Representing some of the country’s most compelling authors and academics for speeches, lectures, and readings

Featured Speakers

Joshua Prager

Joshua Prager

Pulitzer Prize Finalist • Author • Investigative Journalist

For more than twenty years, journalist Joshua Prager has unraveled historical secrets. His groundbreaking book, The Family Roe, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, details the hidden lives behind Roe v. Wade, enabling readers for the first time to understand the Supreme Court’s most divisive case in its full social, historical and personal context.

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Jessica Bruder

Bestselling Author • Journalist

Praised by the New Yorker as “an acute and compassionate observer,” Jessica Bruder reports on subcultures, economic justice and social issues in her books Nomadland, The Burning Book and her forthcoming Snowden’s Box, about how she become intertwined with the Edward Snowden saga.

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Rachel Louise Snyder

Rachel Louise Snyder

Journalist • Author • Domestic Violence Advocate

Steeped in over a decade of exhaustive reporting, Rachel Louise Snyder’s No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, reveals how the roots of America’s most pressing social crises are buried in abuse that happens behind closed doors.

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Stephanie Land

Stephanie Land

Bestselling Author • Journalist • Economic Justice Advocate

The basis for the critically-acclaimed Netflix series, Land’s instant bestselling memoir Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive recounts her harrowing saga as a single mom navigating the bureaucratic nightmare of living below the poverty line. In her next book, the forthcoming Class, will combine personal experience and reporting to expose hard truths about the high costs of college education.

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Colum McCann

Colum McCann

National Book Award Winner • Bestselling Author • Novelist

Irish-born author Colum McCann wrote the National Book Award-winning novel Let the Great World Spin and the bestselling Transatlantic. His latest novel is Apeirogon, a boundary-pushing real-life story of two grieving fathers on either side of a seemingly intractable conflict in the Middle East. He speaks on storytelling, self-discovery, social justice, and travel.

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Dr. Ellen Wu

Dr. Ellen Wu

Historian • Author • Cultural Commentator

Historian Wu is a nationally-recognized authority on Asian-Pacific Americans and the “model minority” myth, which she unpacks in her books The Color of Success and the forthcoming Overrepresented .

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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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Kiese Laymon

Bestselling Author • Social Critic • Essayist

Laymon is the author of Heavy: An American Memoir, a fearless and provocative memoir which unpacks what a lifetime of secrets and lies does to a Black body, a Black family, and a nation hunkered on the edge of moral collapse.

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Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr

Pulitzer Prize Winner • Bestselling Author • Novelist

Doerr is the author of the runaway bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winning All the Light We Cannot See, a novel set during WW II, which spent more than three and a half years on the New York Times bestseller list.

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Speakers by Subject

New & Noteworthy

Hour of the Witch

Praise for Hour of the Witch

Another surprise read from the fabulously protean, New York Times best-selling Bohjalian.

Library Journal

The Tsar of Love and Techno

Praise for The Tsar of Love and Techno

This book will burn itself into your heart… It’s funny, moving and beautiful, the perfect thing to read.

The New York Times

A House Among The Trees

Praise for A House Among The Trees

A fascinating look at a world in which a creative artist becomes a hot property to be both honored and exploited . . . A compelling story with fully realized characters.

Booklist (starred review)

The Family Roe

Praise for The Family Roe

[A]n honest glimpse into the American soul…a sweeping, granular, century-deep case for women’s sovereignty over themselves.

Anand Giridharadas , The New York Times Book Review

Mad Honey

Praise for Mad Honey

Forthcoming

On Animals

Praise for On Animals

Forthcoming

Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration,

Praise for Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration,

Reminiscent of Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, Miller’s well-argued book delivers a scarifying account of law gone awry.

Kirkus, starred review

The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

Praise for The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self

This radiant book will not only change your life, but perhaps even save it.

Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Big Magic

Under the Wave at Waimea

Praise for Under the Wave at Waimea

Incantatory, ecstatic, hypnotic…. One of Theroux’s best novels.

The Seattle Times

Fencing with The King

Praise for Fencing with The King

A rare pleasure. Abu-Jaber’s rich characters live and breathe around you, and her nuance and wit bring the largest themes to irresistible, present life.

Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl