From bands to books, an East Village resident starts a new chapter

Photos and reporting by Stacie Joy 

When Cresta Kruger moved to the East Village in 1996, it was to start a band. 

Thirty years later, after playing electric flute and singing in several rock bands, raising two daughters in the neighborhood, working as a photographer and spending a decade in a local memoir-writing group, Kruger is starting something else: her own book publicity company. 

Kruger recently launched Cresta Kruger Communications, a boutique publicity operation that she hopes will focus on authors writing about women's issues, art and music — with some East Village writers in the mix, too. 

It's a new direction, though one that connects several strands of Kruger's life in the neighborhood.

After arriving here in the 1990s, she played in several bands, including the all-women group Kisser, and later hosted music programs on MTV2 and The Music Choice Channel. 

While raising daughters Ayla and Kali with her partner, cinematographer Christian Huguenot, Kruger volunteered at their schools and performed for eight years in the District 1 Battle of the Family Bands at the Bowery Ballroom. She also worked weekends as a maternity and portrait photographer. 

For more than a decade, Kruger has been part of the Howling Women, the memoir-writing circle the late Beat writer and longtime East Village resident Hettie Jones formed at the Lower East Side Girls Club in 2014. The group has continued meeting and writing since Jones died in 2024. 

Now that her daughters are older — and her days no longer revolve quite so much around getting them to school, sports and art classes — Kruger said she has the time to concentrate on her own career. Her first publicity client brings the story back to music. 

 

Mary Lucia, the longtime Minneapolis rock DJ and sister of Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg, published the memoir "What Doesn't Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To," a 2026 Minnesota Book Award finalist. 

The book recounts Lucia's life in music and a much darker period: a three-year ordeal involving a stalker who initially connected with her as a radio listener. Lucia also has her own ties to the neighborhood, having lived in New York during parts of the 1990s. 

Kruger marked the launch of her new company by organizing a series of East Village readings and signings for Lucia, including at The Library and Rabbit Bar & Books.

For Kruger, the events brought together two constants in her life here: music and writing. She also sees an appetite for the kind of in-person cultural gatherings that were once much more commonplace around the neighborhood.

"People are craving IRL opportunities to connect with one another, get inspired by artists and thinkers, and have a cup of something yummy," she said. 

And Kruger has a fitting analogy for what she's betting on next: "In this digital age, books are the new vinyl."