Literary world's class divide: working-class writers feel they don't belong

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When I walk into a room full of writers, I’m often struck by the sense that I don’t belong. I’m an immigrant, first-generation to college; my father was a welder. Swearing was the third language we spoke at home—after English and Greek—and my grandmother’s favorite word rhymed with “swat.” I don’t, per se, have a literary inheritance—the only people I knew with professional degrees were teachers. I went to a state school, started out teaching high school in Newark, NJ, and was lucky to attend a funded MFA program. But the sense of fraudulence never quite left me.

Once, to prepare for a job interview with an English department, I watched an episode of Lives of the Rich and Famous ; I barely understood what a Medievalist was at the time, and I knew I would not have the cultural capital to sit through a lunch with the search committee (and the Medievalist) without doing my homework. Yet even after a bad writing day, I tell myself, You are not your grandfather with a fourth-grade education working the grape vines, you are not your sisters waking up at 6am to serve coffee. You are a white American who gets to write.

While many in the lit community come from predominantly white households with professional pedigrees—financial privilege and connections, access to culture—there are countless writers, immigrant and non-immigrant alike, grappling with what it means to be an outsider and striving to make a life in the arts as first-gen writers. It’s an invisible path, one marked by doubt; simultaneously, it is an imaginative act of self-determination.

For this round table, I asked writers Sara Nović , Chet’la Sebree , and Maria Adelman —all of whom have new books out—to talk about their origins, survival strategies, and the imagination required to be an immigrant of letters.

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D/Annie Liontas: I find that the experiences of first-gen writers are too often illegible in the publishing industry and the literary world. What has your experience around access been like? What have you had to overcome?

Maria Adelman: My situation was probably a little different from yours. There were times growing up when money was very tight, but by the time I was in middle school, my parents had solid “American” jobs—my dad was a truck driver and my mom, who went to college, was a kindergarten teacher.

I spent so long feeling so small that now I’ve taken a largely reverse approach, which results in a different type of masking—an over performance.

When I went to Cornell, I was surprised to find these were not the kinds of jobs my classmates’ parents had. They were the children of professors, of CEOs, of hotel-chain magnates. The first week of university, I called my dad and asked if we were poor. I felt thrust into another world—and it wasn’t just money, it was milieu. It was a certain register they could hit when they talked or wrote that I just couldn’t. And they had a confidence that comes from having few material concerns, this idea that the ground would always be there to meet them. And yet my classmates kept insisting to me, with near panic, that they were middle class.

Chet’la Sebree: I arrived at the University of Richmond under similar circumstances to how you arrived at Cornell, Maria. Though my mom was a lawyer and my dad was working at the management level in security, they were newly appointed in both of these spheres—having moved into those types of roles while I was in middle and high school and paying off years of debt. I went to UR on a full ride and ended up on a partially funded study abroad program in Italy where I twice overdrafted my bank account and where one of my classmates paid for our 14-person, multi-course meal with his father’s AMEX while we were in Rome. I felt like I wasn’t even trying to “keep up” but just not drown.

Sara Nović: I felt the same way at college as a first-gen student. We think of class as an economic state, and it is, of course, but there’s a reason it’s called “socio”-economic. My dad grew up in an apartment on top of his grandparents’ bar in NJ. Curse words were terms of endearment to me. I hadn’t read the books or seen the movies or eaten the foods everyone else loved—I didn’t understand the references. And the thing I think often doesn’t get accounted for when schools try to build programs to help us play “catch up” on academic content is that not only do we not know the “stuff,” we often don’t even know the questions to ask. We might not know to look for the resources. It took me a while to work out going to Disability Services, for example, in part because asking for help was so ingrained in me as tantamount to failure, and in part just because I had no concept of the organizational systems of a college.

CS: The first time writing appeared as a viable path was when I got my first full-time teaching job as a tenure-track professor. This is absolutely not to say that that’s what I believe is the pinnacle of achievement—it’s just that for the first time in my adult life I’m not functioning at some wild fiscal deficit. The year before, I wanted to quit pursuing any kind of writing life. My dad encouraged me to push a little longer, and here we are (working as a recently tenured professor, teaching in a low-res, and running around doing writing gigs i.e. still hustling).

MA: Right, a tenure-track job is one of the ways writers have traditionally found stability! So it worries me that more and more tenure-track positions are being replaced with adjunct labor. Even much of the journalistic work out there is now low-paid and piecemeal. How will people that don’t come from wealth be able to survive and create at the same time in this new world?

