August 5, 2025
By Sarah Schenck for Wordsprouts
WordSprouts is the Park Slope Food Coop’s long-standing reading series, featuring published authors who are also Coop members. For over 20 years, we’ve hosted readers and writers in events that are always free and open to all, including non-Coop members.
Our mission is to showcase local writers who are members of the Coop and cultivate friendships between Coop members and our larger community.
During the pandemic, the Coop lost the capacity to host events in our building, and the committee went on hiatus, except for a few events graciously hosted by our neighbors at Old First Church.
We revived WordSprouts in 2025, with an exciting partnership with the Old Stone House (336 Third Street in Park Slope, just off Fifth Avenue), where we host events on the last Wednesday of the month, including delicious snacks provided by the PSFC.
Our 2025 line-up has featured:
- 2/18/25: Christopher Hastings, graphic novelist/comic artist and creator of Five Nights at Freddy’s (Scholastic Inc., 2019) and InvestiGators: Agents of S.U.I.T.(coauthored with John Patrick Green) (First Second, 2023)
- 3/25/25: Katherine Fennelly, memoir/biography, Family Declassified: Uncovering my grandfather’s journey from spy to children’s book author (Sunbury Press, Inc., 2023)
- 4/30/25: Rosanna Staffa, fiction writer, author of The War Ends at Four (Regal House Publishing, 2023)
- 5/28/25: Betsy Andrews, poet and journalist covering food, drink and travel and author of Coastal: 130 Recipes from a California Road Trip (Chronicle, 2025)
- 6/25/25: Suzanne Cope, biography and memoir, and author of Women of War: The Italian Assassins, Spies, and Couriers Who Fought the Nazis (Penguin Random House 2025)
Our next event will be on Wednesday, September 24, with New York Times bestselling author Carina Finn, author of the young readers’ fantasy series Feast and Famine: The Last Great Heir (Sourcebooks, 2023). Carina’s next book will be coming out in February.
The RSVP link for our September event can be found here.
We welcome your suggestions for future events—past events have featured fiction, nonfiction, history, memoir, graphic novel, cultural criticism and cookbooks. Feel free to suggest a Coop friend or nominate yourself as a potential featured guest speaker!
We’ve been contemplating upcoming events with self-published authors and also works-in-progress, and welcome your suggestions.
You can email us at psfcwordsprouts@gmail.com or follow us on Instagram at @foodcoopwordsprouts.
WordSprouts’ Committee includes committee leader Sarah Schenck
and committee members Susan Horwich and Ruthie Nachmany.