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When X--an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter--falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone's good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora's box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification. A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X's widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X's peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X's defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife's deceptions were far crueler than she imagined. Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.

Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, and Pew, and the short story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Believer, and elsewhere.

Lacey will be in conversation with Hillary Kelly. Kelly is a critic and essayist who has written for The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Vogue, The New York Times, and more. 

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Coming of age in the USSR in the 1980s, best friends Anya and Milka try to envision a free and joyful future for themselves. They spend their summers at Anya's dacha just outside of Moscow, lazing in the apple orchard, listening to Queen songs, and fantasizing about trips abroad and the lives of American teenagers. Meanwhile, Anya's parents talk about World War II, the Blockade, and the hardships they have endured. By the time Anya and Milka are fifteen, the Soviet Empire is on the verge of collapse. They pair up with classmates Trifonov and Lopatin, and the four friends share secrets and desires, argue about history and politics, and discuss forbidden books. But the world is changing, and the fleeting time they have together is cut short by a sudden tragedy. Years later, Anya returns to Russia from America, where she has chosen a different kind of life, far from her family and childhood friends. When she meets Lopatin again, he is a smug businessman who wants to buy her parents' dacha and cut down the apple orchard. Haunted by the ghosts of her youth, Anya comes to the stark realization that memory does not fade or disappear; rather, it moves us across time, connecting our past to our future, joys to sorrows. Inspired by Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry's The Orchard powerfully captures the lives of four Soviet teenagers who are about to lose their country and one another, and who struggle to survive, to save their friendship, to recover all that has been lost.

Born in Armenia and raised in Soviet Russia, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry moved to the U.S. in 1995, after having witnessed perestroika and the fall of the Iron Curtain. Her work appeared in Zyzzyva, Subtropics, Zoetrope: All Story, Joyland, LitHub, Electric Literature, Indiana Review, The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, and elsewhere. Kristina is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, the Tennessee Williams scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for her first collection of stories, What Isn’t Remembered, long-listed for the 2022 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and shortlisted for the 2022 William Saroyan International Prize. Her debut novel, The Orchard, was included by NY Post among the best books/top 30 must-read titles of the year.

Gorcheva-Newberry will be in conversation with Paul Goldberg. Goldberg’s novel, The Dissident, will be published in June by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is the author of the novels The Yid, which was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the National Jewish Book Award's Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction, and The Château. As a reporter, Goldberg has written two books about the Soviet human rights movement, and co-authored (with Otis Brawley) the book How We Do Harm, an expose of the U.S. healthcare system. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Slate, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He is also the editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, a publication focused on the business and politics of cancer. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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Join award-winning NPR journalist Ari Shapiro for an evening of conversation about his memoir and tales from his storied broadcast career.

The beloved host of “All Things Considered” is known for his adventurous spirit and insatiable curiosity, which has served him well whether he’s traveling on Air Force One with President Obama, navigating war-torn countries, or following community leaders fighting for social justice. His new memoir, The Best Strangers in the World, details all of this and more in captivating essays and is a true love letter to journalism. Shapiro will be joined by special guests as he shares insights from his life spent listening.

Shapiro will be in conversation with Audie Cornish, an anchor and correspondent for CNN and host of the CNN Audio podcast, “The Assignment.”

With Politics & Prose

In this poetry collection, Sunu P. Chandy includes stories about her experiences as a woman, civil rights attorney, parent, partner, daughter of South Asian immigrants, and member of the LGBTQ community. These poems cover themes ranging from immigration, social justice activism, friendship loss, fertility challenges, adoption, caregiving, and life during a pandemic. Sunu's poems provide some resolve, some peace, some community, amidst the competing notions of how we are expected to be in the world, especially when facing a range of barriers. Sunu's poems provide company for many who may be experiencing isolation through any one of these experiences and remind us that we are not, in fact, going it alone. Whether the experience is being disregarded as a woman of color attorney, being rejected for being queer, losing a most treasured friendship, doubting one's romantic partner or any other form of heartbreak, Sunu's poems highlight the human requirement of continually starting anew. These poems remind us that we can, and we will, rebuild.

Sunu P. Chandy (she/her) lives in Washington, D.C. with her family, and is the daughter of immigrants to the U.S. from Kerala, India. Sunu’s work can be found in publications including Asian American Literary Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Poets on Adoption, Split this Rock’s online social justice database, The Quarry, and in anthologies including The Penguin Book of Indian Poets,  The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood and This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. Sunu earned her B.A. in Peace and Global Studies/Women’s Studies from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, her law degree from Northeastern University School of Law in Boston and her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Queens College/The City University of New York. Sunu started out as a union-side labor and employment lawyer and then worked as a litigator with EEOC for 15 years in NYC. Sunu is currently the legal director of the National Women’s Law Center and serves on the board of the Transgender Law Center. She was included as one the 2021 Queer Women of Washington and one of Go Magazine’s 100 Women We Love: Class Of 2019.

