Detailed Event List
Melissa Scholes Young — Grace in Love (Grace & Gravity Vol. X) — at Conn Ave
Join us for the launch of volume X, Grace in Love, in the Grace & Gravity anthology series of DC Women Writers.
Melissa Scholes Young is the author of the novels The Hive and Flood and editor of the anthologies Grace in Darkness, Furious Gravity, and Grace in Love. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Washington Post, Poets & Writers, The Believer, Ploughshares, Lit Hub and elsewhere. Born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, she is currently an associate professor in Literature at American University.
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Robin Lloyd — Hidden Cargo — at Conn Ave
Five months after the end of the Civil War, Acting Navy Lieutenant Everett Townsend is awaiting discharge in Key West. The end of the war has left him uncertain about his future and full of regret about the end of his relationship with Emma, the Cuban American daughter of a Havana boarding house owner. His Spanish grandmother- a slave owner who runs a prosperous sugar plantation in the Cuban countryside- is dreaming that Everett will return and take over the family business, a prospect that sickens him. Returning from a routine supply mission from Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas, he and his men are caught in a hurricane and witness a shipwreck in the Marquesas Keys. When they investigate, they discover a locked cargo hold with the dead bodies of Black freedmen. When Townsend reports this unsettling incident to his distracted Naval commander in Key West, he's encouraged to drop the matter. But he can't shake his suspicions that the poor souls from the cargo hold were destined for re-enslavement in the sugar fields of Spanish Cuba. The murder of an American sailor in a Cuban port provides Townsend with a reason to return to Cuba and continue his investigation even as it reunites him with Emma who has joined the secretive Cuban resistance to Spanish colonial rule. A rescue of a Navy veteran leads to more clues and helps convince Townsend to become a government informant operating in the interior of Cuba. He goes to live with his Spanish grandmother at her sugar plantation in the Cuban countryside. There Townsend finds himself facing an impossible choice between the Cuban-American woman he loves and his tradition-bound Spanish grandmother. As he grapples with this clash of personalities, Townsend uncovers the details of a conspiracy which forces him to come face to face with his own family's close ties to slavery.
Robin Lloyd is the author of Harbor of Spies and Rough Passage to London, two seafaring suspense novels set in the nineteenth century. Lloyd was a foreign correspondent for NBC News for many years, where he reported from Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Africa. He also covered the White House during the Reagan and Bush administrations. Lloyd has created and produced news programs with foreign networks as well as documentaries and segments for domestic stations, including Maryland Public Television. Among his prestigious awards are four Emmys from the National Capital Chesapeake Bay region and an Overseas Press Award. He and his wife divide their time between Chevy Chase, Maryland and Maine.
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P&P Live! Gina Apostol — La Tercera - with Idra Novey
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Rosario, a Filipina novelist in New York City, has just learned of her mother's death in the Philippines. Instead of rushing home, she puts off her return by embarking on a remote investigation into her family's history and her mother's supposed inheritance, a place called La Tercera, which may or may not exist. Rosario catalogs generations of Delgado family bequests and detritus: maps of uncertain purpose, rusted chicken coops, a secret journal, the words to songs sung at the family home during visits from Imelda Marcos.
Each life Rosario explores opens onto an array of other lives and raises a multitude of new questions. But as the search for La Tercera becomes increasingly labyrinthine, Rosario's mother and the entire Delgado family emerge in all their dizzying complexity: traitors and heroes, reactionaries and revolutionaries. Meanwhile, another narrative takes shape--of the country's erased history of exploitation and slaughter at the hands of American occupying forces.
La Tercera is Gina Apostol's most ambitious, personal, and encompassing novel: a story about what seems impossible--capturing the truth of the past--and the terrible cost to a family, or a country, that fails to try.
Gina Apostol is the author of the novels Insurrecto, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Bibliolepsy, and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. She is the winner of two Philippine National Book Awards, the PEN/Open Award, and the Rome Prize. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Leyte, in the Philippines.
Apostol will be in conversation with Idra Novey. Novey is a writer and translator. Her newest novel Take What You Need is a most anticipated book of 2023 with Vulture, Elle, Oprah Daily, Today.com and LitHub . She is also the author of Those Who Knew, a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize, an Indie Next Pick, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her first novel Ways to Disappear, was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Los Angeles Times. Her works as a translator include Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. and a co-translation with Ahmad Nadalizadeh of Iranian poet Garous Abdolmalekian, Lean Against This Late Hour, a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Prize in 2021. In 2022, she received a Pushcart Prize for her story "The Glacier. "She teaches fiction at Princeton University.
Philip Zelikow — Lessons from the Covid War: An Investigative Report - with Charity Dean and John Barry — at Conn Ave
Our national leaders have drifted into treating the pandemic as though it were an unavoidable natural catastrophe, repeating a depressing cycle of panic followed by neglect. So a remarkable group of practitioners and scholars from many backgrounds came together determined to discover and learn lessons from this latest world war. Lessons from the Covid War is plain-spoken and clear sighted. It cuts through the enormous jumble of information to make some sense of it all and answer: What just happened to us, and why? And crucially, how, next time, could we do better? Because there will be a next time. The Covid war showed Americans that their wondrous scientific knowledge had run far ahead of their organized ability to apply it in practice. Improvising to fight this war, many Americans displayed ingenuity and dedication. But they struggled with systems that made success difficult and failure easy. This book shows how Americans can come together, learn hard truths, build on what worked, and prepare for global emergencies to come.
Philip Zelikow is the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission and the Carter-Ford Commission on Federal Election Reform. He is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia.
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Stephen Buoro — The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa - with Tope Folarin — at Conn Ave
Andrew Aziza, jokingly nicknamed Andy Africa by his beloved teacher, is a fifteen-year-old boy living in Kontagora in Northern Nigeria. He lives with his secretive mother, Gloria, and spends his days running around with his droogs, Slim and Morocca, chatting about leaving his small-town life behind and constantly contemplating the larger questions of existence. Together with his teacher Zahrah and his equally brilliant friend Fatima, a Hausa-Fulani girl who clearly has feelings for him, he discusses mathematical theorems, Black power, and what Andy has deemed “the curse of Africa.” Obsessed with American movies, pop culture, girls - and more specifically white, blonde girls, Andy falls hopelessly in love with the first one he lays eyes on: Eileen, Father McMahon's niece. But at the church party held to celebrate her arrival, multiple crises loom. The first is that an unfamiliar man there claims to be Andy's father. The second is that an anti-Christian mob has gathered, headed for the church. In the ensuing havoc and its aftermath, Andy’s life is completely turned upside down. He is forced to reckon with his identity, his complicated love for his mother, and his overpowering desire to escape the so-called Cursed Continent. The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa is a tragicomic and utterly unique novel that provides a stunning lens into contemporary African life, the complicity of the West, and the impossible challenges of coming of age in a turbulent world.
Stephen Buoro was born in Nigeria in 1993. He has received a degree in mathematics and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia as the recipient of the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship. He has also received the Deborah Rogers Foundation Award. He lives in Norwich, United Kingdom.
Buoro 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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Dave Barry — Swamp Story — at Conn Ave
Jesse Braddock is trapped in a tiny cabin deep in the Everglades with her infant daughter and her ex-boyfriend, a wannabe reality TV star who turned out to be a lot prettier on the outside than on the inside. Broke and desperate for a way out, Jesse stumbles across a long-lost treasure, which could solve all her problems--if she can figure out how to keep it. The problem is, some very bad men are also looking for the treasure, and they know Jesse has it. Meanwhile, Ken Bortle of Bortle Brothers Bait and Beer has hatched a scheme to lure tourists to his failing store by making viral videos of the "Everglades Melon Monster." The Monster is in fact an unemployed alcoholic newspaperman named Phil wearing a Dora the Explorer costume head. Incredibly, this plan actually works, inspiring a horde of TikTokers to swarm into the swamp in search of the monster at the same time villains are on the hunt for Jesse's treasure. Amid this mayhem, a presidential hopeful arrives in the Everglades to start his campaign. Needless to say, it does not go as planned. In fact, nothing in this story goes as planned. This is, after all, Florida.
Dave Barry is the author of more bestsellers than you can count on two hands, including Lessons from Lucy, Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys, Dave Barry Turns Forty, and Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up. A wildly popular syndicated columnist best known for his booger jokes, Barry won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He lives in Miami.
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Camille Kellogg — Just as You Are - with Susie Dumond — at Conn Ave
Liz Baker and her three roommates work at The Nether Fields, a queer magazine in New York that’s on the verge of shutting down—until it’s bought at the last minute by two wealthy lesbians. Even though Liz is eager to leave listicles behind for more meaningful writing, she knows that she’s lucky to still have a paycheck. But it’s hard to feel grateful with minority investor Daria Fitzgerald slashing budgets, cancelling bagel Fridays, and password protecting the color printer to prevent “frivolous use.” When Liz overhears Daria scoffing at her articles, she knows that it’s only a matter of her time before her impulsive mouth tells Daria off and gets herself fired. But as Liz and Daria wind up having to spend more and more time together, Liz starts to see a softer side to Daria—she’s funny, surprisingly helpful, and actually seems to like that Liz’s gender presentation varies between butch and femme. Even as the evidence that Liz can’t trust Daria piles up, it starts getting harder and harder to keep hating her—and harder and harder to resist her.
Camille Kellogg is a queer writer based in New York City, where she works as an editor for children's and young adult books. She studied English and creative writing at Middlebury College and attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference on a fiction scholarship. She's passionate about queer stories, cute dogs, and bad puns.
Kellogg will be in conversation with Susie Dumond. Dumond is a queer writer from Little Rock, Arkansas. She is a senior contributor at Book Riot, where she writes a monthly Horoscopes and Book Recommendations column, as well as various quizzes, book lists, and bookish news pieces. Susie received a bachelor of arts from the University of Tulsa and a master of arts in public policy and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from the George Washington University. Currently, she’s probably making cupcakes at her home in Washington, D.C., with her partner, Mary, her dog, Waffles, and her cat, Maple.
