Speakers

Featured Speakers

Alex Kotlowitz

Bestselling Author • Journalist • Documentary Filmmaker

Bestselling author Alex Kotlowitz is recognized for his unflinching portrayals of race and poverty in America. In his latest, An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago, Kotlowitz returns to some of Chicago’s most turbulent neighborhoods to offer a spellbinding collection of intimate profiles of people and communities touched by gun violence.

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Anthony Doerr

Pulitzer Prize Winner • Bestselling Author • Novelist

“Anthony Doerr writes beautifully about the mythic and the intimate, about snails on beaches and armies on the move, about fate and love and history and those breathless, unbearable moments when they all come crashing together.” —Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins Since the publication of his first story collection, The Shell Collector, in 2002, Anthony […]

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Rachel Louise Snyder

Domestic Violence Advocate • Journalist • Author

Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade, and the novel What We’ve Lost is Nothing.

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Eli Saslow

Pulitzer Prize Winner • Journalist • Author

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage for The Washington Post, Eli Saslow, who has been called “one of the great young journalists in America,” reveals the human stories behind the most divisive issues of our time. From racism and poverty to addiction and school shootings, Saslow’s work uncovers the manifold impacts of major national issues on […]

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Esi Edugyan

Bestselling Author • Novelist • Essayist

Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan writes richly imagined and impeccably researched stories that illuminate complicated truths about race and belonging. “One of our sharpest and deepest writers of historical fiction,” according to Entertainment Weekly, she is only the third writer to twice win the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious literary award.

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John Irving

National Book Award Winner • Bestselling Author • Screenwriter

John Irving is an award-winning American novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of The World According to Garp (1978), The Cider House Rules (1985), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), and A Widow for One Year (1998).

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Kiese Laymon

Bestselling Author • Social Critic • Essayist

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. In his observant, often hilarious work, Laymon does battle with the personal and the political: race and family, body and shame, poverty and place. His savage humor and clear-eyed perceptiveness have earned him comparisons to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alice Walker, and Mark Twain. He is the author of the powerful and provocative memoir Heavy (which won the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction), the groundbreaking essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and the genre-defying novel Long Division.

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Mitchell S. Jackson

Author • Filmmaker

TED Fellow Mitchell S. Jackson is the author of Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family (March 2019). This hybrid—part essay, part memoir, part history—uses stories of Jackson’s family and friends to speak to larger issues in American culture, including the racial history of Oregon, whiteness in America, the prison system, drug addiction, criminality, sex work, violence, and broken families.

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Rebecca Skloot

Bestselling Author • Journalist

Bestselling author Rebecca Skloot spent more than ten years doggedly uncovering the truth about the life, death, and ultimate “immortality” of a poor Black tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks. Her phenomenal book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has sold nearly 3 million copies to date. In The Immortal Life, Skloot tells the story of a young […]

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Sheri Fink

Pulitzer Prize Winner • Bestselling Author • Journalist

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for journalism and a National Magazine Award, Sheri Fink is the author of Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital. The book is a landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina, and a suspenseful portrayal of the pursuit of justice […]

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Susan Orlean

Bestselling Author • Journalist • Essayist

New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean has been called “a national treasure” by The Washington Post. Her deeply moving explorations of American stories both familiar and obscure have earned her a reputation as one of America’s most distinctive journalistic voices. A staff writer for The New Yorker for over twenty years and a former contributing editor at Rolling Stone and Vogue, she has been praised as […]

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The Lacks Family

The Lacks Family of THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

The Lacks family has enthralled audiences across the country by talking about their mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, Henrietta Lacks, and her transcendentally important contributions to science. The international success of Rebecca Skloot’s New York Times bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, has left people keenly interested in the Lacks family and Henrietta’s legacy. In their appearances, the family shares with audiences […]

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Jeanne Marie Laskas

Bestselling Author • Journalist • Memoirist

Jeanne Marie Laskas is one of the most incisive, wide-ranging, and appealing voices in contemporary journalism. An “intrepid reporter and great storyteller” (Kirkus), she has been writing longform narratives for GQ, Esquire, and other magazines for more than 20 years. She has profiled everyone from Mr. Rogers to Vice President Joe Biden, and has done […]

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