Chandy will be in conversation with Kierra Johnson. Executive Director, Kierra Johnson, joined the National LGBTQ Task Force in 2018 as Deputy Executive Director but was already engaged with the organization, previously serving on the National LGBTQ Task Force’s board of directors and its National Action Council. Johnson came to the Task Force after serving as (Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity) URGE’s Executive Director with a wealth of experience in organizational leadership and management, program development, youth leadership and reproductive justice. As a bisexual Black woman, Johnson is one of the few out queer-identified women of color at the helm of a national LGBTQ organization.

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This event is in partnership with Literati Bookstore.

Finding seeds of inspiration in the Brothers Grimm, seventeenth-century French lore, and Scottish ballads, Kelly Link spins classic fairy tales into utterly original stories of seekers--characters on the hunt for love, connection, revenge, or their own sense of purpose.

In "The White Cat's Divorce," an aging billionaire sends his three sons on a series of absurd goose chases to decide which child will become his heir. In "The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear," a professor with a delicate health condition becomes stranded for days in an airport hotel after a conference, desperate to get home to her wife and young daughter, and in acute danger of being late for an appointment that cannot be missed. In "Skinder's Veil," a young man agrees to take over a remote house-sitting gig for a friend. But what should be a chance to focus on his long-avoided dissertation instead becomes a wildly unexpected journey, as the house seems to be a portal for otherworldly travelers--or perhaps a door into his own mysterious psyche.

Twisting and turning in astonishing ways, expertly blending realism and the speculative, witty, empathetic, and never predictable--these stories remind us once again of why Kelly Link is incomparable in the realm of short fiction.

Kelly Link is the author of Get in Trouble, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, Magic for Beginners, Stranger Things Happen, and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have been published in The Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She is a MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow and has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press and co-edits the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is also the co-owner of Book Moon, an independent bookstore in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

Link will be in conversation with Leigh Bardugo. Bardugo is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Ninth House and the creator of the Grishaverse (now a Netflix original series) which spans the Shadow and Bone trilogy, the Six of Crows duology, the King of Scars duology—and much more. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple anthologies including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. She lives in Los Angeles and is an associate fellow of Pauli Murray College at Yale University.

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Most folk thought Sallie Kincaid was a nobody who’d amount to nothing. Sallie had other plans. Sallie Kincaid is the daughter of the biggest man in a small town, the charismatic Duke Kincaid. Born at the turn of the 20th century into a life of comfort and privilege, Sallie remembers little about her mother who died in a violent argument with the Duke. By the time she is just eight years old, the Duke has remarried and had a son, Eddie. While Sallie is her father’s daughter, sharp-witted and resourceful, Eddie is his mother’s son, timid and cerebral. When Sallie tries to teach young Eddie to be more like their father, her daredevil coaching leads to an accident, and Sallie is cast out. Nine years later, she returns, determined to reclaim her place in the family. That’s a lot more complicated than Sallie expected, and she enters a world of conflict and lawlessness. Sallie confronts the secrets and scandals that hide in the shadows of the Big House, navigates the factions in the family and town, and finally comes into her own as a bold, sometimes reckless bootlegger. You will fall in love with Sallie Kincaid, a feisty and fearless, terrified and damaged young woman who refuses to be corralled.

Jeannette Walls graduated from Barnard College and was a journalist in New York. Her memoir, The Glass Castle, has been a New York Times bestseller for more than eight years. She is also the author of the instant New York Times bestsellers The Silver Star and Half Broke Horses, which was named one of the ten best books of 2009 by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. Walls lives in rural Virginia with her husband, the writer John Taylor.

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Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations is a book for workers, unionists, tenant organizers, racial justice and climate campaigners, academics, policymakers and everyone who wants a more fair and democratic society. Drawing insights from recent hard-won union negotiation campaigns, Jane McAlevey and Abby Lawlor look to the workers leading some of the toughest fights today to provide a masterclass in participatory social change.  

In the face of a small committee of middle management and their lawyers, most unions put forward a similarly small committee of worker representatives who negotiate behind closed doors. This book focuses on the nuts and bolts of a different approach: high-participation negotiations. It features six case studies from the last five years: Boston hotel workers, educators in New Jersey, nurses in rural Massachusetts and Philadelphia, reporters from the Los Angeles Times and Law360, and hospital workers in Germany fighting for their patients and their own lives in the pandemic. In each of these cases, workers used the collective bargaining process to achieve transformative contracts through deep organizing and member-driven strategy.

Rules to Win By offers not only a theory of high-participation negotiations, but also practical tools and resources for any campaign. Unlike so many books on negotiations, it encourages us to think beyond the shortcuts of verbal tricks and short-term tactics and to harness the power of ordinary people to win the public good.

Jane McAlevey is an organizer, negotiator, author, and scholar. She is currently a Senior Policy Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley's Labor Center.

McAlevey will be in conversation with Sara Nelson. Nelson has served as the International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO since 2014, and she is currently serving her third four year term. She first became a union member in 1996 when she was hired as a Flight Attendant at United Airlines and today she represents 50,000 of aviation’s first responders at 19 airlines.

