Featured Speakers

Stephanie Land

Stephanie Land


Bestselling Author • Memoirist • Economic Justice Advocate

Both Land’s bestselling debut memoir Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive and the hit Netflix series adaptation of the same name, recount her story as a single mom navigating the physical, economic, and social brutalities that domestic workers face, all while radiating a parent’s hope and resilience.

Find out more
Rachel Louise Snyder

Rachel Louise Snyder


Journalist • Author • Domestic Violence Advocate

For decades, Snyder has been an outspoken reporter on the darkest issues that impact women’s lives. She is the author of the memoir Women We Buried, Women We Burned, and the award-winning No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us.

Find out more

Ishmael Beah


UNICEF Advocate • Bestselling Author • Memoirist

Bestselling author and UNICEF advocate Beah is the author of the novels Little Family, The Radiance of Tomorrow, and the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, which has over 1.5 million copies in print.

Find out more
Casey Parks

Casey Parks


Journalist • Author

Casey Parks is the author of Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and Mystery (winner of the 2021 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award from the Columbia School of Journalism and Harvard’s Nieman Foundation). She reports on gender and family issues for The Washington Post.

Find out more

Roberto Lovato


Award-Winning Author • Journalist • Cultural Commentator

Roberto Lovato is a human rights activist, award-winning journalist, and the author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas. A recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center, Lovato has chronicled some of the most pressing issues facing communities across the US and the rest of the Americas. 

Find out more
Suleika Jaouad

Suleika Jaouad


Bestselling Author • Memoirist • Emmy Award-Winner

“When I found myself in my own aftermath of a life interruption, I was intent on moving on. I wanted to leave all that behind me. I wanted to seize this new opportunity of living that I’d been granted. But I very quickly realized that you don’t get to move on from your most difficult […]

Find out more
Mitchell S. Jackson

Mitchell S. Jackson


Pulitzer Prize Winner • Author • Cultural Commentator

Pulitzer Prize-winner 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.

Find out more

Speakers by Subject

New & Noteworthy

Poverty, By America

Praise for Poverty, By America

Through in-depth research and original reporting, the acclaimed sociologist offers solutions that would help spread America’s wealth and make everyone more prosperous.

Time

Dear Martin

Praise for Dear Martin

“A visceral portrait of a young man reckoning with the ugly, persistent violence of social injustice.” 

Publishers Weekly

Romantic Comedy

Praise for Romantic Comedy

Zingy… electrically compelling, with steady warmth as well as drama.… [Romantic Comedy’s] command of structure, pace and dialogue is faultless.… [An] affable, intelligently crafted tale of work and love.

The Guardian

Lady Tan's Circle of Women

Praise for Lady Tan's Circle of Women

See is one of those special writers capable of delivering both poetry and plot.

New York Times Book Review

The House of Lincoln

Praise for The House of Lincoln

“Brimming with a rich and unforgettable array of imagined and real historical figures who helped to shape Springfield, Illinois and the nation beyond during the turbulent time of slavery and the Civil War, The House of Lincoln is storytelling at its best.

Gail Tsukiyama, author of The Color of Air, The Samurai’s Garden, and Women of the Silk

Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

Praise for Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

Required reading for this post-Dobbs world.

Kirkus (starred review)

The People's Hospital

Praise for The People's Hospital

“A rare and unforgettable work, The People’s Hospital takes us deep into the lives of some of America’s poorest patients. Following in the tradition of Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy and Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, Nuila makes a revelatory passage through a system that is both flawed and primed for reform.”

Andrea Elliott, author of Invisible Child

Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Praise for Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

A thoroughly researched and heartbreakingly personal look at prison art and the broader visual culture of incarceration…Woven throughout are striking illustrations of the work of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists…While prisoners have been largely excluded from public life, the art and images Fleetwood highlights function as material traces of the disappeared, who, through acts of creation, refuse to be rendered invisible.

Jackie Wang, Art in America

Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas

Praise for Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas

“Groundbreaking…. A kaleidoscopic montage that is at once a family saga, a coming-of-age story and a meditation on the vicissitudes of history, community and, most of all for [Lovato], identity.”

The New York Times

The Ferryman

Praise for The Ferryman

Next to impossible to put down once you’ve read the first few pages.

Stephen King

Women We Buried, Women We Burned

Praise for Women We Buried, Women We Burned

Women We Buried, Women We Burned is a gorgeous memoir that parses the patriarchy with an endearing frankness as fierce as it is, astonishingly, forgiving.

Beth Macy, New York Times bestselling author of Dopesick

The Humble Lover

Praise for The Humble Lover

“Audacious…. As ever, White is a master of social comedy and wry observations.”

Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

Be Mine

Praise for Be Mine

If this is also Ford’s curtain call, he has done himself proud.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Mercury Pictures Presents

Praise for Mercury Pictures Presents

Sublime…It is impossible to do justice to Marra’s smooth, sweeping style.

The New York Times

The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

Praise for The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

Jeff Goodell brings a mix of fantastic storytelling, lucid science communication, and eternal optimism in detailing the profound threat we face with the climate crisis and what we can still do about it.

Michael Mann, author of The New Climate War

The Invisible Hour

Praise for The Invisible Hour

What delight to experience the melding, across the centuries, of two prodigious American literary imaginations—Hoffman’s and Hawthorne’s—in this redemptive tale of daughters and mothers and one true love for a man and his book.

Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Peabody Sisters

 Fly The Big Book of Basketball Fashion

Praise for Fly The Big Book of Basketball Fashion

In Fly, Jackson does more than compile a basketball/fashion lookbook, and it’s more than a timeline and a history. To me, what he explores is the evergreen push to remind people that the talented are more than their talents. That there’s a burning creativity and a relentless desire to express onself, not as a highlight but as a human.

Jason Reynolds

Brooklyn Crime Novel

Praise for Brooklyn Crime Novel

A blistering book. A love story. Social commentary. History. Protest novel. And mystery joins the whole together: is the crime ‘time’? Or the almighty dollar? I got a great laugh from it too. Every city deserves a book like this.

Colum McCann, National Book Award-winning author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin

Let Us Descend

Praise for Let Us Descend

Forthcoming

Remember Us

Praise for Remember Us

Forthcoming

The Unsettled

Praise for The Unsettled

Shelter without the grace of welcome is exposure to the worst coldness of the world. Loyalty and the offer of comfort satisfy needs we feel in our bones.  In The Unsettled, Ayana Mathis brings these extremes of experience intensely to life. This is a fine, powerful book.

Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead

Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education

Praise for Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education

Forthcoming