D/AL: Can we talk about masking? When we do it, or why we don’t? Who is in the room when we’re trying to demonstrate that we belong?

MA: There’s a scene in my book The Adjunct in which my main character attends a party at a fancy college where undergrads are discussing Freud. The funny thing is, the main character read Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis because she found it in a box of free books at a gas station (this happened to me!). But she can’t really find a way to contribute to the conversation at the party. The irony is that no one else has actually read Freud yet, but they already know what the culture has extracted from his work and she doesn’t. So they sound very smart (to her), and she is afraid if she speaks she’ll sound stupid.

For a long time, being quiet is how I dealt with feeling out of my depth. Now I often lean into a certain earnestness that can play as refreshing or charming. But, for the most part, I have unconsciously distanced myself from environments where I feel like I don’t fit in. I don’t work at a university; I don’t teach at workshops; I don’t attend AWP. None of this is helpful, of course, when I unfurl from my cocoon every few years with a book that I’m supposed to promote.

SN: Ditto on the quiet. It’s funny because I grew up trying to mask as a deaf person and come off as “normal”, and now I tend to use my deafness as an escape hatch—an accepted reason for retreating inward in situations where I feel like an alien.

CS: I probably do a bit of the opposite. As a Black woman who has moved through a lot of predominately white spaces, I’ve spent my whole life trying to prove that I belong, that I deserve to be in certain rooms. I spent so long feeling so small that now I’ve taken a largely reverse approach, which results in a different type of masking—an over performance. In fact, when people assume my lack of intellect or right to be in the room, I often end up reminding them of their own biases by quickly asserting myself. This, of course, is its own sort of exhaustion.

D/AL: What does being an outlier give you on and off the page? How does it push you creatively?

MA: I love this question. I read a lot growing up, but I didn’t have any sense of the industry. So, on the page, I didn’t try to fit in. That’s my greatest strength as a writer, my total me -ness. I couldn’t have written my first novel, How to Be Eaten , if I was trying to pick a genre or even a traditional narrative structure. It’s unhinged speculative literary horror, I guess. Like, ok, great! It’s just what I wanted to write!

D/AL: Yes! There is freedom of being the first through the door. You get to decide the shape you take.

SN: Growing up, there was a point where I’d read every book in the house and just started reading CD liner notes. I learned a lot, narrative-wise, from people like Billy Joel or Crosby, Stills and Nash, or CCR, and I’m sure that’s made a difference in how I sound as a writer, and probably in the kinds of stories I write, too.

D/AL: I also read the liner notes! And cereal boxes, and, when I was in sixth grade, Dracula unabridged because a family friend was getting rid of some books (speaking of finding boxes of free books, Maria). Like you, Sara, my writing is fueled by everything from my father’s broken English and idioms like “smell my fingers” to the TV Guide I was obsessed with as a kid.

It’s true that not having the same literary exposure and expectations can be creatively freeing, even though I still sometimes feel angst about needing to fill in those knowledge gaps.

MA: I think anger about these very issues also keep me writing. I joke that I rage-wrote The Adjunct , that it’s a novel of revenge. It was inspired by my partner’s plight in academia, one that mirrored my own plight as a former freelancer barely making ends meet. I don’t see many books about class, other than at the extremes, and I really wanted this story to be told, and so I told it, with complete disregard for a campus novel’s usual tropes.

SN: I love rage writing. I always “joke” that I run on spite and Dunkin’. But it’s true that not having the same literary exposure and expectations can be creatively freeing, even though I still sometimes feel angst about needing to fill in those knowledge gaps.

D/AL: I never thought about it as rage writing, but I’ve always felt desperate, wrote as if I was on fire—and just chalked that up to being Greek.

CS: I definitely feel you on the desperation! I always felt this state of urgency—like I had to fight to say anything and that if I finally got the chance to say something it had to matter. It’s made me scrappy. It’s actually what got me started writing essays. I’m trained first and foremost as a poet, but in the early pandemic, following George Floyd’s murder, I felt desperate to take up more space, desperate to say more than the poem could hold, which is how I ended up writing Turn (W)here: A Geography of Home , which looks at my relationship to home and belonging as a queer Black woman with disabilities through domestic and international travel.