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On a spring afternoon in 1985 in Gary, Indiana, a fifteen-year-old girl kills an elderly woman in a violent home invasion. In a city with a history of racial tensions and white flight, the girl, Paula Cooper, is Black, and her victim, Ruth Pelke, is white and a beloved Bible teacher. The press swoops in. When Paula is sentenced to death, no one decries the impending execution of a tenth grader. But the tide begins to shift when the victim's grandson Bill forgives the girl, against the wishes of his family, and campaigns to spare her life. This tragedy in a midwestern steel town soon reverberates across the United States and around the world--reaching as far away as the Vatican--as newspapers cover the story on their front pages and millions sign petitions in support of Paula. As Paula waits on death row, her fate sparks a debate that not only animates legal circles but raises vital questions about the value of human life: What are we demanding when we call for justice? Is forgiveness an act of desperation or of profound bravery? As Bill and Paula's friendship deepens, and as Bill discovers others who have chosen to forgive after terrible violence, their story asks us to consider what radical acts of empathy we might be capable of. In Seventy Times Seven, Alex Mar weaves an unforgettable narrative of an act of violence and its aftermath. This is a story about the will to live--to survive, to grow, to change--and about what we are willing to accept as justice. Tirelessly researched and told with intimacy and precision, this book brings a haunting chapter in the history of our criminal justice system to astonishing life.

Alex Mar is the author of Witches of America, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2015. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, Wired, The New York Times Book Review, and The Guardian, among many other outlets, as well as The Best American Magazine Writing. She was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Feature Writing in 2018. She is also the director of the feature-length documentary American Mystic. She lives in the Hudson Valley and New York City.

Mar will be in conversation with Tope Folarin. Folarin is a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington DC. He serves as Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University. He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards. Tope also serves as a board member of the Avalon Theater in Washington DC, the Vice President of the Board of the Pen/Faulkner Foundation, and as a member of the President’s Council of Pathfinder. He was educated at Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he earned two Masters degrees as a Rhodes Scholar. His debut novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man, was published by Simon & Schuster.

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Jenny Molberg, Sarah Katz, and David Keplinger will be in conversation about their latest poetry collections Court of no Record, Glass, and The Long Answer.

The Court of No Record, serves as both evidence and testimony against a legal system that often fails victims of physical trauma and domestic abuse. Country of Glass is the debut poetry collection from Sarah Katz, who offers an exploration of the concept of precariousness as it applies to bodies, families, countries, and whole societies. The Long Answer is poetry less concerned with explanations or discoveries than it is that we remember what we are.

Jenny Molberg is the author of three poetry collections: Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the Berkshire Prize), Refusal, and The Court of No Record. She edited the Unsung Masters book, Adelaide Crapsey: On the Life & Work of an American Master. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, VIDA, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. Molberg is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she directs Pleiades Press and co-edits Pleiades magazine. Find her online at jennymolberg.com.

Sarah Katz's poems have appeared in District Lit, the So to Speak blog, Rogue Agent, MiPOesias, The Shallow Ends, and Bear Review, among others. She earned an MFA in poetry from American University and her poetry manuscript, Country of Glass, was named a finalist by former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky for Tupelo Press's 2016 Dorset Prize. She has contributed essays and articles to a variety of publications, including The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Slate, and others. Sarah lives with her husband, Jonathan, in Fairfax, Virginia, and is Poetry Editor of The Deaf Poets Society, an online journal that features work by writers and artists with disabilities.

Molberg and Katz will be in conversation with David Keplinger. Keplinger is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Another City, which was awarded 2019 UNT Rilke Prize. Among his other collections are The Most Natural Thing and The Prayers of Others, which won the Colorado Book Award. His first collection, The Rose Inside, was chosen by the poet Mary Oliver for the 1999 T.S. Eliot Prize. Keplinger has been awarded the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Erskine Prize from Smartish Pace, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as funding from the DC Council on the Arts and Humanities, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Danish Council on the Arts, and a two-year Soros Foundation fellowship in the Czech Republic. In 2011 he produced By and By, an album of eleven songs based on the poetry of his great-great grandfather, a Civil War veteran. He performed and presented on the project at the National Portrait Gallery's Donald W. Reynolds Center in 2013. His translations of Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen have appeared in three volumes, World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors (2007), House Inspections (2011), a Lannan Literary Series Selection, and Forty-One Objects (forthcoming, 2019). His collaboration with German poet, Jan Wagner, entitled The Art of Topiary was published in 2017 by Milkweed Editions. He teaches in the MFA Program at American University in Washington, D.C

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In teenagers, powerful emotions come with the territory. And with so many of today's teens contending with academic pressure, social media stress, worries about the future, and concerns about their own mental health, it's easy for them--and their parents--to feel anxious and overwhelmed. But it doesn't have to be that way.

With clear, research-informed explanations alongside illuminating, real-life examples, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers gives parents the concrete, practical information they need to steady their teens through the bumpy yet transformational journey into adulthood.

