Featured Speakers

Ayana Mathis


Bestselling Author • Novelist • Essayist

Mathis’s stunning debut novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was an Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 selection and named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and NPR. Mathis is the first Black woman to be a permanent faculty member at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is also the author of The Unsettled, a searing multi-generational novel set in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia about a mother fighting for her sanity and survival.

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Imbolo Mbue


Bestselling Author • Novelist

A “bright and captivating storyteller” (The Washington Post), Imbolo Mbue is the author two novels”: the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers and How Beautiful We Were, one of The New York Times‘s top 10 book of 2021.

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Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami


Award-Winning Author • Novelist • 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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Andrea Elliott

Andrea Elliott


Pulitzer Prize Winner • Bestselling Author • Journalist

Andrea Elliott is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who has documented the lives of poor Americans, Muslim immigrants and other people on the margins of power. She is an investigative reporter for The New York Times and the author of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

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Jeff Goodell

Jeff Goodell


Author • Energy & Environment Expert • Investigative Journalist

A contributing writer for Rolling Stone, Goodell has dedicated decades to reporting on climate change and humanity’s fraught relationship with our rapidly changing planet. His books include The Water Will Come, Big Coal, How to Cool the Planet, and his latest The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.

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Dahlia Lithwick

Dahlia Lithwick


Legal Scholar • Award-Winning Author • Journalist

“Dahlia Lithwick has been the nation’s best legal commentator for two decades. . . With an unparalleled ability to untangle the most complex debates, Lithwick’s analysis of the mechanics and theatrics of the American legal system is unmatched. Her dynamism, clarity, and compassion shine through in her columns.”—Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis citation MSNBC […]

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Dr. Ricardo Nuila

Dr. Ricardo Nuila


Educator • Author • Physician

Over his decade-long career as a practicing physician, Dr. Ricardo Nuila’s first-hand experiences have fueled his writing on health disparities, healthcare policy, and the interface between art and medicine. His stunning debut, The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine, details the stories of five Houstonians unable to access healthcare in his hometown of Houston, […]

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Speakers by Subject

New & Noteworthy

The Unsettled

Praise for The Unsettled

Expansive and explosive, this beauty of a novel showcases Ayana Mathis’s grace on the page, as writer, as storyteller. A book to be read and re-read.

Jesmyn Ward, two-time National Book Award-winning author of Let Us Descend

 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

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

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

This is a propulsive book, one to be raced through; the planet is burning, and we are running out of time.

Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

The House of Lincoln

Praise for The House of Lincoln

A compelling reminder that events of the past are indelibly connected to attitudes that persist today.

Booklist

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

Be Mine

Praise for Be Mine

A fitting finale to the landmark Bascombe saga, this ranks among Ford’s best.

Booklist (starred review)

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

Justice by Means of Democracy

Praise for Justice by Means of Democracy

Without doubt one of the most important books ever written on democracy.

Margaret Levi, Co-director of the Ethics, Society, and Technology Hub, Stanford University

The Ferryman

Praise for The Ferryman

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

Stephen King

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)

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

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

Remember Us

Praise for Remember Us

Forthcoming

Let Us Descend

Praise for Let Us Descend

Forthcoming

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

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

Captivating….Eye-opening and heartrending, [CLASS] will provide succor for readers who’ve faced similar hardships and essential education for anyone who hasn’t. It’s another stirring personal history from one of the foremost chroniclers of 21st-century economic anxiety.

Publishers Weekly, starred review

The Bad Angel Brothers

Praise for The Bad Angel Brothers

Theroux is at his masterly best.

The New York Times

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

The Morningside

Praise for The Morningside

Forthcoming

The Princess of Las Vegas

Praise for The Princess of Las Vegas

Forthcoming