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

Featured Speakers

Sheri Fink

Sheri Fink

Pulitzer Prize Winner • Bestselling Author • Journalist

Fink, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, a landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina—and a suspenseful portrayal of the quest for truth and justice.

Find out more
Gish Jen

Gish Jen

Cultural Commentator • Novelist • Essayist

Funny, surprising, and observant, Gish Jen is a brilliant chronicler—in both fiction and nonfiction—of America and the immigrant experience. She is the author of novels Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife, World and Town and the non-fiction books Tiger Writing: Art, Culture and the Interdependent Self and The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap. Her newest novel The Resisters imagines a not-so-distant dystopian future that The Washington Post calls “chillingly plausible…gripping”.

Find out more
Clive Thompson

Clive Thompson

Journalist • Author • Tech Industry Expert

Wired columnist and New York Times contributor Thompson writes about the interactions of human behavior and technology. His first book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better reveals how modern technology is making us smarter and better connected, and his latest, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, details how computer programming grew to be the most influential profession on the planet and shines a light on their culture.

Find out more

Jessica Bruder

Journalist • Author

Praised by the New Yorker as “an acute and compassionate observer,” Jessica Bruder reports on subcultures, economic justice and social issues in her books Nomadland, The Burning Book and her forthcoming Snowden’s Box, about how she become intertwined with the Edward Snowden saga.

Find out more

Speakers by Subject

New & Noteworthy

The Resisters

Praise for The Resisters

Inventive, funny, and tender, The Resisters is about family, baseball, and the future—but more than anything, it is about freedom, and it is about us—here, now.

Allegra Goodman, author of The Chalk Artist

The Lucky Star

Praise for The Lucky Star

This big, underwater-lit novel returns Vollmann’s work to the dive bars and gender-fluid clubs of San Francisco . . . Vollmann admirably captures the pull of vulnerability and invention, how sex can be, in the right space, a powerful way to know one’s self, and ultimately, how much each of his characters here needs a space to be themselves.

Lit Hub, Most Anticipated 2020

Snowden's Box

Praise for Snowden's Box

[Snowden’s Box] reads like a thriller, as well as a cautionary tale, because beyond this drama’s handful of players are all of us—and what’s happened to our data, our privacy, and our political agency.

Rebecca Solnit, author of Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir

Apeirogon

Praise for Apeirogon

All I can really tell you is, read McCann’s book.  It’s an important book.  It’s quite possibly a great book.

Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours

Writers and Lovers

Praise for Writers and Lovers

Writers & Lovers stole my heart from its first pages. I am in love with this book. In. Love. This deep dive of a novel will stay with me forever.

Elin Hilderbrand, author of Summer of ’69

Living in the Long Emergency

Praise for Living in the Long Emergency

Forthcoming, 2020