Recognized as a thought leader by the American Psychological Association, Lisa Damour, Ph.D., co-hosts the Ask Lisa podcast, writes about adolescents for the The New York Times, appears as a regular contributor to CBS News, works in collaboration with UNICEF, and maintains a clinical practice. She is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood and Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls. She and her husband have two daughters and live in Shaker Heights, Ohio.

Ever since she became a parent, Mary Louise Kelly has said "next year." Next year will be the year she makes it to her son James's soccer games (which are on weekdays at 4 p.m., right when she is on the air on NPR's All Things Considered, talking to millions of listeners). Drive carpool for her son Alexander? Not if she wants to do that story about Ukraine and interview the secretary of state. Like millions of parents who wrestle with raising children while pursuing a career, she has never been cavalier about these decisions. The bargain she has always made with herself is this: this time I'll get on the plane, and next year I'll find a way to be there for the mom stuff.

This chronicle of her eldest child's final year at home, of losing her father, as well as other curve balls thrown at her, is not a definitive answer―not for herself and certainly not for any other parent. But her questions, her issues, will resonate with every parent. And, yes, especially with mothers, who are judged more harshly by society and, more important, judge themselves more harshly. What would she do if she had to decide all over again?

Mary Louise's thoughts as she faces the coming year will speak to anyone who has ever cared about a child or a parent. It. Goes. So. Fast. is honest, funny, poignant, revelatory, and immensely relatable.

Mary Louise Kelly has been reporting for NPR for nearly two decades and is now cohost of All Things Considered. She has also written the suspense novels Anonymous Sources and The Bullet, and is the author of articles and essays that have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, among numerous other publications. A Georgia native, Kelly graduated from Harvard University with degrees in government and French language and literature and completed a master's degree in European studies at the University of Cambridge in England. She created and taught a graduate course on national security and journalism at Georgetown University. In addition to her NPR work, Kelly has served as a contributing editor at the Atlantic, moderating news-maker interviews at forums from Aspen to Abu Dhabi.

Damour and Kelly will be in conversation with Michele Norris. Norris is one of the most trusted voices in journalism. She is a Columnist for The Washington Post Opinion Section, a celebrated author and the host of an upcoming podcast with Higher Ground Productions called Your Mama’s Kitchen. Her voice will be familiar to followers of public radio, where from 2002 to 2012 she was a host of National Public Radio’s afternoon magazine show, All Things Considered. Norris is also the Founding Director of The Race Card Project™, a Peabody Award Winning narrative archive where half a million people from all around the world have shared their experiences, questions, hopes, dreams, laments, and observations about identity --in just six words--as the starting point for conversations about race and belonging. The author of the The Grace of Silence, her upcoming book, tentatively titled Tell Me What You Really Think, is scheduled to be released by Simon & Schuster in October of 2023. Based on her work at The Race Card Project™, her next book explores America’s hidden conversation about race and identity during the period bookended by the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

All tickets include a book.

The authors will be signing books following the event.

Attendees are encouraged to follow COVID guidance provided by the school while on campus.

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On Work gathers a selection of Derek Thompson’s most popular and significant writing on work, life, and the future of jobs. From essays on how mass automation could change society to his widely read treatise on “workism” as our modern religion, Thompson’s analysis and forecasts have become fixtures of the twenty-first century conversation about work.

Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he publishes the newsletter “Work in Progress” on science, tech, and culture. He is the founder and host of the popular news podcast Plain English with Derek Thompson. A news analyst with NPR, Derek appears weekly on the national news show Here and Now and is also a contributor to CBS News. His first book, the national bestseller Hit Makers: How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction, has been translated into more than a dozen languages and was named the 2018 Book of the Year by the American Marketing Association. Derek lives in Washington, DC, with his wife and dog.

Thompson will be in conversation with Ross Andersen. Andersen is the deputy editor of The Atlantic.

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A book signing will follow the event.

Sally Milz, a sketch writer for the weekly late-night comedy show “The Night Owls,” has long abandoned the search for love. But when Sally’s fellow writer begins dating a glamorous actress, he joins the group of talented but average-looking men at the show—and in society at large—who’ve gotten romantically involved with incredibly beautiful and accomplished women. Sally channels her annoyance into a sketch underscoring how unlikely it is that the reverse would ever happen for a woman.

Enter this week’s host and musical guest, Noah Brewster, a pop music sensation with a reputation for dating models. Sally hits it off with Noah instantly, and she begins to wonder if there might actually be sparks. But this isn’t a romantic comedy—it’s real life. And in real life, someone like him would never date someone like her…right?

With her trademark ability to bring complex women to life on the page, Curtis Sittenfeld, the New York Times bestselling author of Rodham, Prep, and Eligible, explores the neurosis-inducing wonder of love while dissecting the social rituals of romance and gender relations in the modern age in her latest novel, Romantic Comedy.

Sittenfeld will be in conversation with Martine Powers, the senior host of “Post Reports,” The Washington Post‘s flagship daily news podcast.

with Politics and Prose

FLOW is a three-part series taking place April 14th and 15th. Tickets must be purchased separately for each event.