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Laura Scalzo— American Arcadia — at Conn Ave
New York City, 1985, the scaffolded and torchless Statue of Liberty is under reconstruction, the Twin Towers hum with money, and the clubs pulse with music. Young Wall Streeter, Mina Berg, and her roommate, Chry Risk, strike up friendships with the volatile Danny Nyro and easygoing Dare Fiore. Mina wants Chry's family prestige, while Chry only wants to play the bass like Jaco Pastorius. Nyro trades on his father's notoriety and Dare is keeping secrets. Each of these twenty-somethings attempts to rewrite their origin story as they find themselves knotted in the cross purposes of friendship and love, life and death. Meanwhile, the Sicilian grandmothers on Staten Island are telling tall tales of a fugitive mermaid who lives in the New York Harbor. It's for you to decide if she's a monster or a saint. Themes of art, immigration, reproductive rights, AIDS, assault, class, and betrayal simmer beneath a dynamic plot that spans one life-altering year.
Laura Scalzo is the author of two novels, American Arcadia (2023) and The Speed of Light in Air, Water, and Glass (2018). Her shorter work has appeared in various journals including, Hobart, HAD, and Ellipses Zine. Among the many jobs she's held are waitress, office temp, copywriter, Eurodollar broker on the Japan desk, bike company sales rep., and energy commodities derivatives broker. She lives in Washington, DC.
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Aaron Hamburger — Hotel Cuba - with Justine Kenin — at Conn Ave
Fleeing the chaos of World War I and the terror of the Soviet Revolution, practical, sensible Pearl Kahn and her lovestruck, impulsive younger sibling Frieda sail for America to join their sister in New York. But discriminatory new immigration laws bar their entry, and the young women are turned back at Ellis Island. With few options, Pearl and Frieda head for Havana, Cuba, convinced they will find a way to overcome this setback. At first, life in big-city Prohibition-era Havana is overwhelming, like nothing Pearl and Frieda have ever experienced--or could have ever imagined in the rural shtetl where they grew up. As the sisters begin to adjust, their plans for going to America together become complicated. Frieda falls for the not-so-dreamy man of her dreams while Pearl's life opens up unexpectedly, offering her a taste of freedom and heady romance, and an opportunity to build a future on her own terms. Though to do so, she must confront her past and the shame she has long carried. A heartbreaking, epic family story, Hotel Cuba explores the profound courage of two women displaced from their home who strive to create a new future in an enticing and dangerous world far different from anything they have ever known.
Aaron Hamburger was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his collection of stories, The View from Stalin’s Head. He is the author of two previous novels, Faith for Beginners, a Lambda Literary Award nominee, and Nirvana is Here, a Bronze Medal winner in the 2019 Foreword Indies Awards. He has won fellowships from Yaddo, Djerassi, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and taught creative writing at Columbia University, George Washington University, New York University, and the Stonecoast MFA Program. His work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Village Voice, Tablet, Tin House, and O, the Oprah Magazine.
Hamburger will be in conversation with Justine Kenin. Kenin is an editor for All Things Considered. She started at NPR in 1999 -- and her favorite thing to do at work and in life is to put the perfect book in the right person's hands.
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Joshua Myers — Of Black Study — at Conn Ave
Joshua Myers considers the work of thinkers who broke with the racial and colonial logic of academic disciplinarity and how the ideas of Black intellectuals created different ways of thinking and knowing in their pursuit of conceptual and epistemological freedom. Bookended by meditations with June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara, Of Black Study focuses on how W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Jacob Carruthers, and Cedric Robinson contributed to Black Studies approaches to knowledge production within and beyond Western structures of knowledge. Especially geared toward understanding the contemporary evolution of Black Studies in the neoliberal university and allows us to consider the stakes of intellectual freedom and the path toward a new world.
Joshua Myers is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Howard University. He is the author of Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition and We are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Protest of 1989.
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Kem — Share My Life: A Journey of Love, Faith and Redemption — at Conn Ave
Known for his smooth affecting crooning and dapper style, Kem's journey to the stage is nothing short of inspiring. In Share My Life, Kem goes back to the very beginning before his time to introduce his grandmother who worked as a sharecropper in the South and had thirteen children. As Kem's family rises from the sharecropping and ultimately lands in Detroit, there is an unspoken mantra of "hard things are better left unsaid," which has devastating consequences down the line. And so, Kem grows up in the midst of an impenetrable silence. His mother is never without a beer in her hand, and his relationship with his father is oddly tense. Emotionally starved, Kem internalizes harmful feelings, eventually spiraling to drug use in his search for relief.
At nineteen, Kem is homeless, roaming the cold Detroit streets. In the overly bright AA halls, Kem comes across men like himself verbalizing their feelings. The meetings helped him discover his own voice, using music as an outlet that has since touched millions.
In Share My Life, Kem chronicles his incredible journey of self-discovery. The young boy who struggled with feelings of worthlessness becomes a man willing to put everything on the line for his dream.
For all of his life, Kem has been driven by music and the emotions involved in bringing it to life. Today, the internationally renowned R&B singer/songwriter has to his credit: one platinum-selling album (Kem: Album II); two gold-selling albums (Kemistry; Intimacy); three Grammy nominations; five #1 hit singles (“Love Calls,” “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” “Why Would You Stay,” “It’s You,” and “Nobody”), along with several sold-out national tours and international shows. He is the author of Share My Life.
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Steve Drummond — The Watchdog: How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War Two - with Melissa Block — at Conn Ave
Months before Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt knew that the United States was on the verge of entering another world war for which it was dangerously ill-prepared. The urgent times demanded a transformation of the economy, with the government bankrolling the unfathomably expensive task of enlisting millions of citizens while also producing the equipment necessary to successfully fight--all of which opened up opportunities for graft, fraud and corruption.
In The Watchdog, Steve Drummond draws the reader into the fast-paced story of how Harry Truman, still a newcomer to Washington politics, cobbled together a bipartisan team of men and women that took on powerful corporate entities and the Pentagon, placing Truman in the national spotlight and paving his path to the White House.
Drawing on the largely unexamined records of the Truman Committee as well as oral histories, personal letters, newspaper archives and interviews, Steve Drummond--an award-winning senior editor and executive producer at NPR--brings the colorful characters and intrigue of the committee's work to life. The Watchdog provides readers with a window to a time that was far from perfect but where it was possible to root out corruption and hold those responsible to account. It shows us what can be possible if politicians are governed by the principles of their office rather than self-interest.
Steve Drummond is a journalist at NPR in Washington, where he has been a senior editor for more than two decades. He currently leads a team that covers education and learning, and the race and identity podcast Code Switch. He has been a reporter with newspapers in Florida and in Michigan with The Associated Press, and has written for many publications, including The St. Petersburg Times, The Detroit News, The New York Times, Education Week, and Teacher Magazine. He lives in Maryland, where he also teaches journalism at the University of Maryland.
Drummond will be in conversation with Melissa Block. As special correspondent and guest host of NPR's news programs, Block brings her signature combination of warmth and incisive reporting. Her work over the decades has earned her journalism's highest honors, and has made her one of NPR's most familiar and beloved voices. Block spent twelve years as a host of All Things Considered, after many years at NPR as a correspondent and producer. Now, as special correspondent, Block continues to engage both the heart and the mind with her reporting on a wide range of issues: from LGBTQ rights to the Big Lie; from guns and suicide to opioid addiction. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, writer Stefan Fatsis. In good weather, you'll likely find her out looking for songbirds or sweet-talking the native plants in her perennial gardens.
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Carly Goodman — Dreamland: America's Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction - with Dara Lind — at Conn Ave
In a world of border walls and obstacles to migration, a lottery where winners can gain permanent residency in the United States sounds too good to be true. Just as unlikely is the idea that the United States would make such visas available to foster diversity within a country where systemic racism endures. But in 1990, the United States Diversity Visa Lottery was created to do just that. Dreamland tells the surprising story of this unlikely government program and its role in American life as well as the global story of migration. Historian Carly Goodman takes readers from Washington, D.C., where proponents deployed a colorblind narrative about our "nation of immigrants" to secure visas for white immigrants, to the African countries where it flourished and fostered dreams of going to America. From the post office to the internet, aspiring emigrants, visa agents, and others embraced the lottery and tried their luck in a time of austerity and limits. Rising African immigration to the United States has enriched American life, created opportunities for mobility, and nourished imagined possibilities. But the promise of the American dream has been threatened by the United States' embrace of anti-immigrant policies and persistent anti-Black racism.
Carly Goodman is Senior Editor at Made by History at the Washington Post, where she edits daily commentary and analysis from the nation’s leading historians. Made by History won the OAH’s 2022 Friend of History Award. She is also the Communications Coordinator for Nationalities Service Center, a century-old immigration agency in the heart of Philadelphia.
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Nicole Hackett — The Perfect Ones: A Thriller - with Dr. Christy Gibson — at Union Market
Two days after arriving in Iceland for a promotional trip, Instagram influencer Alabama Wood goes missing. With no leads, the Icelandic police start their investigation by focusing on the two influencers seemingly closest to Alabama on the trip: Celeste Reed, Alabama’s best friend of ten years, and Hollie Goodwin, fitness guru and Alabama's unwilling idol. Celeste and Alabama have grown apart recently because Celeste has been too distracted by her five-year-old’s behavioral issues and her husband’s refusal to admit that there’s a problem. What Celeste doesn’t tell them is how she has been coping with these worries and how it involves Alabama in ways no one would guess. On the outside, Hollie appears to have everything—the husband, the body, and over one million Instagram followers. In reality, however, Hollie came to Iceland to escape the implosion of her life behind the screen. The only person who suspected something amiss behind Hollie’s precisely filtered pictures is Alabama. As secrets are revealed and loyalties are tested, debut author Nicole Hackett asks: do we control our online image, or does it control us?
Nicole Hackett lives near Baltimore, Maryland with her husband, and two children. She works as a biochemical patent agent for a law firm based in Washington, DC.
