Join the NYS Writers Institute for a conversation with Dennard Dayle, a Jamaican American humorist and fiction writer whose work appears frequently in The New Yorker. His first novel is How to Dodge a Cannonball (2025), a razor-sharp satire that dives into the heart of the Civil War.

The novel follows the misadventures of a young white idealist who ultimately joins an all-Black Union regiment full of strange characters, including a science-fiction playwright, a Haitian double agent, and a former slave feuding with God.