LEONARDISSIMO! —Leonardo da Vinci’s World and Its Waters

Apr 14, 8 pm, The Kennedy Center, Eisenhower Theater

Part of RiverRun’s “FLOW” Literary Series curated by Marie Arana, this stunning multimedia presentation about Leonardo da Vinci delves into the great master’s obsession with water.

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“FLOW”—Literary Series: The Waters We Seek to Master

Grand Delusion reveals that this story, while episodically impressive, was too often tragic and at times dishonorable. As we enter a new era in foreign policy, this is an essential book, a cautionary history that illuminates American's propensity for self-deception and misadventure at a moment when the nation is redefining its engagement with a world in crisis.

Steven Simon served on the National Security Council staff as senior director for Middle Eastern and North African affairs 2011-2012. He also worked on the NSC staff 1994-1999 on counterterrorism and Middle East security policy. These assignments followed a fifteen-year career at the U.S. Department of State. Between government assignments, he was Hasib Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, analyst at the RAND Corporation, and deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies; he is currently a professor at Colby College. He is the co-author, among other books, of The Age of Sacred Terror, winner of the Arthur C. Ross Award for best book in international relations.

Simon will be joined in conversation with Aaron David Miller, vice president for new initiatives and a distinguished fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, served for two decades as a State Department analyst, negotiator and adviser on Middle East issues.

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Granted special access by Queen Elizabeth II to her parents' letters and diaries and to the papers of their close friends and family, Sally Bedell Smith brings the love story of this iconic royal couple to vibrant life. This deeply researched and revealing book shows how a loving and devoted marriage helped the King and Queen meet the challenges of World War II, lead a nation, solidify the public's faith in the monarchy, and raise their daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret.

When King Edward VIII abdicated the throne in 1936, shattering the Crown's reputation, his younger brother, known as Bertie, assumed his father's name and became King George VI. Shy, sensitive, and afflicted with a stutter, George VI had never imagined that he would become King. His wife, Elizabeth, a pretty, confident, and outgoing woman who became known later in life as "the Queen Mum," strengthened and advised her husband. With his wife's support, guidance, and love, George VI was able to overcome his insecurities and become an exceptional leader, navigating the country through World War II, establishing a relationship with Winston Churchill, visiting Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington and in Hyde Park, and inspiring the British people with his courage and compassion during the Blitz. Simultaneously, George VI and Elizabeth trained their daughter Princess Elizabeth from an early age to be a highly successful monarch, and she would reign for an unprecedented seventy years. Sally Bedell Smith gives us an inside view of the lives, struggles, hopes, and triumphs of King George VI and Elizabeth during a dramatic time in history.

Sally Bedell Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of Elizabeth the Queen and Prince Charles, as well as biographies of William S. Paley; Pamela Harriman; Diana, Princess of Wales; John and Jacqueline Kennedy; and Bill and Hillary Clinton. An on-air contributor for CNN since 2017, she was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair from 1996 to 2018.

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Countless Black Americans descended from slavery are related to the enslavers who bought and sold their ancestors. Among them is Dionne Ford, whose great grandmother was the last of six children born to a Louisiana cotton broker and the enslaved woman he received as a wedding gift. What shapes does this kind of intergenerational trauma take? In these pages, which move between her inner life and deep research, Ford tells us. It manifests as alcoholism and post-traumatic stress; it finds echoes in her own experience of sexual abuse at the hands of a relative, and in the ways in which she builds her own interracial family. To heal, Ford tries a wide range of therapies, lifestyle changes, and recovery meetings. "Anything," she writes, "to keep from going back there." But what she learns is that she needs to go back there, to return to her female ancestors, and unearth what she can about them to start to feel whole.

Dionne Ford is an NEA creative writing fellow and the co-editor of the anthology Slavery's Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (Rutgers University Press). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Literary Hub, New Jersey Monthly, the Rumpus, and Ebony and won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Newswomen's Club of New York. She holds a BA from Fordham University and an MFA from New York University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and daughters.

Ford will be in conversation with W. Ralph Eubanks. Eubanks is faculty fellow and writer-in-residence at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through A Real and Imagined Literary Landscape as well as two other works of nonfiction. A writer and essayist whose work focuses on race, identity, and the American South, his writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, and The New Yorker. He is a 2007 Guggenheim fellow and a 2021-2022 Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow.

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A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past--the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia's death and the conviction of the school's athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers--needs--to let sleeping dogs lie. But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn't as much of an outsider at Granby as she'd thought--if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case. In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman's reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.

A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca Makkai is on the MFA faculties of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.Her last novel, The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, the Clark Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize; and it was one of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of 2018. Her other books are the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime—four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories.

Makkai will be in conversation with Angie Kim. Kim is a Korean immigrant, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, and author of the international bestseller and Edgar Award winner Miracle Creek, which has been translated into over 20 languages and named a "Best Book of the Year" by Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus, and The Today Show. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Vogue, and Glamour, among many others. Her second novel, Happiness Falls, is forthcoming from Hogarth/Random House in September 2023. http://www.AngieKimBooks.com.