Hackett will be in conversation with Dr. Christy Gibson. Christy Gibson, MD is a physician and change-agent, a TEDx and international speaker, and trauma clinician. Dr. Gibson's book, The Modern Trauma Toolkit, was also published earlier in May. She is a thought-leader and a vocal advocate for policies that enhance equity. She has created a residency program in health equity, formed Global Familymed Foundation, and Safer Spaces Training, a start-up that helps organizations become trauma-informed. She lives in Calgary, Canada.
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Elizabeth Winkler — Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature — at Conn Ave
The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, vexed, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard's biography is a "black hole," yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) "immoral." In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo. Whisking readers from London to Stratford-upon-Avon to Washington, DC, she pulls back the curtain to show how the forces of nationalism and empire, religion and mythmaking, gender and class have shaped our admiration for Shakespeare across the centuries. As she considers the writers and thinkers--from Walt Whitman to Sigmund Freud to Supreme Court justices--who have grappled with the riddle of the plays' origins, she explores who may perhaps have been hiding behind his name. A forgotten woman? A disgraced aristocrat? A government spy? Hovering over the mystery are Shakespeare's plays themselves, with their love for mistaken identities, disguises, and things never quite being what they seem. As she interviews scholars and skeptics, Winkler's interest turns to the larger problem of historical truth--and of how human imperfections (bias, blindness, subjectivity) shape our construction of the past. History is a story, and the story we find may depend on the story we're looking for. An irresistible work of literary detection , Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies will forever change how you think of Shakespeare... and of how we as a society decide what's up for debate and what's just nonsense, just heresy.
Elizabeth Winkler is a journalist and book critic whose work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Economist, among other publications. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and her master’s in English literature from Stanford University. Her essay “Was Shakespeare a Woman?”, first published in The Atlantic, was selected for The Best American Essays 2020. She lives in Washington, DC.
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Landon Jones — Celebrity Nation: How America Evolved into a Culture of Fans and Followers - with Evan Thomas — at Conn Ave
From the writer and editor who coined the term "baby boomer" comes Celebrity Nation, an exploration into how and why fame no longer stems only from heroic achievements but from the number of "likes" and shares--and what this change means for American culture. Landon Jones--who spent decades in "celebrityland" only to emerge, like Alice, blinking in the sunlight--brings a personal and first-person perspective on fame and its dark underbelly, complicated even further by the arrival of the internet and social media. Jones draws on his experience as the former managing editor of People magazine to bolster his account with profiles of celebrities he knew personally, ranging from Malcolm X to Princess Diana, as well as observations about contemporary social media stars like Kim Kardashian and computer-generated macro-influencer Miquela, a self-proclaimed "19-year-old Robot living in LA." In analyzing the stories of over 75 celebrities, spanning decades and industries, Jones shows how celebrity has been wielded as a weapon of mass distraction to spawn narcissism, harm, and loneliness. And yet, in these stories we also see a path forward. Jones highlights luminaries like Nobel Peace prize winner Maria Ressa and lauded environmental activist Greta Thunberg, who have effected meaningful change not by glorifying themselves but by turning to their communities for action. A lively analysis of celebrity culture's impact on nearly every facet of our lives, Celebrity Nation helps us to recognize how the apparatus of fame operates.
Landon Jones is an editor and author. He is the former managing editor of People and Money magazines and the author of William Clark and the Shaping of the West (2004), a biography of the co-leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Jones also edited a selection of the expedition journals, The Essential Lewis and Clark (2000) . In 1980, he published Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation, which coined the phrase "baby-boomer" and was a finalist for the American Book Award in Nonfiction. In 2015, he received the Henry R. Luce Award for Lifetime Achievement from Time Inc. He is from St. Louis, Missouri, and currently resides in Princeton, New Jersey.
Jones will be in conversation with Evan Thomas. Thomas is the author of bestselling books including First: Sandra Day O’Connor, Being Nixon, John Paul Jones, and Sea of Thunder. Thomas was a writer, correspondent, and editor at Time and Newsweek and has taught writing and journalism at Harvard and Princeton.
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Melissa Ditmore — Unbroken Chains: The Hidden Role of Human Trafficking in the American Economy — at Conn Ave
The years of the COVID-19 pandemic have brought to light the exploitation of workers. In this moment of heightened visibility, Unbroken Chains demands that readers examine the hidden sector of American trafficked labor and understand its prevalence across our economy. Drawing from nearly two decades of research on US and international human trafficking, Melissa Hope Ditmore sets forth the harrowing stories of human trafficking survivors and grounds their accounts in the long history of US indentured servitude, looking to its iterations in chattel slavery, Chinese contract labor, and prison labor. In this groundbreaking investigation of American trafficking, Ditmore unveils the unnerving reality that forced labor permeates many industries beyond sex work: in almost every aspect of consumption, people who create our everyday necessities are working amid inescapable exploitation, often without pay. Unbroken Chains tells these workers' stories: They are nannies for New York City's diplomatic elites and door-to-door magazine salespeople in the American South. A trafficked person may have harvested your produce, sewn your clothes, or cleaned your apartment lobby. Ditmore offers readers an illuminating window on the world of forced labor, which exists within our own, and a road map for participating in its destruction. Unbroken Chains will include more than a dozen images, including detailed maps, archival pictures, and trafficking documents. Among these images are a modern map of the Sonoran Desert in the American Southwest, a bill of sale for an enslaved woman forced into sex work, letters from men in compulsory plantation labor after the Civil War, and 19th-century "white slave" panic propaganda.
Melissa Ditmore is a freelance consultant specializing in issues of gender, development, health and human rights, particularly as they relate to marginalized populations including sex workers, migrants, trafficked persons and people who use drugs. Her past and current clients include UNAIDS, the International Council of Aids Service Organizations, Aids Fonds Nederland, and the Urban Justice Center. She holds a PhD in sociology from the City University of New York, and her writing has appeared in outlets such as The Guardian, HuffPost, and The Daily Beast.
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Camille T. Dungy — Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden — at Union Market
In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominantly white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013 with her husband and daughter, the community held restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it. Definitive and singular, Soil functions at the nexus of nature writing, environmental justice, and prose to encourage you to recognize the relationship between the peoples of the African diaspora and the land on which they live, and to understand that wherever soil rests beneath their feet is home.
Camille T. Dungy is the author of the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has edited three anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Her honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an and an American Book Award. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Andrew Hoehn & Thom Shanker — Age of Danger: Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Superpowers, New Weapons, and New Threats — at Conn Ave
Again and again, American taxpayers are asked to open their wallets and pay for a national security machine that costs $1 trillion operate. Yet time and time again, the US government gets it wrong on critical issues. So what can be done? Enter bestselling author Thom Shanker and defense expert Andrew Hoehn. With decades of national security expertise between them and access to virtually every expert, they look at what's going wrong in national security and how to make it go right.
Age of Danger looks at the major challenges facing America--from superpowers like Russia and China to emerging threats like pandemics, cybersecurity, climate change, and drones--and reimagines the national security apparatus into something that can truly keep Americans safe. Weaving together expert analysis with exclusive interviews from a new generation of national security leaders, Shanker and Hoehn argue that the United States must create an industrial-grade, life-saving machine out of a system that, for too long, was focused only on deterring adversaries and carrying out global military operations. It is a timely and crucial call to action--a call that if heeded, could save Americans lives, money, and our very future on the global stage.
Andrew Hoehn is Senior Vice President and Director of Research at the RAND Corporation. He was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, responsible for developing and implementing U.S. defense strategy, force planning and assessments, and long-range policy planning.
Thom Shanker is the director of the Project for Media and National Security. He was the National Security/Foreign Policy Editor for the New York Times' Washington Bureau, and is co-author of the NYT bestseller Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda.
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Annual American University MFA Graduate Reading — at Conn Ave
Congratulate A.U.’s most recent Master of Fine Arts graduates as these accomplished poets and fiction writers present their work.
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Kate Clancy — Period: The Real Story of Menstruation - with Ed Yong — at Conn Ave
Menstruation is something half the world does for a week at a time, for months and years on end, yet it remains largely misunderstood. Scientists once thought of an individual's period as useless, and some doctors still believe it's unsafe for a menstruating person to swim in the ocean wearing a tampon. Period counters the false theories that have long defined the study of the uterus, exposing the eugenic history of gynecology while providing an intersectional feminist perspective on menstruation science. Blending interviews and personal experience with engaging stories from her own pioneering research, Kate Clancy challenges a host of myths and false assumptions. There is no such a thing as a "normal" menstrual cycle. In fact, menstrual cycles are incredibly variable and highly responsive to environmental and psychological stressors. Clancy takes up a host of timely issues surrounding menstruation, from bodily autonomy, menstrual hygiene, and the COVID-19 vaccine to the ways racism, sexism, and medical betrayal warp public perceptions of menstruation and erase it from public life. Offering a revelatory new perspective on one of the most captivating biological processes in the human body, Period will change the way you think about the past, present, and future of periods.
Kate Clancy is professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she holds appointments in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies and the Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology, and at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. She has written for National Geographic, Scientific American, and American Scientist.
Clancy will be in conversation with Ed Yong. Yong is a science journalist who reports for The Atlantic. An Immense World, his second book, was published in June 2022 and looks at the extraordinary sensory worlds of other animals. His first book, I Contain Multitudes, delved into the amazing partnerships between animals and microbes.
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Bethanne Patrick — Life B: Overcoming Double Depression — at Conn Ave
Plagued by depression her entire life, it wasn't until her early fifties that writer and book critic Bethanne Patrick, advocating for her own care, received a medical diagnosis that would set her on the path to wellness and stability. Recognizing the intergenerational effects of trauma and mental health struggles, Patrick unearths the stories of her past in order to forge a better future for herself and her two daughters, dismantling the stigmas surrounding mental health challenges that can plague families into silence and resignation. Life B is an intimate portrait we haven't yet seen--of a lifelong struggle with depression, of midlife diagnosis and newly found strength. Most important, it's a life-affirming blueprint of how to accept and transcend the limitations of mental illness.
