Irna – Miss Phillips – when she told me about the character, I suggested the name. As sort of a little joke between the two of us.”

“Ah! So you’re the Shakespearean scholar.”

“Hardly!” Her snort was instinctive. If utterly unladylike.

“It was precisely the guidance I required to understand this man. He commits villainous acts, seducing married women, attempting to murder his father and brother, but he does not see himself as the villain. After being cast aside for an accident of birth, he feels righteously justified to, as they say: top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper: Now, gods, stand up for bastards! Surely, a sentiment we’ve all experienced. Whether or not we’d admit it.”

Was that the moment Rose fell in love with him?

It was recently pointed out to me that I was born in the “early 1900s.” Wait! What? You could have knocked me over with Mr. Carson’s Bowler hat… Obviously, I know my own bir…

02/24/2025

Private preschools will announce admissions on Thursday, February 27, while public preschool applications are due on Friday, February 28.

For parents who reached out to me asking for recommendations about which public programs to rank, I stressed that proximity is key. All the available programs are very similar. Most are in community based centers (because spots at public schools tend to be limited and go to siblings of children already in the school). None of them "prep" children for Hunter or other Gifted & Talented Kindergarten options. You are much better off selecting the school easiest for you to get to, as that will bring the most benefits on a daily basis.

However, there are things all good preschools, public and private, must provide. Two veteran teachers explain what parents should be looking for when they tour, here:

Is your preschool doing everything it should be? Private school and Universal PreK teachers explain what you should look for as you tour, and how to know if ...

02/17/2025

Working in NYC education, where "gifted" is the default setting for every child, I was drawn to read "The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize S***m Bank" by David Plotz. Written around the time these pre-ordained "superbabies" were hitting their high school and college years, their "genius" was demonstrated via the schools they got into - ones NYC parents would deem the bare minimum. Very well researched, engagingly written, and just plain old fun to read, "The Genius Factory" demonstrated what should have been obvious to those who initially launched this project: That the offspring's "achievements" were less the result of them being the biological children of successful men (very few were actual Nobel winners, most were just doctors, computer programers, and other types of scientists, along with some Olympic athletes), and much more them being the children of women who went out of their way to select "brilliant" s***m donors, raising the kids in homes where they were encouraged (or compelled) to live up to their imagined great potential. Considering that the descendants of true geniuses rarely achieve anything of note themselves, and that's with the benefit of both nature and the nurture of being raised by their biological genius parents, it's amazing that people who thought themselves smarter than average ever thought this experiment could yield the saviors of humanity they were expecting. But the book is great!

From the former editor of Slate and CEO of Atlas Obscura comes the unbelievable story of “the Nobel Prize s***m bank” and the children it produced—“a superb...

02/09/2025

Yuliya Patsay, narrator of "My Mother's Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region," continues to suggest my sentences are too long to be read comfortably by a reasonable human. (She and my high-school AP English teacher make very similar faces when confronted by my work.)

02/04/2025

For :

“Mr. Micheaux was America’s first colored filmmaker. He has quite the biography. Son of a freed slave, he was a homesteader, a mill worker, a Pullman porter, naturally—we do it in real life, not merely in the movies—a shoe-shiner, and a novelist. Had seven books published. And that was all before he turned to film production. His company, Lincoln Motion Pictures—note who is credited in the title—was the first owned by a colored man. Mr. Micheaux wrote, he directed, he produced. Forty-four finished films, silents and talkies. He was quite the success, even sold stock in his corporation—primarily to wealthy white folks he charmed during his days with the railroad. I only met him briefly on The Betrayal. It was the first race story to open at a white theater, right here in New York City at the Mansfield, in 1948. A generous critic called it the greatest Negro photoplay of all time. The New York Times, of course, hated it. Especially the suggestion that Negroes and whites might find many points of commonality, not merely in professional and community endeavors, but possibly in marriage.”

A Literal Literary Loser Mixes Fact and Fiction