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Never having run for office before, Rep. Katie Porter defied expectations in 2018 when she was elected to Congress as a Democrat in historically conservative Orange County, California. Underestimated as a single mom and chided for her progressive values, she quickly went viral for videos of her using a whiteboard to take CEOs and corrupt government officials to task in Congressional hearings.

I Swear: Politics Is Messier Than My Minivan shares what it’s really like to serve in Congress and exposes the gaps between politicians’ press conferences and real people’s lives. With the same clarity she demonstrates in Congressional hearings, Rep. Porter makes the case for consumer protection, corporate accountability, and anti-corruption reforms, providing whiteboard lessons on where your campaign donations go, how to fight the corporations that cheat you, and how to conduct her trademark robust oversight.

Full of candid and inspiring stories—from how Rep. Porter lent Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a pair of sneakers during the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, to her kids’ lightly illegal campaign hijinks—this is a book by an exhausted, committed parent who just doesn’t have the time for nonsense in her house or in the House of Representatives.

Katie Porter represents Orange County, California, in Congress. Prior to being elected in 2018, she was a law professor and consumer finance expert. Katie lives with her three school-aged kids in Irvine, California.

with Politics and Prose

When W. E. B. Du Bois, believing in the possibility of full citizenship and democratic change, encouraged African Americans to "close ranks" and support the Allied cause in World War I, he made a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Seeking both intellectual clarity and personal atonement, for more than two decades Du Bois attempted to write the definitive history of Black participation in World War I. His book, however, remained unfinished. In The Wounded World, Chad Williams offers the dramatic account of Du Bois's failed efforts to complete what would have been one of his most significant works. The surprising story of this unpublished book offers new insight into Du Bois's struggles to reckon with both the history and the troubling memory of the war, along with the broader meanings of race and democracy for Black people in the twentieth century.

Drawing on a broad range of sources, most notably Du Bois's unpublished manuscript and research materials, Williams tells a sweeping story of hope, betrayal, disillusionment, and transformation, setting into motion a fresh understanding of the life and mind of arguably the most significant scholar-activist in African American history. In uncovering what happened to Du Bois's largely forgotten book, Williams offers a captivating reminder of the importance of World War I, why it mattered to Du Bois, and why it continues to matter today.

Chad L. Williams is the Samuel J. and Augusta Spector Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of the award-winning book Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era and the coeditor of Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence. His writings and op-eds have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Time, and The Conversation. He lives in Needham, Massachusetts.

Williams will be in conversation with Michael Kazin. Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and editor emeritus of Dissent magazine. He is the author of seven books and the editor of three. His latest book, What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party, was published in March 2022 (paperback, March 2023). It was an Editor’s Choice of the New York Times and was named by Kirkus as one of the ten best books on U.S. history published in 2022. Kazin is a former on-line columnist for The New Republic and has written articles and reviews for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The New York Review of Books and many other periodicals and websites. He has held fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Center, The Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Smithsonian Institution, and the Fulbright Program and has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, Russia, and Japan. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Tula Pendleton was the belle of her small Kentucky hometown when she married Holmes Cummins Jr., a rising young insurance executive, in 1894. When the expected children never came, Tula turned her hand to writing short fiction, publishing stories in popular American magazines. Her range as an author was impressive, from romances and medical dramas to truly haunting tales of the uncanny. She also wrote charming stories of small-town life that addressed the pleasures, comforts, and stings of life in a rural community.

Tula’s stories were well received, but as her writing career blossomed, the couple struggled with family, health, and financial troubles. In 1924, they carried out a suicide pact, an event covered by more than 120 American newspapers at the time. Soon after, though, both Tula and her work were forgotten.

This volume, researched and written by Tula’s great-niece, relates with empathy and insight the remarkable story of Tula’s life. It also collects, for the first time, all of her extant stories, giving new generations the chance to discover the work of this extraordinary Southern writer.

Barbara Pendleton Jones, great-niece of Tula Pendleton Cummins, grew up hearing only the barest account of Tula’s career as a writer and her tragic death. When she set out to learn more about her great-aunt, she had only two of Tula’s letters and fragments of her family history. By piecing together Tula’s genealogy, finding her published stories, locating letters and newspaper articles in archives, and retracing Tula’s steps across much of the South, Jones—a retired psychologist and psychoanalyst—has crafted a moving and illuminating portrait of her extraordinary relative.

Jones will be in conversation with Susan Shreve. Shreve is the author of fifteen novels, most recently You Are the Love of My Life, a memoir Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood and twenty-nine books for children. She has edited or co-edited five anthologies and her essays have appeared in several collections as well as The New York Times, The Washington Post and several magazines. She was co-founder and has been a Professor in the Master of Fine Arts Program at George Mason University for more than forty years. In 1985, she co-founded the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and served for thirty years most recently as Chairman.

