All 2024 Authors and Speakers

Jose Antonio Vargas

We are thrilled to announce that we have booked Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Jose Antonio Vargas. Vargas’ debut memoir Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen (2018), begins in the Philippines on the morning he, at just 12-years-old, is awoken by his mother and hurriedly sent in a taxi to the airport where he then flies to the U.S. Once there, he is sent to live with his grandparents in Northern California. Unbeknownst to Vargas, he was relocated illegally, and at 16 years old he discovered he lacked the appropriate citizenship documents. Since that moment he has been interrogating one fundamental question: What does it mean to be an American?

Vargas won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for his contributions to three Washington Post articles about the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. He is also known for his coverage of the HIV epidemic in Washington D.C., which inspired the full-length documentary, The Other City, that he wrote and co-produced. Dear America is the most comprehensive follow-up to three works in particular: Vargas’s 2011 New York Times Magazine essay, “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant”; his 2012 Time cover story, “Not Legal Not Leaving”; and his 2013 film, Documented. He is both a journalist and an activist who founded the nonprofit Define American, and Vargas notes that he’s often regarded as the “most famous undocumented immigrant in America.” Vargas’ Young Reader’s edition of Dear America will be available in March 2019.

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

Esi Edugyan

Esi Edugyan is the author of two Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning books, Washington Black (2018) and Half-Blood Blues (2011).

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.”

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.