Representing some of the country’s most compelling authors and academics for speeches, lectures and readings

Featured Speakers

Katherine Boo

Katherine Boo

Pulitzer Prize Winner • Bestselling Author • Journalist

“Very little journalism is world changing. But if change is to happen, it will be because people with power have a better sense of what’s happening to people who have none.” —Katherine Boo Over twenty-five years as a journalist, Katherine Boo has established herself as a fearless, honest writer dedicated to telling the stories of […]

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Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman

Bestselling Author • Memoirist • Social Justice Advocate

Piper Kerman’s best-selling memoir Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison chronicles what the author calls her “crucible experience”—the 13 months she spent in the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. A brief dalliance with drug trafficking while she was in her early twenties sent Kerman to prison ten years later on […]

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Dr. Matthew Desmond

Dr. Matthew Desmond

Bestselling Author • Social Justice Advocate • Urban Ethnographer

“Desmond is an academic who teaches at Harvard—a sociologist or, you could say, an ethnographer. But I would like to claim him as a journalist too, and one who… has set a new standard for reporting on poverty.” —Barbara Ehrenreich MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond’s New York Times bestselling book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the […]

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Allyson Hobbs

Allyson Hobbs

Author • Essayist • Historian

Allyson Hobbs is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Stanford University and a contributing staff writer to NewYorker.com. Allyson’s first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press in October 2014, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth […]

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Ayana Mathis

Ayana Mathis

Bestselling Author • Novelist • Essayist

Ayana Mathis’ stunning debut novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was hailed by critics as marking the arrival of an incandescent literary talent. The book was a New York Times Bestseller, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Boston Globe Best Book of the Year, and an NPR Best Books of 2013. It was long-listed for the Impac Dublin International Literary Award, nominated for a 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0.

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Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami

Novelist • Author • Essayist

Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco, a place whose past and present permeate her writing. A novelist, short story writer and essayist, Lalami is a unique and confident voice in the conversations about race and immigration that increasingly occupy our national attention. Originally building a strong following through her widely-read literary blog “MoorishGirl,” […]

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Taylor Branch

Taylor Branch

Pulitzer Prize Winner • Bestselling Author • Historian

“Truth requires a maximum effort to see through the eyes of strangers, foreigners and enemies.” —Taylor Branch Author and historian Taylor Branch’s landmark narrative history of the civil rights era, America in the King Years, has been compared with other epic histories such as Shelby Foote’s The Civil War and Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography of […]

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Subjects

New & Noteworthy

A Chosen Exile

Praise for A Chosen Exile

[An] incisive cultural history…[A] critically vigilant work.

New York Times Book Review

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

Praise for The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane

Forthcoming

March 2017

A Truck Full Of Money

Praise for A Truck Full Of Money

The story of [an] entrepreneur’s remarkable life [and] the new American economy and the technological world that built it. More engrossing work from a gifted practitioner of narrative nonfiction.

Kirkus

The Fire This Time

Praise for The Fire This Time

An absolutely indispensable anthology.

Booklist, starred review