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The games and rituals performed by Katherine Heiny's characters range from mischievous to tender: In "Bridesmaid, Revisited," Marlee, suffering from a laundry and life crisis, wears a massive bridesmaid's dress to work. In "Twist and Shout," Erica's elderly father mistakes his four-thousand-dollar hearing aid for a cashew and eats it. In "Turn Back, Turn Back," a bedtime story coupled with a receipt for a Starbucks babyccino reveal a struggling actor's deception. And in "561," Charlene pays the true price of infidelity and is forced to help her husband's ex-wife move out of the family home. ("It's like you're North Korea and South Korea . . . But would North Korea help South Korea move?") From one of our most celebrated writers, our bard of waking up in the wrong bed, wearing the wrong shoes, late for the wrong job, but loved by the right people, Heiny has delivered a work of glorious humor and immense kindness.

Katherine Heiny is the author of Early Morning Riser, Standard Deviation, and Single, Carefree, Mellow, and her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and many other magazines. She has lived in London, The Hague, and Boyne City, Michigan, and now lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband and children.

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At least thirteen million Americans will have to move away from American coasts in the coming decades, as rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms put lives at risk and cause billions of dollars in damages. In Charleston, South Carolina, denial, boosterism, widespread development, and public complacency about racial issues compound; the city, like our country, has no plan to protect its most vulnerable. In these pages, Susan Crawford tells the story of a city that has played a central role in America's painful racial history for centuries and now, as the waters rise, stands at the intersection of climate and race.

Unbeknownst to the seven million mostly white tourists who visit the charming streets of the lower peninsula each year, the Holy City is in a deeply precarious position. Weaving science, narrative history, and the family stories of Black Charlestonians, Charleston chronicles the tumultuous recent past in the life of the city--from protests to hurricanes--while revealing the escalating risk in its future. A bellwether for other towns and cities, Charleston is emblematic of vast portions of the American coast, with a future of inundation juxtaposed against little planning to ensure a thriving future for all residents.

In Charleston, we meet Rev. Joseph Darby, a well-regarded Black minister with a powerful voice across the city and region who has an acute sense of the city's shortcomings when it comes to matters of race and water. We also hear from Michelle Mapp, one of the city's most promising Black leaders, and Quinetha Frasier, a charismatic young Black entrepreneur with Gullah-Geechee roots who fears her people's displacement. And there is Jacob Lindsey, a young white city planner charged with running the city's ten-year "comprehensive plan" efforts who ends up working for a private developer. These and others give voice to the extraordinary risks the city is facing.

The city of Charleston, with its explosive gentrification over the last thirty years, crystallizes a human tendency to value development above all else. At the same time, Charleston stands for our need to change our ways--and the need to build higher, drier, more densely-connected places where all citizens can live safely.

Illuminating and vividly rendered, Charleston is a clarion call and filled with characters who will stay in the reader's mind long after the final page.

Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She previously was Obama's special assistant to the president for science, technology, and innovation policy and co-led the FCC transition team between his and the Bush administrations. Earlier in her career, Crawford was a partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. As an academic, she teaches courses about climate adaptation and public leadership. Crawford is the author of several books, including Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age and Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution and Why America Might Miss It.

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In Birth, journalist Rebecca Grant provides us with a never-before-seen look at the changing landscape of pregnancy and childbirth in America--and the rise of midwifery--told through the eyes of three women who all pass through the doors of the same birth center in Portland, Oregon.

There's Alison, a teacher whose long path to a healthy pregnancy has led her to question a traditional hospital birth; T'Nika, herself born with the help of a midwife and now a nurse hoping to work in Labor & Delivery and improve equality in healthcare; and Jillian, an office manager and aspiring midwife who works at Andaluz Birth Center, excited for a new beginning, but anxious about how bringing a new life into the world might mean the deferral of her own dreams.

In remarkable detail and with great compassion, Grant recounts the ups downs, fears, joys, and everyday moments of each woman's pregnancy and postpartum journey, offering a rare look into their inner lives, perspectives, and choices in real time--and addresses larger issues facing the entire nation, from discrimination in medicine and treatment (both gender and race-based) to fertility, family planning, complicated feelings about motherhood and career, and the stigmas of miscarriage and postpartum blues. The result is an inspiring and illuminating look at one of life's most profound rites of passage.

Rebecca Grant is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon, who covers reproductive rights, health, and justice. Her work has appeared in NPR, The Atlantic, VICE, The Nation, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, HuffPost, and The Guardian, among other publications. She has received grants and fellowships from the International Women’s Media Foundation, the International Reporting Project, and The Investigative Fund, reporting stories around the US and the world. Rebecca studied English and art history at Cornell University and served in the Peace Corps in Thailand. Before full-time freelancing, she worked at Washingtonian Magazine and wrote about startups in San Francisco.

Grant will be in converaation with Molly Ball. Ball is Time magazine’s national political correspondent and a frequent television and radio commentator. She is the author of Pelosi, a bestselling biography of the first woman Speaker of the House. Prior to joining Time, Ball covered U.S. politics for The Atlantic, Politico and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. She has received numerous awards for her political coverage, including the Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress, the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency and the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting. A graduate of Yale University, Ball won $100,000 on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in 2007. She grew up in Idaho and Colorado and lives in the Washington, DC, area with her husband and three children.