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Chasten Buttigieg — I Have Something to Tell You—For Young Adults: A Memoir - with R. Eric Thomas — at Sixth & I
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In his New York Times bestselling memoir I Have Something to Tell You, teacher Chasten Glezman Buttigieg shared his story of growing up gay in a small, conservative Midwestern town and how he overcame obstacles on his journey to finding acceptance as a gay man. As he traveled cross-country in support of the groundbreaking presidential campaign of his husband, former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Chasten became an inspiration to young queer kids struggling with their identity.
To celebrate the release of the young adult adaptation of his memoir—I Have Something to Tell You (for Young Adults)—adults of all ages, parents, kids, and anyone who’s ever felt like a fish out of water are welcome at this event where Chasten will speak with author R. Eric Thomas about his experience coming out and how he’s healed from the painful responses and isolation; his journey to finding acceptance and self-love; and how to pass the torch and support younger generations who feel isolated or unworthy of love. Chasten’s ultimate goal is to show young people that they are not alone and to inspire them to forge their own path to acceptance.
Thomas is a television writer, playwright, and the bestselling author of Here For It, or How to Save Your Soul in America.
With Politics & Prose.
Angela Tucker — "You Should Be Grateful": Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption — at Conn Ave
"Your parents are so amazing for adopting you! You should be grateful that you were adopted." Angela Tucker is a Black woman, adopted from foster care by white parents. She has heard this microaggression her entire life, usually from well-intentioned strangers who view her adoptive parents as noble saviors. She is grateful for many aspects of her life, but being transracially adopted involves layers of rejection, loss, and complexity that cannot be summed up so easily. In You Should Be Grateful, Tucker centers the experiences of adoptees to share deeply personal stories, well-researched history, and engrossing anecdotes from mentorship sessions with adopted youth. These perspectives challenge the fairy-tale narrative of adoption, giving way to a fuller story that explores the impacts of racism, classism, family, love, and belonging.
Angela Tucker is the Executive Director of the Adoptee Mentoring Society and a well-known voice in the conversation about interracial adoption. Through The Adopted Life LLC, Angela blogs, offers regular consulting for agencies and families, hosts monthly Adoptee Lounges for adult adoptees and spends her weekends mentoring adopted youth. Angela earned a B.A. in Psychology from Seattle Pacific University and lives in Seattle with her husband.
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James Risen — The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys—and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy — at Conn Ave
For decades now, America's national security state has grown ever bigger, ever more secretive and powerful, and ever more abusive. Only once did someone manage to put a stop to any of it.
Senator Frank Church of Idaho was an unlikely hero. He led congressional opposition to the Vietnam War and had become a scathing, radical critic of what he saw as American imperialism around the world. But he was still politically ambitious, privately yearning for acceptance from the foreign policy establishment that he hated and eager to run for president. Despite his flaws, Church would show historic strength in his greatest moment, when in the wake of Watergate he was suddenly tasked with investigating abuses of power in the intelligence community. The dark truths that Church exposed--from assassination plots by the CIA, to links between the Kennedy dynasty and the mafia, to the surveillance of civil rights activists by the NSA and FBI--would shake the nation to its core, and forever change the way that Americans thought about not only their government but also their ability to hold it accountable.
Drawing upon hundreds of interviews, thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and reams of unpublished letters, notes, and memoirs, some of which remain sensitive today, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter James Risen tells the gripping, untold story of truth and integrity standing against unchecked power--and winning--in The Last Honest Man.
James Risen is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. Throughout his career, Risen’s explosive investigative reporting has triggered a series of political firestorms. Among his best-selling books are State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration and Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War. He lives in the Washington, D.C. area with his wife.
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Raja Shehadeh — We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir — at Conn Ave
Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee, he was also the father of bestselling author and activist Raja. In this new and searingly personal memoir, Raja Shehadeh unpicks the snags and complexities of their relationship. A vocal and fearless opponent, Aziz resists under the British mandatory period, then under Jordan, and, finally, under Israel. As a young man, Raja fails to recognize his father's courage and, in turn, his father does not appreciate Raja's own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz is murdered in 1985, it changes Raja irrevocably. Through a host of correspondence, historical and familial documents, including his father’s diaries, articles, legal reports and other writings, Raja masterfully reconstructs a window into a particular father and son relationship; the true story of one family’s journey marked by extraordinary displays of bravery, and a turn of events that forever shifted the trajectory of their fate. At once personal and sweeping, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I recounts not only the story of the battle against the various oppressors, reminding of the threat to freedom and democracy exacted by such forces; highlighting both the costs to and the power of the individual to enact change but also recounts an enduring and particular father and son relationship shaped by its circumstance.
Raja Shehadeh is Palestine’s leading writer. He is also a lawyer and the founder of the pioneering Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq. Shehadeh is the author of several acclaimed books including Strangers in the House, Occupation Diaries, and Palestinian Walks, which won the prestigious Orwell Prize.
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Simon Sebag Montefiore — The World: A Family History of Humanity — at Conn Ave
Around 950,000 years ago, a family of five walked along the beach and left behind the oldest family footprints ever discovered. For award-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, these poignant, familiar fossils serve as an inspiration for a new kind of world history, one that is genuinely global, spans all eras and all continents, and focuses on the family ties that connect every one of us. In this epic, ever-surprising book, Montefiore chronicles the world’s great dynasties across human history through palace intrigues, love affairs, and family lives, linking grand themes of war, migration, plague, religion, and technology to the people at the heart of the human drama. It features a cast of extraordinary diversity: in addition to rulers and conquerors, there are priests, charlatans, artists, scientists, tycoons, gangsters, lovers, husbands, wives, and children. There is Hongwu, the beggar who founded the Ming dynasty; Ewuare, the Leopard-King of Benin; Henry Christophe, King of Haiti; Kamehameha, the conqueror of Hawaii; Zenobia, the Arab empress who defied Rome; Lady Murasaki, the first female novelist; Sayyida al-Hurra, the Moroccan pirate-queen. Here too are moderns such as Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and Volodymyr Zelensky. Here are the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Krupps, Churchills, Kennedys, Castros, Nehrus, Pahlavis and Kenyattas, Saudis, Kims and Assads. These powerful families represent the breadth of human endeavor, with bloody succession battles, treacherous conspiracies, and shocking megalomania alongside flourishing culture, moving romances, and enlightened benevolence. A dazzling achievement as spellbinding as fiction, The World captures the whole human story in a single, masterful narrative.
Simon Sebag Montefiore is a historian of Russia and the Middle East whose books are published in more than forty languages. Catherine the Great and Potemkin was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won the History Book of the Year Prize at the British Book Awards, and Young Stalin won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, the Costa Biography Award, and le Grande Prix de la biographie politique. He received his Ph.D. from Cambridge, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in London.
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Evan Thomas — Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II — at Conn Ave
So begins this suspenseful, impeccably researched history that draws on new access to diaries to tell the story of three men who were intimately involved with America's decision to drop the atomic bomb--and Japan's decision to surrender. They are Henry Stimson, the American Secretary of War, who had overall responsibility for decisions about the atom bomb; Gen. Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific, who supervised the planes that dropped the bombs; and Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, the only one in Emperor Hirohito's Supreme War Council who believed even before the bombs were dropped that Japan should surrender. Henry Stimson had served in the administrations of five presidents, but as the U.S. nuclear program progressed, he found himself tasked with the unimaginable decision of determining whether to deploy the bomb. The new president, Harry S. Truman, thus far a peripheral figure in the momentous decision, accepted Stimson's recommendation to drop the bomb. Army Air Force Commander Gen. Spaatz ordered the planes to take off. Like Stimson, Spaatz agonized over the command even as he recognized it would end the war. After the bombs were dropped, Foreign Minister Togo was finally able to convince the emperor to surrender. To bring these critical events to vivid life, bestselling author Evan Thomas draws on the diaries of Stimson, Togo and Spaatz, contemplating the immense weight of their historic decision. In Road to Surrender, an immersive, surprising, moving account, Thomas lays out the behind-the-scenes thoughts, feelings, motivations, and decision-making of three people who changed history.
Evan Thomas is the author of bestselling books including First: Sandra Day O’Connor, Being Nixon, John Paul Jones, and Sea of Thunder. Thomas was a writer, correspondent, and editor at Time and Newsweek and has taught writing and journalism at Harvard and Princeton.
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Rachel Louise Snyder — Women We Buried, Women We Burned — at Conn Ave
For decades, Rachel Louise Snyder has been a fierce advocate reporting on the darkest social issues that impact women's lives. Women We Buried, Women We Burned is her own story. Snyder was eight years old when her mother died, and her distraught father thrust the family into an evangelical, cult-like existence halfway across the country. Furiously rebellious, she was expelled from school and home at age 16. Living out of her car and relying on strangers, Rachel found herself masquerading as an adult, talking her way into college, and eventually travelling the globe. Survival became her reporter's beat. In places like India, Tibet, and Niger, she interviewed those who had been through the unimaginable. In Cambodia, where she lived for six years, she watched a country reckon with the horrors of its own recent history. When she returned to the States with a family of her own, it was with a new perspective on old family wounds, and a chance for healing from the most unexpected place. A piercing account of Snyder's journey from teenage runaway to reporter on the global epidemic of domestic violence, Women We Buried, Women We Burned is a memoir that embodies the transformative power of resilience.
Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of Fugitive Denim, the novel What We've Lost is Nothing, and No Visible Bruises, winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, the Hillman Prize, and the Helen Bernstein Book Award, and finalist for the NBCC, LA Times Book Prize, and Kirkus Award. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Slate, and elsewhere. A 2020-2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Snyder is a Professor of Creative Writing and Journalism at American University. She lives in Washington, DC.
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Jonathan Eig — King: A Life — at Conn Ave
Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.--and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family's origins as well as MLK's complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father--as well as the nation's most mourned martyr. In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history's greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.
