Speakers

Featured Speakers

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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Jesmyn Ward

National Book Award Winner • Essayist • Memoirist

New York Times bestselling author and MacArthur “Genius” Jesmyn Ward is the first woman and first person of color to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice, for her novels Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones. The American Booksellers Association has called her “the new Toni Morrison.”

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Rebecca Skloot

Bestselling Author • Journalist

Skloot’s extraordinary debut, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, spent more than seven years on the bestseller lists. More than 100 schools and communities have chosen The Immortal Life for their common read programs and the book has been translated into more than 25 languages and adapted for the screen by HBO and Oprah.

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Dr. Matthew Desmond

Pulitzer Prize Winner • Bestselling Author • Urban Ethnographer

Princeton sociologist, Pulitzer Prize-winner, and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a landmark work of scholarship and reportage that has forever changed the way we look at poverty in America.

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Katherine Boo

Pulitzer Prize Winner • Bestselling Author • Journalist

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist noted for her reporting on poverty and inequality, Boo is the author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a gripping narrative of life in a Mumbai slum. The book won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

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Lisa Ko

Novelist • Essayist

Ko’s debut novel, The Leavers, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. As the daughter of Chinese immigrants from the Philippines, Ko offers “a fresh and moving look at the immigrant experience in America” (Publishers Weekly).

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Paul Beatty

Bestselling Author • Novelist • Poet

Beatty, an acerbic and fearless commentator on race and pop culture, is the first American to win the Man Booker Prize for The Sellout. He has been called “one of the shrewdest cultural commentators, and hilarious cutups, of his generation” (Interview).

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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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NoViolet Bulawayo

Novelist • Essayist • Short Story Writer

PEN/Hemingway Prize-winner, Bulawayo is a breakout voice in the literature of the African diaspora. She is the author of We Need New Names, which was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.

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