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In April 1968, following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., a wave of uprisings swept across America. None was more visible--or resulted in more property damage, arrests, or federal troop involvement--than in Washington, DC, where thousands took to the streets in protest against racial inequality, looting and burning businesses in the process. The nation's capital was shaken to its foundations. 

When the Smoke Cleared tells the story of the Washingtonians who seized the moment to rebuild a more just society, one that would protect and foster Black political and economic power. A riveting account of activism, urban reimagination, and political transformation, Kyla Sommers's revealing and deeply researched narrative is ultimately a tale of blowback, as the Nixon administration and its allies in Congress thwarted the ambitions of DC's reformers, opposing civil rights reforms and self-governance. And nationwide, conservative politicians used the specter of crime in the capital to roll back the civil rights movement and create the modern carceral state.

A vital chapter in the struggle for racial equality, When the Smoke Cleared is an account of open wounds, paths not taken, and their unforeseen consequences--revealed here in all of their contemporary significance.

Kyla Sommers earned her PhD in history from the George Washington University. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Washington History journal, and the book Demand the Impossible: Essays in History as Activism. Sommers is the digital engagement editor at American Oversight and was previously the editor-in-chief of the History News Network. The author of When the Smoke Cleared (The New Press), she lives in Washington, DC.

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Martha Anne Toll, Jai Chakrabarti, Ari Joskowicz, and Karen Baum Gordon will be in conversation about their latest titles Three Muses, A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, Rain of Ash, and The Last Letter: A Father's Struggle, a Daughter's Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust.

Three Muses is a love story that enthralls: a tale of Holocaust survival venturing through memory, trauma, and identity, while raising the curtain on the unforgiving discipline of ballet. The stories in A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness capture men and women struggling with transformation and familial bonds; they traverse the intersections of countries and cultures to illuminate what it means to love in uncertain times; and they showcase the skill of a storyteller who dazzles with the breadth of his vision. Rain of Ash is the untold story of how Roma turned to Jewish institutions, funding sources, and professional networks as they sought to gain recognition and compensation for their wartime suffering. In The Last Letter: A Father's Struggle, a Daughter's Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust, Gordon explores not only her father's life story, but also the stories and events that shaped the lives of her grandparents--two Holocaust victims that Rudy tried in vain to save in the late 1930s and early years of World War II.

Martha Anne Toll writes fiction, essays, and book reviews, and reads anything that’s not nailed down. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction. Martha brings a long career in social justice to her work covering BIPOC and women writers. She is a book reviewer and author interviewer at NPR Books, the Washington Post, The Millions, and elsewhere; and publishes short fiction and essays in a wide variety of outlets.

Jai Chakrabarti is the author of the novel A Play for the End of the World (Knopf), which won the National Jewish Book Award, was the Association of Jewish Libraries Honor Book, was short-listed for the Tagore Prize, and was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of the story collection A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness (Feb-2023). His short fiction has appeared in One Story, Electric Literature, A Public Space, Conjunctions, and elsewhere and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize.

Ari Joskowicz is a historian with a special interest in the complicated relations between different minority groups. An Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, European Studies, and History at Vanderbilt University, he is the author of The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France and editor of Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times. He also serves as the director of Vanderbilt’s Max Kade Center for European and German Studies.

A graduate of Harvard College and Columbia Business School, Karen Baum Gordon co-founded Strategic Horizons, Inc., an executive coaching and management consulting firm. Karen is a Dallas native and now lives with her husband and black lab in Brooklyn, New York, and South Hero, Vermont. She is an active member of Brooklyn Heights Synagogue and recently served as president of the congregation.

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Award-winning historian Tamika Y. Nunley has unearthed the stories of enslaved Black women charged by their owners with poisoning, theft, murder, infanticide, and arson. While free Black and white people accused of capital crimes received a hearing, trial, and, if convicted, an opportunity to appeal, none of these options were available to enslaved people. Conviction was final, and only the state or owners could spare their accused chattel of punishment by death. For enslaved women in Virginia, clemency was not uncommon, but Nunley shows why this act ultimately benefitted owners and punished the accused with sale outside of the state as the best possible outcome.

Demonstrating how crimes, convictions, and clemency functioned within a slave society that upheld the property interests of white Virginians, Nunley reveals the frequency with which owners preferred to keep the accused in bondage, which allowed them, behind the veil of paternalism, to continue to benefit from Black women's labor. This so-called clemency also sought to rob Black women of the power they exercised when they committed capital crimes. The testimonies that Nunley has collected and analyzed offer compelling glimpses of the self-identities forged by Black women as they attempted to resist enslavement and the limits of justice available to them in the antebellum courtroom.

Tamika Y. Nunley is associate professor of history at Cornell University.

Nunley will be joined in conversation with, Marcia Chatelain, an American academic who serves as a professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. In 2021, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History for her book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, which also won a James Beard Award.

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