Jonathan Eig is a former senior writer for The Wall Street Journal. He is the New York Times bestselling author of five books, including Ali: A Life, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, and Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season. Ken Burns calls him "a master storyteller," and Eig's books have been listed among the best of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Sports Illustrated, and Slate. He lives in Chicago with his wife and children.
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Alaina E. Roberts — I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land (America in the Nineteenth Century) — at Conn Ave
Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"--the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from. In nineteenth-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), a story unfolds that ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land that had been taken from others. Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907.
Alaina E. Roberts is an award-winning African American, Chickasaw, and Choctaw historian who studies the intersection of Black and Native American life from the Civil War to the modern day. Currently an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Roberts holds a Doctorate in History from Indiana University and a Bachelor of Arts in History, with honors, from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She writes, teaches, and presents public talks about Black and Native history in the West, family history, slavery in the Five Tribes (the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Indian Nations), Native American enrollment politics, and Indigeneity in North America and across the globe. In addition to multiple academic articles, her writing has appeared in news outlets like the Washington Post, High Country News, and TIME magazine, and she has been profiled by CNN, Smithsonian Magazine, and the Boston Globe.
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Abraham Verghese — The Covenant of Water — at Sidwell Friends School Robert L. Smith Meeting Room
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The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of the major word-of-mouth bestseller Cutting for Stone, which has sold over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years.
Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India's Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning--and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl--and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi--will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.
A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the difficulties undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.
Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP, is Professor and Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor, and Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the School of Medicine at Stanford University. He is also a best-selling author and a physician with a reputation for his focus on healing in an era where technology often overwhelms the human side of medicine. He received the Heinz Award in 2014 and was awarded the National Humanities Medal, presented by President Barack Obama, in 2015.
All tickets include a signed book.
The author will be personalizing books following the event.
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Mitchell Zuckoff — The Secret Gate: A True Story of Courage and Sacrifice During the Collapse of Afghanistan — at Conn Ave
When the U.S. began its withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Afghan Army instantly collapsed, Homeira Qaderi was marked for death at the hands of the Taliban. A celebrated author, academic, and champion for women's liberation, Homeira had achieved celebrity in her home country by winning custody of her son in a contentious divorce, a rarity in Afghanistan's patriarchal society. As evacuation planes departed above, Homeira was caught in the turmoil at the Kabul Airport, trying and failing to secure escape for her and her eight-year-old son, Siawash, along with her parents and the rest of their family.
Meanwhile, a young American diplomat named Sam Aronson was enjoying a brief vacation between assignments when chaos descended upon Afghanistan. Sam immediately volunteered to join the skeleton team of remaining officials at Kabul Airport, frantically racing to help rescue the more than 100,000 stranded Americans and their Afghan helpers. When Sam learned that the CIA had established a secret entrance into the airport two miles away from the desperate crowds crushing toward the gates, he started bringing families directly through, personally rescuing as many as fifty-two people in a single day.
On the last day of the evacuation, Sam was contacted by Homeira's literary agent, who persuaded him to help her escape. He needed to risk his life to get them through the gate in the final hours before it closed forever. He borrowed night-vision goggles and enlisted a Dari-speaking colleague and two heavily armed security contract "shooters." He contacted Homeira with a burner phone, and they used a flashlight code signal borrowed from boyhood summer camp. For her part, Homeira broke Sam's rules and withstood his profanities. Together they braved gunfire by Afghan Army soldiers anxious about the restive crowds outside the airport. Ultimately, to enter the airport, Homeira and Siawash would have to leave behind their family and everything they had ever known.
The Secret Gate tells the thrilling, emotional tale of a young man's courage and a mother and son's skin-of-the-teeth escape from a homeland that is no longer their own.
Mitchell Zuckoff is the author of eight previous works of nonfiction, including the #1 New York Times bestseller 13 Hours, as well as Frozen in Time and Lost in Shangri-La. As a member of the Boston Globe Spotlight Team, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting. Zuckoff’s honors include the Livingston Award for International Reporting, the Winship/PEN New England Award for Nonfiction, and the Heywood Broun Memorial Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and numerous other publications.
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Kevin Griffin — The Greatest Song: Spark Creativity, Ignite Your Career, and Transform Your Life — at Conn Ave
Jake Stark. Hit songwriter for Nashville music publisher, MegaMusic. Until he's not. When MegaMusic decides to not renew his contract over a lack of hit songs, Jake is at a loss. His creative energy is down, and the bills are piling up. Enter Sir Daniel Smith-Daniels, the young, enigmatic owner of the hottest music publisher in Nashville, The Row. During a compelling initial meeting, Sir Daniel introduces Jake to his unique approach to work and life, The Method. Soon, with the help of The Row's talented roster of collaborators, Jake is creating some of the best music he's written in years. And what's more, by following The Method's five distinctive practices, Jake may finally be able to write the song he's always known has been within him, but just out of reach, The Greatest Song. From acclaimed songwriter, Kevin Griffin, The Greatest Song is a creative-nonfiction book for every profession. Through the inspiring fictional narrative of Jake Stark, Griffin shares ideas that can be used by anyone, anywhere, to transform their career and their life.
Kevin Griffin is an award-winning songwriter, producer, and performer whose songs have sold in excess of eighty million copies and been streamed over a billion times. He is best known as the singer and founding member of the platinum-selling rock band, Better Than Ezra. He has written numerous #1’s and had songs performed by artists such as Taylor Swift, Train, Sugarland, Dierks Bentley, Christina Perri, Hunter Hayes, James Blunt, and many more. He is a co-founder and partner in Pilgrimage Music & Cultural Festival located in Franklin, Tennessee, and has served as a writer-in-residence at NYU’s Clive Davis School of Music. Griffin lectures internationally on creativity to groups and companies ranging from Live Nation, Google, Spotify and Disney to Nike, YPO/WPO and Salesforce.
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Stacey Abrams — Rogue Justice — at Sixth & I
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Trailblazing political leader, voting rights advocate, attorney, entrepreneur, and bestselling author Stacey Abrams offers a follow-up to her #1 New York Times bestselling suspense novel, While Justice Sleeps, with Rogue Justice—an intricately plotted thriller in which a blackmailed federal judge, a secret court, and a brazen murder may lead to an unprecedented national crisis.
As Congressional hearings and political skirmishes swirl around her, Supreme Court clerk Avery Keene is approached at a legal conference by Preston Davies, a fellow law clerk to a federal judge. Davies believes his boss was being blackmailed in the days before she died. Desperate to understand what happened, he gives Avery a file, a burner phone, and a warning that there are dangerous people involved.
Another shocking murder leads Avery to a list of federal judges, all on the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. As Avery digs deeper, she worries that something far more sinister may be unfolding inside the nation’s third branch of government.
With Rogue Justice, Abrams combines twisting plotlines, wry wit, and clever puzzles to create another immensely entertaining suspense novel.
with Politics and Prose
Keith Ellison — Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence — at Conn Ave
Break the Wheel takes the reader through different solutions that will make way for a defining, generational moment of racial reckoning and social justice understanding. The murder of George Floyd sparked global outrage. At the center of the conflict, the controversy and the trial, Keith Ellison grappled with how to bring justice for Floyd and his family, and now, in the pages of this important book, aims to find the best approaches to put an end to police brutality once and for all. Each chapter of Break the Wheel works through a different spoke of the tragedy and its causes. The first chapter channels George Floyd's perspective as Ellison narrates the high stakes tension of the trial. The next chapter comes at the issue from a cop's viewpoint as Ellison sits down with white and BIPOC officers to discuss police reform. From there this book goes spoke to spoke on the wheel with Ellison in conversation with prosecutors, heads of police unions, historians (to capture the troubled history of policing), judges, activists, legislators, politicians, and media figures, in attempt to end this chain of violence and replace it with empathy and shared insight. While it may seem like an unattainable goal, Break the Wheel demonstrates through Ellison's analysis of George Floyd's life, alongside rich historical context, that lasting change can be achieved with informed solutions.
Keith Ellison was sworn in as Minnesota's 30th attorney general on January 7, 2019. From 2007 to 2019, Keith Ellison represented Minnesota's 5th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he championed consumer, worker, environmental, and civil and human-rights protections for Minnesotans. He is the proud father of four adult children: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah, and Amirah. He is the first African American and the first Muslim American to be elected to statewide office in Minnesota.
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David Von Drehle — The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man — at Conn Ave
When a veteran Washington journalist moved to Kansas, he met a new neighbor who was more than a century old. Little did he know that he was beginning a long friendship--and a profound lesson in the meaning of life. Charlie White was no ordinary neighbor. Born before radio, Charlie lived long enough to use a smartphone. When a shocking tragedy interrupted his idyllic boyhood, Charlie mastered survival strategies that reflect thousands of years of human wisdom. Thus armored, Charlie's sense of adventure carried him on an epic journey across the continent, and later found him swinging across bandstands of the Jazz Age, racing aboard ambulances through Depression-era gangster wars, improvising techniques for early open-heart surgery, and cruising the Amazon as a guest of Peru's president.
David Von Drehle came to understand that Charlie's resilience and willingness to grow made this remarkable neighbor a master in the art of thriving through times of dramatic change. As a gift to his children, he set out to tell Charlie's secrets. The Book of Charlie is a gospel of grit--the inspiring story of one man's journey through a century of upheaval. The history that unfolds through Charlie's story reminds you that the United States has always been a divided nation, a questing nation, an inventive nation--a nation of Charlies in the rollercoaster pursuit of a good and meaningful life.
David Von Drehle is a columnist for The Washington Post, where he writes about national affairs and politics from a home base in the Midwest. He joined The Washington Post in 2017 after a decade at Time, where he wrote more than sixty cover stories as editor-at-large. He is the author of a number of books, including the award-winning bestseller Triangle: The Fire That Changed America. He lives in Kansas City with his wife, journalist Karen Ball. They have four children.
