All 2024 Authors and Speakers

Esi Edugyan

Esi Edugyan is the author of two Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning books, Washington Black (2018) and Half-Blood Blues (2011). She is the third writer, after M.G. Vassanji and Alice Munro, ever to win this award twice. Her debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2005), was published internationally, nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, picked as a More Book Lust selection, and chosen by the New York Public Library as one of 2004’s Books to Remember.

Edugyan taught creative writing at both Johns Hopkins University and the University of Victoria, and has sat on many international panels, including the LesART Literary Festival in Esslingen, Germany, the Budapest Book Fair in Hungary, and Barnard College in New York City. Washington Black, her third novel, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Reviewed as “enthralling” by the Boston Globe, “a rip-roaring tale,” by the Washington Post and “extraordinary” by the Seattle Times, Washington Black is a dazzling adventure story about a boy who rises from the ashes of slavery to become a free man of the world.

Other 2019 Authors & Speakers

Jamie Bernstein

Author, Narrator, and Filmmaker, daughter of Leonard Bernstein

Tom Brokaw

Tom Brokaw is one of America’s most trusted and respected journalists.

Jeffrey Brown

Jeffrey Brown is Senior Correspondent and Chief Arts Correspondent for PBS NewsHour, public television’s prestigious nightly news program viewed by millions. During his career with NewsHour he has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues.

Charina Chou, Ph.D.

Google Scientist and Researcher, Specializing in Artificial Intelligence

Billy Collins

Two-time US Poet Laureate, dubbed “the most popular poet in America” by the New York Times

David Crane

David Crane is a lecturer in Public Policy at Stanford University and president of Govern for California.

Wade Davis

National Geographic Explorer in Residence, Ethnographer, Writer, Photographer and Filmmaker

James and Deborah Fallows

James Fallows is the author of eleven books, including National Defense (1981), for which he received the 1983 National Book Award, Postcards from Tomorrow Square (2009), and China Airborne (2012). He has been a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly for over 30 years, and his work has also appeared in Slate, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the American Prospect, among others. Deborah Fallows is the author of Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language(2010).

Alex Filippenko

Filippenko is an Astrophysicist on a Nobel Prize winning team, as well as the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize, 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics to all team members. He was voted the “best professor at UC Berkeley 9 years!”.

Francis Fukuyama, Ph.D.

Francis Fukuyama is a renowned political scientist and public intellectual.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

A Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer, presidential historian, former sports journalist and political commentator.

Anthony Ray Hinton

Author, Social Commentator who spent 30 years on Alabama’s death row for a murder he did not commit

Philip K. Howard

Philip K. Howard is the author of the bestseller The Death of Common Sense (Random House, 1995), and The Rule of Nobody (W.W. Norton, 2014), which was a finalist for the Hayek Book Prize.

Pedro Irazoqui, Ph.D.

Head, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins, Whitney School of Engineering. Pioneer in wireless implantable devices for treatment of epilepsy, glaucoma, depression, PTSD

Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson is a thought leader of today’s interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to innovation.

Gordon Lithgow, Ph.D.

Dr. Lithgow sheds light on the mechanisms of aging by identifying agents that extend lifespan or prevent age-related disease.

Mack McCarter

Mack McCarter has been on a journey to impact the world his entire life, and he has.

Michael McFaul

McFaul is a leading expert on international relations, Russian politics, American foreign policy, and democratic development around the world.

Roger McNamee

If you had told Roger McNamee even three years ago that he would soon be devoting himself to stopping Facebook from destroying our democracy, he would have howled with laughter.

John McReynolds

An early interest in food and wine led John McReynolds to the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, where he received a scholarship sponsored by Julia and Paul Child.

Alana Nichols

Author, Five-time Paralympian, Six-time Medalist (3 gold, 2 silver, 1 bronze)

Caitlin O’Connell, Ph.D.

Instructor, Harvard Medical School, Scientific Consultant, Author, specialist in elephant communications

Dr. Ramon Resa

Acclaimed Author and Physician, “Out of the Fields: My Journey from Farmworker Boy to Pediatrician” has for over 35 years taken care of children like himself as a child

John Burnham Schwartz

What best characterizes a John Burnham Schwartz novel is a quote from Reservation Road, the 1998 novel that cemented his reputation and was made into a screenplay…

Michael Shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger’s just released Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All has been called, “an extremely important book,” by none other than historian Richard Rhodes, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

Dr. Gary Small

Dr. Gary Small invented the first brain scan that allows doctors to see the physical evidence of brain aging and Alzheimer’s disease in living people.

Anne Snyder

Anne Snyder is determined to make the world a better place through the lost art of building character and encourages us to join her mission.

Claire Spafford

Claire Spafford is the Science Educator at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

James Strock

Strock writes the ‘Next Nationalism’ on Substack and hosts the ‘Serve to Lead’ podcast.

Trudi Trueit

“I’m a writer of middle grade fiction because middle school was a tough time for me. I was a brainy, awkward, and shy kid…So if I can make it a bit easier for a reader, if he/she can find something to identify with in my books, then that’s all the reward I need.”

Jose Antonio Vargas

Vargas won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for his contributions to three Washington Post articles about the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007.

Matthew Walker

Matthew Walker is dead serious about the dangers of sleep deprivation.

Justin Wangler and Tracey Shepos Cemani

Author-chefs Justin Wangler and Tracey Shepos Cemani have partnered with farmer Tucker Taylor, a world-renowned expert in sustainable culinary gardening, to celebrate the simple good taste of the farm-to-table lifestyle.