How it started
hailo grew up in the suburbs, quiet and a little out of place. Her mother taught her to read at three, and books became the place she felt most herself. She read everything: grocery store paperbacks, the same dog-eared novels over and over, anything she could find.
At Princeton, she picked up F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and felt something shift. Here was a book about ambition and beauty and the feeling of being young and not yet formed. She started to understand that literature was not just entertainment. It was a way of building a self.
She also noticed something missing: a community that treated reading that way. There were plenty of places to track books or find recommendations. There was nowhere that made reading feel like a lifestyle, or that connected readers who took it seriously, the way a great music scene or fashion community could.
Hot Literati started as an answer to that absence. Not a book club in the traditional sense. A movement. A place to read deeply, connect genuinely, and become the person you are trying to be.