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P&P Live! Kristen Ghodsee — Everyday Utopia
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In the 6th century BCE, the Greek philosopher Pythagoras--a man remembered today more for his theorem about right-angled triangles than for his progressive politics--founded a commune in a seaside village in what's now southern Italy. The men and women there shared their property, lived as equals, and dedicated themselves to the study of mathematics and the mysteries of the universe.
Ever since, humans have been dreaming up better ways to organize how we live together, share our property, raise our children, and determine who's part of our families. Some of these experiments burned brightly for only a brief while--but others carry on today.
In Everyday Utopia, fascinatingly feminist thinker Kristen R. Ghodsee whisks you away on a tour through history and around the world to explore those places that have boldly dared to reimagine how we might live our daily lives: from the Danish cohousing communities that share chores and deepen neighborly bonds to matriarchal Colombian ecovillages where residents grow all their own food; and from Connecticut, where new laws make it easier for extra "alloparents" to help raise children not their own, to China, where planned microdistricts ensure everything a busy household might need is nearby.
One of those startlingly rare books that upends what you think is possible, Everyday Utopia offers a radically hopeful vision for how to build more contented and connected societies, alongside a practical guide to what we all can do in the meantime to live the good life each and every day.
Kristen R. Ghodsee is a Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the critically acclaimed author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, which has been translated into fourteen languages. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Jacobin, among other outlets, and she’s appeared on PBS NewsHour and France 24 as well as on dozens of podcasts, including NPR’s Throughline and New York magazine’s The Cut. She lives outside of Philadelphia.
Andrew McCarthy — Walking with Sam: A Father, a Son, and Five Hundred Miles Across Spain — at Conn Ave
When Andrew McCarthy's eldest son began to take his first steps into adulthood, McCarthy found himself wishing time would slow down. Looking to create a more meaningful connection with Sam before he fled the nest, as well as recreate his own life-altering journey decades before, McCarthy decided the two of them should set out on a trek like few others: 500 miles across Spain's Camino de Santiago.
Over the course of the journey, the pair traversed an unforgiving landscape, having more honest conversations in five weeks than they'd had in the preceding two decades. Discussions of divorce, the trauma of school, McCarthy's difficult relationship with his own father, fame, and Flaming Hot Cheetos threatened to either derail their relationship or cement it. Walking With Sam captures this intimate, candid and hopeful expedition as the father son duo travel across the country and towards one another.
Andrew McCarthy is the author of three books, Brat: An '80s Story, Just Fly Away, and The Longest Way Home — all New York Times best sellers. He is an award winning travel writer and served for a dozen years as an editor-at-larger at National Geographic Traveler magazine. Best known as an actor for the past four decades, Andrew has appeared in such iconic films as Pretty in Pink and Less Than Zero. He lives in New York.
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Stephen Vladeck — The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic - with Mark Joseph Stern — at Conn Ave
The Supreme Court has always had the authority to issue emergency rulings in exceptional circumstances. But since 2017, the Court has dramatically expanded its use of the behind-the-scenes "shadow docket," regularly making decisions that affect millions of Americans without public hearings and without explanation, through cryptic late-night rulings that leave lawyers--and citizens--scrambling.
The Court's conservative majority has used the shadow docket to green-light restrictive voting laws and bans on abortion, and to curtail immigration and COVID vaccine mandates. But Americans of all political stripes should be worried about what the shadow docket portends for the rule of law, argues Supreme Court expert Stephen Vladeck. In this rigorous yet accessible book, he issues an urgent call to bring the Court back into the light.
Stephen Vladeck holds the Charles Alan Wright Chair in Federal Courts at the University of Texas School of Law. His work has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Slate. He has argued before the Supreme Court and has been CNN’s Supreme Court analyst since 2013. Vladeck lives in Austin, Texas.
Vladeck will be in conversation with Mark Joseph Stern. Stern is a senior writer covering courts and the law for Slate Magazine. He holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center and is a member of the Maryland Bar. He's also the author of American Justice 2019: The Roberts Court Arrives, published by the University of Pennsylvania press.
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Elliot Ackerman — Halcyon — at Conn Ave
Virginia, 2004. Gore is entering his second term as president. Our narrator, a recently divorced historian, is living at Halcyon, the estate of renowned lawyer and World War II hero Robert Ableson. When scientists, funded by the Gore administration, find a cure for death, more and more of life's certainties get called into question, including Ableson's identity. Is this new science a miraculous good or an insidious evil? Is Ableson a man outside of time, or is he the product of a new era? How does America's fate hang in the balance? Stretching from Civil War battles to the toppling of Confederate monuments, from scholarly debates to intimate family secrets, Halcyon is a profound and probing novel that grapples with what history means, who is affected by it, and how the complexities of our shared future rest on the dual foundations of remembering and forgetting.
Elliot Ackerman is the author of the novels Red Dress in Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing (a finalist for the National Book Award), and Green on Blue (a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize), as well as the memoir Places and Names, and is the coauthor with Admiral James Stavridis of the best seller 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. Ackerman is both a former White House Fellow and Marine, and served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart.
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Tembe Denton-Hurst — Homebodies — at Conn Ave
Mickey Hayward dreams of writing stories that matter. She has a flashy media job that makes her feel successful and a devoted girlfriend who takes care of her when she comes home exhausted and demoralized. It's not all A-list parties and steamy romance, but Mickey's on her way, and it's far from the messy life she left behind in Maryland. Despite being overlooked and mistreated at work, it seems like she might finally get the chance to prove herself--until she finds out she's being replaced.
Distraught and enraged, Mickey fires back with a detailed letter outlining the racism and sexism she's endured as a Black woman in media, certain it will change the world for the better. But when her letter is met with overwhelming silence, Mickey is sent into a tailspin of self-doubt. Forced to reckon with just how fragile her life is--including the uncertainty of her relationship--she flees to the last place she ever dreamed she would run to, her hometown, desperate for a break from her troubles.
Back home, Mickey is seduced by the simplicity of her old life--and the flirtation of a former flame--but her life in New York refuses to be forgotten. When a media scandal catapults Mickey's forgotten letter into the public zeitgeist, suddenly everyone wants to hear what Mickey has to say. It's what she's always wanted--isn't it?
Intimate, witty, and deeply sexy, Homebodies is a testament to those trying to be heard and loved in a world that refuses to make space, and introduces a standout new writer.
Tembe Denton-Hurst (known on the internet as @tembae) is a book-obsessed beauty and culture writer and author. Currently, she works as a staff writer at New York magazine's The Strategist, where she covers beauty, lifestyle, and books. When she's not writing, Tembe can be found on her couch in Queens, where she lives with her partner and their two cats, Stella and Dakota. Homebodies is her debut novel.
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Michelle Brafman — Swimming with Ghosts - with Bethanne Patrick — at Conn Ave
It's June 2012. The magical and slightly cultish River Run swim club is alive with the spirit of fun competition when a perfect storm brews between team moms and best friends, Gillian Cloud and Kristy Weinstein. The ghost of family addiction has turned up, looming over their carefully planned pasta parties, tie-dye nights, and pep rallies, forcing them to face their unresolved childhood trauma. Gillian responds by trying to control everyone around her, while Kristy relapses into her dangerous addiction to love. Real sparks fly on the night of the derecho--a freak land hurricane--which sweeps through Northern Virginia, knocking out power for days. The storm ignites a tinder box of secrets, leaving Gillian and Kristy alone in the hot dark--their shame their only company. At times humorous and devastating, Swimming with Ghosts is a hauntingly dark, yet uniquely tender story of the various entrapments of addiction and lingering trauma, and what it takes to overcome our hidden legacies of disgrace and discover a once unimaginable freedom made possible by confronting life's greatest storms with the people closest to us.
Michelle Brafman is the author of Bertrand Court: Stories and the novel Washing the Dead. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, LitHub, The Forward, Tablet, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction writing in the Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program. www.michellebrafman.com.
Brafman will be in conversation with Bethanne Patrick. Patrick maintains a storied place in the publishing industry as a critic and as @TheBookMaven on Twitter, where she created the popular #FridayReads and regularly comments on books and literary ideas to over 200K followers. Her work appears frequently in the Los Angeles Times as well as at The Washington Post, NPR Books, and Literary Hub. She sits on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and has served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the host of the Missing Pages podcast.
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Nora Murphy — The New Mother - with Melissa Adelman — at Conn Ave
Isolated. Lonely. Tired. It's hard being The New Mother. Sometimes it's murder. Nothing is simple about being a new mom alone in a new house, especially when your baby is collicky. Natalie Fanning loves her son unconditionally, but being a mother was not all she wanted to be. Enter Paul, the neighbor. Paul provides the lifeline she needs in what feels like the most desperate of times. When Paul is helping with Oliver, calmed by his reassuring, steady presence, Nat feels like she can finally rest. But Paul wants something in return. It's no coincidence that he has befriended Nat--she is the perfect pawn for his own plan. Will Nat wake up in time to see it?
Nora Murphy attended law school in Washington, D.C., then worked as a judicial law clerk before transitioning to private practice. A practicing attorney who writes as much as she can, usually on her phone, Nora resides in Maryland with her husband, two sons, and four rescue pets.
Murphy will be in conversation with Melissa Adelman. Adelman is the author of What the Neighbors Saw. She was born and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, a first-generation American with parents from Haiti and Chile. When she is not traveling the world for her job as an international development economist, her favorite place to be is at home, an old house full of surprises in Northern Virginia. Melissa lives with her husband, two energetic little boys, and long-suffering shih tzu. She holds a Ph.D. and B.A. in economics from Harvard University and has authored several policy papers and research volumes.
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T. J. Newman — Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421 — at Conn Ave
Six minutes after takeoff, Flight 1421 crashes into the Pacific Ocean. During the evacuation, an engine explodes and the plane is flooded. Those still alive are forced to close the doors--but it's too late. The plane sinks to the bottom with twelve passengers trapped inside.
More than two hundred feet below the surface, engineer Will Kent and his eleven-year-old daughter Shannon are waist-deep in water and fighting for their lives.
