Speakers

Featured Speakers

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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Elizabeth Berg

Bestselling Author • Novelist

“Before I became a writer, I was a registered nurse for ten years, and that was my ‘school’ for writing—taking care of patients taught me a lot about human nature, about hope and fear and love and loss and regret and triumph and especially about relationships—all things that I tend to focus on in my […]

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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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Clive Thompson

Journalist • Author • Tech Industry Expert

Clive Thompson is a longtime contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Wired, and the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better and Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World.

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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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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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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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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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Edmund White

Novelist • Social Critic • Memoirist

Across biography, social history, and memoir, in both fiction and nonfiction, Edmund White has chronicled the gay experience in the United States from the closeted 1950s through the AIDS crisis and beyond. But as William Goldstein wrote in Publishers Weekly, “To call Edmund White merely a gay writer is to oversimplify his work and his intentions.” […]

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