Kenyan-born, Cambridge- and Harvard-educated Liaquat Ahamed is a Pulitzer Prize–winning financial historian and longtime investment manager who is widely regarded as one of the leading interpreters of financial history, praised for his ability to humanize central bankers and clarify the often opaque mechanics of monetary policy.

Farmworker’s daughter, teen mom, award-winning author, and international keynote speaker proves resilience rewrites any story, and education opens every door.

For more than three decades, Jeffrey Brown has sat across from newsmakers, leaders, and the world’s most celebrated writers and artists, drawing out ideas that shape how we understand our world. The PBS NewsHour senior correspondent returns to the SVAF stage in 2027 as a lead moderator.

Alex Filippenko is an award-winning UC Berkeley astrophysicist and electrifying speaker, known for groundbreaking research on supernovae and dark energy, whose infectious enthusiasm and humor turn cosmic mysteries into mind-opening, unforgettable experiences for audiences of all backgrounds.

Following the global phenomenon Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus returns with Peck & Peck, a fresh, funny, tender-hearted satire of publishing, poetry, and the wonderfully unconventional people who can’t live without either. Oprah Daily named it one of the Best Books of Fall 2026.

Few writers uncover a true story like David Grann. The celebrated New Yorker writer and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager combines relentless reporting, extraordinary detail, and page-turning suspense to illuminate forgotten corners of history, and the people caught inside them.

Lauren Groff is one of the most acclaimed voices in contemporary American fiction. A three-time National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author, she writes with fearless imagination, dazzling precision, and emotional power. Her newest book, Brawler, brings together nine bold, beautifully crafted stories about family, love, loss, survival, and the struggle between our darkest and best instincts.

Few writers illuminate the hidden worlds of crime, power, money, and history like Patrick Radden Keefe. The award-winning New Yorker writer and #1 bestselling author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain combines fearless reporting with the pace and suspense of a great thriller.

His newest book, London Falling, is a spellbinding investigation into the mysterious death of a 19-year-old whose secret life drew him into London’s dangerous criminal underworld. At once a riveting mystery, a portrait of a city transformed by extraordinary wealth and dirty money, and a deeply moving story of a family searching for answers, London Falling shows Keefe at the height of his powers.

Min Jin Lee transforms the immigrant experience into unforgettable storytelling. The bestselling author of Pachinko returns with American Hagwon, an ambitious, deeply human family saga that crosses continents and generations to explore education, sacrifice, belonging, and the relentless pursuit of a better life.

Sebastian Mallaby, two-time Pulitzer finalist, takes readers inside Google DeepMind, the lab at the center of the race to build superintelligence. His much-heralded new book, The Infinity Machine, draws on unprecedented access to Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis and to DeepMind insiders, rivals, and estranged cofounders. The result is a revelatory account of the technology that could reshape science, the economy, and humanity itself, and of the one person who may decide how it unfolds.

Artificial intelligence can manufacture convincing images, fabricate stories, and blur the line between fact and fiction. Author and longtime Google insider Dan Russell offers a powerful new survival skill: thinking like a detective in the digital age. He cuts through the hype to show what works, what doesn’t, how to use AI in your own life, and what to know about its promises, perils, upsides, and costs.

Dr. Robert Wachter, the father of the hospitalist movement and UCSF’s Chair of Medicine, delivers the definitive, clear-eyed guide to AI in healthcare in his national bestseller A Giant Leap. As AI reaches hospitals, clinics, and patients, his work has never mattered more. Wachter shows what’s at stake and how the choices we make will shape the future of care.

Nearly a decade after Educated became a global phenomenon, Tara Westover returns with Brothers and Sisters, a powerful, deeply personal memoir about memory, family, betrayal, and the extraordinary consequences of telling your own story.

Bestselling author and poet Javier Zamora is one of America’s essential voices. His American Book Award-winning memoir, Solito, tells of a nine-year-old’s perilous migration and how therapy, poetry, and nature helped him heal from it.