Their only chance at survival is an elite rescue team on the surface led by professional diver Chris Kent--Shannon's mother and Will's soon-to-be ex-wife--who must work together with Will to find a way to save their daughter and rescue the passengers from the sealed airplane, which is now teetering on the edge of an undersea cliff.
There's not much time.
There's even less air.
With devastating emotional power and heart-stopping suspense, Drowning is an unforgettable thriller about a family's desperate fight to save themselves and the people trapped with them--against impossible odds.
T. J. Newman is a former bookseller and flight attendant whose first novel Falling became a publishing sensation and debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list. The book was named a best book of the year by USA TODAY and Esquire, among many others, and has been published in over thirty countries. The book will soon be a major motion picture from Universal Pictures. T. J. lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Drowning is her second novel.
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Elizabeth Benedict — Rewriting Illness - with Deborah Tannen — at Conn Ave
By turns somber and funny but above all provocative, Elizabeth Benedict's Rewriting Illness: A View of My Own is a most unconventional memoir. With wisdom, self-effacing wit, and the story-telling skills of a seasoned novelist, she brings to life her cancer diagnosis and committed hypochondria. As she discovers multiplying lumps in her armpit, she describes her initial terror, interspersed with moments of self-mocking levity as she indulges in "natural remedies," among them chanting Tibetan mantras, drinking shots of wheat grass, and finding medicinal properties in chocolate babka. She tracks the progression of her illness from muddled diagnosis to debilitating treatment as she gathers sustenance from her family and an assortment of urbane, ironic friends, including her fearless "cancer guru."
In brief, explosive chapters with startling titles - "Was it the Krazy Glue?" and "Not Everything Scares the Shit out of Me" - Benedict investigates existential questions: Is there a cancer personality? Can trauma be passed on generationally? Can cancer be stripped of its warlike metaphors? How do doctors' own fears influence their comments to patients? Is there a gendered response to illness? Why isn't illness one of literature's great subjects? And delving into her own history, she wonders if having had children would have changed her life as a writer and hypochondriac. Post diagnosis, Benedict asks, "Which fear is worse: the fear of knowing or the reality of knowing? (164)"
Throughout, Benedict's humor, wisdom, and warmth jacket her fears, which are personal, political, and ultimately global, when the world is pitched into a pandemic. Amid weighty concerns and her all-consuming obsession with illness, her story is filled with suspense, secrets, and even the unexpected solace of silence.
Elizabeth Benedict, whose novels inlcude the national bestseller, Almost, and the National Book Award finalist, Slow Dancing, authored the classic book on writing about sex in fiction, The Joy of Writing Sex, in print for 25 years. Her personal essays have been selected as “Notable” in five editions of Best American Essays. She has written reviews and articles for The New York Times, Boston Globe, Esquire, Real Simple, and Daedalus, and been a regular contributor to Japanese Playboy, Huffington Post and Salmagundi, writing on sexual politics, money, and literature, and on figures from Monica Lewinsky to British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. She conceived of and edited three prominent anthologies, including NY Times bestseller, What My Mother Gave Me: 31 Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most. Her books are featured regularly in reviews and interviews on All Things Considered, Fresh Air, and many other public radio shows, including the BBC's "Women's Hour," and Australia Public Radio. A graduate of Barnard College, Ms. Benedict has taught creative writing at Princeton, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Columbia, and is on the Fiction Faculty at the New York State Summer Writers Institute.
Benedict will be in conversation with Deborah Tannen. Tannen is a Distinguished University Professor and Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University and author of many books and articles. The best known is You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, which was on the New York Times best seller list for nearly four years, including eight months as No. 1, and has been translated into 31 languages. Her books You Were Always Mom's Favorite! and You're Wearing THAT? were also New York Times best sellers. Tannen has been a guest on such television and radio news and information shows as The Colbert Report, 20/20, Good Morning America, The Today Show, PBS NewsHour, Charlie Rose, Oprah, among others. She has been featured in and has written for most major newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, HuffPost, Newsweek, Time, USA Today, People, and The Harvard Business Review. She has also published poems, short stories, and personal essays. Her first play, "An Act of Devotion," is included in The Best American Short Plays 1993-1994. It was produced, together with her play "Sisters," by Horizons Theatre in Arlington, Virginia.
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Geena Rocero — Horse Barbie: A Memoir — at Conn Ave
As a young femme in 1990s Manila, Geena Rocero heard, " Bakla, bakla!," a taunt aimed at her feminine sway, whenever she left the tiny universe of her eskinita. Eventually, she found her place in trans pageants, the Philippines' informal national sport. When her competitors mocked her as a "horse Barbie" due to her statuesque physique, tumbling hair, long neck, and dark skin, she leaned into the epithet. By seventeen, she was the Philippines' highest-earning trans pageant queen.
A year later, Geena moved to the United States where she could change her name and gender marker on her documents. But legal recognition didn't mean safety. In order to survive, Geena went stealth and hid her trans identity, gaining one type of freedom at the expense of another. For a while, it worked. She became an in-demand model. But as her star rose, her sense of self eroded. She craved acceptance as her authentic self yet had to remain vigilant in order to protect her dream career. The high-stakes double life finally forced Geena to ask herself if she wanted to reclaim the power of Horse Barbie once and for all: radiant, head held high, and unabashedly herself.
A radiant testimony from an icon who sits at the center of transgender history and activism, Horse Barbie is a celebratory and universal story of survival, love, and pure joy.
Born and raised in the Philippines, Geena Rocero is an award-winning producer, director, model, public speaker, trans rights advocate, and television host, and was named one of Gold House's 2020 #A100 most impactful Asians and Pacific Islanders. Her directorial debut Caretakers (PBS), a docuseries about Filipinos in care work, received four Emmy nominations.
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Michael Waldman — The Supermajority: The Year the Supreme Court Divided America — at Conn Ave
In The Supermajority, Michael Waldman explores the tumultuous 2021--2022 Supreme Court term. He draws deeply on history to examine other times the Court veered from the popular will, provoking controversy and backlash. And he analyzes the most important new rulings and their implications for the law and for American society. Waldman asks: What can we do when the Supreme Court challenges the country?
Over three days in June 2022, the conservative supermajority overturned the constitutional right to abortion, possibly opening the door to reconsider other major privacy rights, as Justice Clarence Thomas urged. The Court sharply limited the authority of the EPA, reducing the prospects for combatting climate change. It radically loosened curbs on guns amid an epidemic of mass shootings. It fully embraced legal theories such as "originalism" that will affect thousands of cases throughout the country.
These major decisions--and the next wave to come--will have enormous ramifications for every American.
It was the most turbulent term in memory--with the leak of the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, the first Black woman justice sworn in, and the justices turning on each other in public, Waldman previews the 2022-2023 term and how the brewing fights over the Supreme Court and its role that already have begun to reshape politics.
The Supermajority is a revelatory examination of the Supreme Court at a time when its dysfunction--and the demand for reform--are at the center of public debate.
Michael Waldman is president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a nonpartisan law and policy institute that works to revitalize the nation’s systems of democracy and justice. He was director of speechwriting for President Bill Clinton from 1995 to 1999 and is the author of The Second Amendment: A Biography and The Fight to Vote. Waldman was a member of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court. A graduate of Columbia College and NYU School of Law, he comments widely in the media on law and policy.
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Dana Rubin — Speaking While Female: 75 Extraordinary Speeches by American Women - with Lissa Muscatine — at Conn Ave
This monumental collection of speeches charts the story of America as it unfolded through the decades, showing that at every critical juncture, women were speaking. It's a long-needed corrective to the story we have always told ourselves about whose ideas and voices shaped the nation--a search for long-buried truths, a celebration, and an inspiration.
Dana Rubin is a consultant, speechwriter, and speaker focused on expanding diverse voices and viewpoints in the public discourse. She works with organizations to develop their talent and support underrepresented voices in becoming recognized experts, brand ambassadors, rainmakers, and role models for the next generation. An award-winning journalist, she lives in New York, where she writes and speaks about the history of women's speech and voice. She created the Speaking While Female Speech Bank to broaden our understanding of who actually spoke in history. Visit SpeakingWhileFemale.co to find more speeches by women.
Rubin will be in conversation with Lissa Muscatine, co-owner of P&P and presidential speechwriter in the Clinton White House and chief speechwriter for First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah — Chain Gang All Stars - with Clint Smith — at Conn Ave
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.
In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences.
Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means from a "new and necessary American voice" (Tommy Orange, The New York Times Book Review).
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is the New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He was a National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" honoree, the winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the Saroyan Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for Best First Book, along with many other honors. Raised in Spring Valley, New York, he now lives in the Bronx.
Adjei-Brenyah will be in conversation with Clint Smith, a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and the poetry collection Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award.His poetry collection, Above Ground, was recently published on March 28th. Smith is also the host of the YouTube series Crash Course Black American History. Born and raised in New Orleans, he currently lives in Maryland with his wife and their two children.
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Brett Forrest — Lost Son: An American Family Trapped Inside the FBI's Secret Wars — at Conn Ave
Sept. 11th roused Billy Reilly's curiosity for religions, war, and the world and its people beyond his small town near Detroit. Online, Billy taught himself Arabic and Russian. His passions led him into jihadi Internet forums, attracting the interest of the FBI.
An amateur drawn into professional intelligence, Billy became a Confidential Human Source, one of thousands of civilians who assist FBI agents with investigative work, often at great hazard and with little recourse. When Russia stirred rebellion in Ukraine, Billy set out to make his mark.
In Russia, Billy's communications dropped. His parents, frantic, asked the FBI for help but struggled to find answers. Grasping for clues, the Reilly family turned to Brett Forrest. Commencing a quest of his own, Forrest applied years' worth of research, along with decades of extensive experience in Russia, illuminating the inner workings of the national-security machine that enmeshed Billy and his family, picking up the lost son's trail.
A masterwork of reporting, composed like a thriller, blending political maneuvering and international espionage, Lost Son illustrates one man's coming of age amid new global dangers.
