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

Featured Speakers

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

Bestselling Author • Journalist • Women’s Advocate

Lemmon is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield and The Dressmaker of Khair Khana, about a young entrepreneur who supported her community under the Taliban. She is at work on a forthcoming book about Kurdish women leading the battle against ISIS.

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David Finkel

Pulitzer Prize Winner • Bestselling Author • Journalist

Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post editor, explores what we ask of the men and women we send to war—and how we fail them when they come home in his two bestselling books, The Good Soldiers and Thank You For Your Service.

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Tayari Jones

Tayari Jones

Bestselling Author • Novelist

Dubbed by The Los Angeles Times “a bard of the modern South”, Tayari Jones confronts issues of race, family, and criminal justice reform in her novels. Her latest, the instant New York Times-bestseller An American Marriage, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and an NAACP Image Award and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection.

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Téa Obreht

Téa Obreht

Bestselling Author • Novelist

Téa Oberht’s acclaimed debut, The Tiger’s Wife, was a National Book Award finalist; and her second novel, Inland, was listed on President Obama’s 2019 summer reading list.

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Rachel Louise Snyder

Rachel Louise Snyder

Domestic Violence Advocate • Journalist • Author

Steeped in over a decade of exhaustive reporting, Rachel Louise Snyder’s No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, reveals how the roots of America’s most pressing social crises are buried in abuse that happens behind closed doors.

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Alex Kotlowitz

Alex Kotlowitz

Bestselling Author • Journalist • Documentary Filmmaker

Kotlowitz, bestselling author and Peabody Award-winning journalist, is recognized for his unflinching portrayals of race and poverty in America. His new book, An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago profiles people and communities affected by gun violence. He is the author of There Are No Children Here and was a producer of the critically acclaimed documentary The Interrupters.

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Mitchell S. Jackson

Mitchell S. Jackson

Author • Filmmaker

TED Fellow Jackson is the author of Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family, an essential addition to the national conversation about race and class, and the novel The Residue Years, a powerful reflection on poverty, addiction, and the redemptive power of reading and writing.

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Maaza Mengiste

Maaza Mengiste

Novelist • Essayist • Social Justice Advocate

Mengiste’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was selected by The Guardian as one of the 10 Best Contemporary African Books. Her latest novel, The Shadow King, set during Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, examines what it means to be a woman at war.

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Emily Nussbaum

Emily Nussbaum

TV Critic • Pulitzer Prize Winner • Essayist

Proclaimed as “one of the leading TV critics of our time” (Kirkus), Nussbaum is the television critic for The New Yorker and author of I Like To Watch: Arguing My Way Through The TV Revolution.

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Elizabeth Gilbert

Elizabeth Gilbert

Bestselling Author • Novelist • Memoirist

Unquestionably one of her generation’s most beloved voices, Gilbert is the author of bestsellers Eat Pray Love and Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. Her newest bestselling novel is City of Girls, a coming of age novel set in the hubbub of 1940s New York theatre world.

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Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami

Novelist • Author • Essayist

Award winning author Laila Lalami is a unique voice in the national conversation about identity and immigration. Her latest novel The Other Americans, infused with questions about American’s legacy of assimilation and discrimination, was a National Book Award finalist. She is also the author of The Moor’s Account , a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize.

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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

forthcoming

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