MA: The publishing industry pays so little at the entry-level that it favors people who can afford to be in it—those with parental assistance or without a mountain of educational debt. This might be why the industry can be uncomfortable with stories about the gradations of class. How does low pay in the publishing industry affect the community more broadly?

D/AL: The Great Publishing Resignation! All those junior-level professionals who walked away from the industry because of burnout, stagnant wages. They love books like we do, but there was just no path forward.

SN: Totally! The publishing industry selects for this. I was I think probably one of the last groups of people to go through the unpaid internship scheme at Conde Nast and on the days I worked there I simply could not eat, because I couldn’t afford anything in the cafeteria, and the building is in such a weird spot it was hard to even find a normal bodega. I was in grad school and working multiple other jobs for actual money, and still I subsisted mainly on oatmeal cream pies, and slept in a room I shared with a stranger, just two mattresses on the floor. At the time I was just doing what I thought I had to do to become a writer, and it took me a while to realize most people… were not doing that.

CS: Right?! I could never do the New York stint for an unpaid internship. And I didn’t get into a fully funded program, so I worked two jobs (adjunct and admin work) when I was in grad school and for a year that followed. The two blissful years I focused on my craft when I was a fellow at an institution put me into debt. By the time I was in my early thirties, though I was grateful to know that my parents would never let me go hungry, I moved into my high school bedroom and worked four to five freelance gigs while paying steep health insurance premiums and medical bills while trying to pay off debt.

CS: We’ve all, technically, made it into rooms it sounds like none of us were sure we ever would. How would you mentor someone who feels like a tourist, a novice, in these literary spaces?

D/AL: I think a lot about what other marginalized writers who are trying to come up would want to know. Like other capitalist institutions, the industry thrives on mystifying processes and obfuscating practices–and often you don’t even know what you don’t know. My approach is often to be as direct as possible with mentees, even at the risk of disillusionment. But maybe that is just my immigrant self hard-knuckling everything.

SN: No, I think that’s right. I am always telling my students about the times I felt (and feel!) just as weird and confused as they do–even if it’s maybe not what they want to hear, that not all of us can grow convincingly into these socialite spaces, better to be prepared?

MA: Hard agree on transparency! I also recommend books like Before and After the Book Deal , which personally made me less clueless about the industry. I tell them what I didn’t understand for a long time: your bank account is not commensurate with your talent. The number of copies you sell, big or small, may not have that much to do with the quality of your writing. True financial stability from writing alone is rare, even if you’re “established” or “successful.”

CS: I agree so much about this transparency angle. I tell trusted friends, colleagues, and mentees quite a lot of specifics about rates I’ve charged, salaries I’ve been offered, advances I’ve been paid. I want people to know what has been possible, at least for me. It’s hard to know how to advocate for yourself as a freelancer or even on the academic job market without a functional understanding of the landscape.

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D/Annie Liontas is the trans-genderqueer author of the memoir Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery , which won the ALA’s 2025 Stonewall Award for Nonfiction and the 2025 Lambda Literary Córdova prize, as well as the novel Let Me Explain You . Their work has appeared in The Atlantic , The New York Times Book Review , The New Review , Oprah Daily , and elsewhere. An Assistant Professor at Lehigh University, Liontas helped secure a Mellon Foundation grant on Disability Justice to bring storytelling to communities in the criminal justice system. They write the Most Anticipated Queer Books list at Electric Literature and live in Philadelphia with their wife, dog, and Email the rabbit.

Maria Adelmann is the author of a new novel, The Adjunct , as well as the story collection Girls of a Certain Age and the novel How to Be Eaten , an NPR book of the year and Belletrist book club pick. She has written for Tin House , n+1 , Electric Literature , The New York Times , and many others, and her writing has been distinguished by The Best American Short Stories . She has worked variously as a hotel reviewer, product tester, and copywriter and currently lives in Philadelphia.

Chet’la Sebree is the author of the debut essay collection Turn (W)here: A Geography of Home as well the poetry collections Blue Opening , longlisted for PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry; Field Study , winner of the James Laughlin Award; and Mistress , nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Currently, she’s an associate professor at the George Washington University.

Sara Nović is the author of the novels True Biz and Girl at War , nonfiction America is Immigrants , and a new memoir, Mother Tongue . They’re an instructor of Deaf studies and creative writing, and live in Philadelphia with their family.