Brett Forrest is a national-security reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where his investigative work often focuses on the former Soviet Union. He has covered the war in Ukraine and was the first reporter into the Kiev suburb of Bucha following Russia’s military withdrawal, where he broke news of alleged atrocities. Brett is the author of The Big Fix (about international soccer match-fixing and organized crime within it), an international bestseller in development as a feature film at Netflix. At ESPN, Brett shared a National Magazine Award and co-directed the true-crime documentary Pin Kings, an Emmy nominee. His international-affairs reporting has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and National Geographic. He has lived and worked in Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, and other countries.
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Qin Sun Stubis — Once Our Lives — at Conn Ave
Once Our Lives is the true story of four generations of Chinese women and how their lives were threatened by powerful and cruel ancient traditions, historic upheavals, and a man whose fate - cursed by an ancient superstition - dramatically altered their destinies. The book takes the reader on an exotic journey filled with luxurious banquets, lost jewels, babies sold in opium dens, kidnappings by pirates, and a desperate flight from death in the desert - seen through the eyes of a man for whom the truth would spell disaster and a lonely, beautiful girl with three identities.
Qin Sun Stubis, author of the historical memoir, Once Our Lives, is a Chinese-American writer in the Washington, D.C. area. She is a longtime newspaper columnist and writes poems, essays, short stories and original Chinese tall tales inspired by traditional Asian themes.
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Christina S. Ho — Normalizing an American Right to Health — at Conn Ave
This book argues against the conventional wisdom that a U.S. right to health is out of reach. It shows that the necessary change is not extraordinary but familiar and that the law has already laid considerable groundwork in ordinary statutes and case law. This descriptive foundation, revealed through the application of well-accepted theories of rights, has simply yet to be either acknowledged as, or relied upon, for rights-building. The book then moves from the descriptive task of showing where a right to health already exists in our legal corpus to the prescriptive goal of showing how we could feasibly and meaningfully expand the right through ordinary policies that are widely used in other domains, including impact assessments and state-sponsored reinsurance. By normalizing American health rights discourse and bringing a right to health, including a right to health care, within the domain of ordinary policy debate, this book arms health advocates for the sharp political contests over health that we face today. Amid the prevailing neoliberal, neo-Lochnerian ideologies that have led us to a dead-end, this book proposes a rival ethic that has been developing right under our noses, one focused on embodied justice, where the priority is squarely on the human and our capacity for suffering and flourishing.
Christina S. Ho is a Professor of Law at Rutgers University where she teaches health law, administrative law, and South African Constitutional Law. Before teaching, she worked as a health policy staffer on the White House Domestic Policy Council, in Hillary Rodham Clinton's Senate Office, and for John F. Tierney in the U.S. House of Representatives. She also served as Country Director for the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative China Program, and later worked at the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University Law Center, where she founded the China Health Law Initiative. Christina received her law and public policy degrees from Harvard Law School and Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government respectively.
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Liv Constantine — The Senator's Wife - with Alex Finlay — at Conn Ave
After a tragic chain of events led to the deaths of their spouses two years ago, D.C. philanthropist Sloane Chase and Senator Whit Montgomery are finally starting to move on. The horrifying ordeal drew them together, and now they're ready to settle down again--with each other.
As Sloane returns to the world of White House dinners and political small talk, this time with her new husband, she's also preparing for an upcoming hip replacement--the latest reminder of the lupus she's managed since her twenties. With their hectic schedules, they decide that hiring a home health aide will give Sloane the support and independence she needs postsurgery. And they find the perfect fit in Athena Karras.
Seemingly a godsend, Athena tends to Sloane and even helps her run her charitable foundation. But Sloane slowly begins to deteriorate--a complication, Athena explains, of Sloane's lupus. As weeks go by, Sloane becomes sicker, and her uncertainty quickly turns to paranoia as she begins to suspect the worst. Why is Athena asking her so many probing questions about her foundation--as well as about her past? And could Sloane be imagining the sultry looks between Athena and her new husband?
Riveting, fast-paced, and full of unbelievable twists, The Senator's Wife is a psychological thriller that upends the private lives of those who walk the halls of power. Because when you have it all, you have everything to lose.
Liv Constantine is the pen name of sisters Lynne Constantine and Valerie Constantine. Lynne and Valerie are national and international bestselling authors with over one million copies sold worldwide. Their books have been translated into twenty-eight languages, published in thirty-three countries, optioned for development in both television and film, and praised by USA Today, The Sunday Times, People, and Good Morning America, among many others. Their debut novel, The Last Mrs. Parrish, was a Reese's Book Club selection.
The Constantine sisters will be in conversation with Alex Finlay. Finlay is the author of the 2021 breakout novel, Every Last Fear, the 2022 Goodreads Choice nominee for Best Mystery and Thriller, The Night Shift, and his latest March 2023 release, Library Reads Hall of Fame recipient, What Have We Done. Alex’s novels are regularly on "best of the year" lists, have been translated into nineteen languages, and Every Last Fear is in development for a series on a major streaming service. What Have We Done also was recently acquired for the screen. Alex lives in both Washington, DC and Virginia.
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Gretchen Morgenson & Joshua Rosner — These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America — at Conn Ave
Much has been written about the widening gulf between rich and poor, the pernicious effects our deepening income inequality has on the US’s well-being, and how our style of capitalism has failed to provide a living wage for so many Americans. But nothing has fully detailed the crucial role a small cohort of elite financiers has played in this dispiriting outcome over the past thirty years. Until now. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author Gretchen Morgenson, with coauthor Joshua Rosner, unmask the small group of celebrated Wall Street financiers who use excessive debt and dubious practices to undermine our nation’s economy while enriching themselves: private equity.
These Are the Plunderers lucidly and maddeningly traces the thirty-year history of corporate takeovers in America and private equity’s increasing dominance. Morgenson and Rosner investigate some of the biggest names in private equity, exposing how they buy companies, load them with debt, and then bleed them of assets and profits.
Private equity relies on debt—and lots of it. Morgenson and Rosner show how companies absorbed by private equity have worse outcomes for everyone but the financiers: patients at private equity-owned nursing homes are more likely to die; companies owned by private equity are more likely to go bankrupt; healthcare costs are higher at private equity-owned operations; workers at private equity-owned companies across the nation are more likely to have their benefits and pensions slashed or lose their jobs; retirees from private industry as well as school teachers, firefighters, medical technicians, and other public workers have lower returns on their pensions because of the fees private equity extracts from their investments. You’re worse off because of private equity.
These Are the Plunderers exposes the greed and pillaging in private equity, revealing the many ways these billionaires have bled our economy.
Gretchen Morgenson is the senior financial reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit. A former stockbroker, she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her “trenchant and incisive” reporting on Wall Street. Previously at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, she and coauthor Joshua Rosner wrote the New York Times bestseller Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon about the mortgage crisis.
Joshua Rosner is managing director at independent research consultancy Graham Fisher and Co., advising regulators, policymakers, and institutional investors on banking and financial markets. He has been interviewed on PBS, CBS, NBC, CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, and Fox News, and featured in or written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Economist, Barron’s, and HuffPost. Joshua is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Reckless Endangerment with Gretchen Morgenson.
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Tania James — Loot — at Conn Ave
Abbas is just seventeen years old when his gifts as a woodcarver come to the attention of Tipu Sultan, and he is drawn into service at the palace in order to build a giant tiger automaton for Tipu's sons, a gift to commemorate their return from British captivity. His fate--and the fate of the wooden tiger he helps create--will mirror the vicissitudes of nations and dynasties ravaged by war across India and Europe. Working alongside the legendary French clockmaker Lucien du Leze, Abbas hones his craft, learns French, and meets Jehanne, the daughter of a French expatriate. When Du Leze is finally permitted to return home to Rouen, he invites Abbas to come along as his apprentice. But by the time Abbas travels to Europe, Tipu's palace has been looted by British forces, and the tiger automaton has disappeared. To prove himself, Abbas must retrieve the tiger from an estate in the English countryside, where it is displayed in a collection of plundered art. A hero's quest, a love story, the story of a young artist coming of age, and an exuberant heist novel that traces the bloody legacy of colonialism across two continents and fifty years, Loot is a dazzling, wildly inventive, and irresistible feat of storytelling from a writer at the height of her powers.
Tania James is the author of the novels The Tusk That Did the Damage and Atlas of Unknowns and the short story collection Aerogrammes. Her fiction has appeared in Boston Review, Granta, Guernica, One Story, A Public Space, and The Kenyon Review. She lives in Washington, D.C.
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Thomas Gabor — American Carnage: Shattering the Myths That Fuel Gun Violence - with Kris Brown — at Conn Ave
Fred Guttenberg, who lost his beloved daughter Jaime in the 2018 Parkland school shooting, and International gun policy consultant Thomas Gabor team up in American Carnage to dismantle some of the most common myths about guns and gun violence.
A national disgrace. Over 40,000 die each year as a result of gun violence in America. Relative to other advanced countries, the U.S. has a dismal gun violence record. Gun law reforms could reduce the number of gun deaths per year, but many political challenges stand in the way. A widespread multi-year misinformation campaign and assault on truth by the gun lobby and gun-extremists sows doubt about the dangers posed by pervasive gun ownership and gun carrying, as well as the potential effectiveness of gun laws.
Debunking popular gun myths. Countering with strong evidence-based research the many slogans and myths repeated incessantly by spokespersons for the gun lobby and its surrogates is essential if we are to have a society in which kids can attend school safely and people can work and enjoy life without fear of being shot. Over the last 30 years, the NRA's campaign to achieve an armed society has succeeded in persuading many Americans that having a gun in the home or carrying a gun makes them safer. The evidence is overwhelming this is not the case. Guns in the home are far more likely to be used against a family member or in a suicide attempt than against an intruder. Tackling this and other myths is critical.
Myths and slogans exposed as false in American Carnage include:
- Gun owners frequently use firearms to fend off attackers
- An armed society is a safer society
- Guns don't kill people, people kill people
If you have read Trigger Points, The Violence Project, Warning Signs, or Fred Guttenberg's Find the Helpers, American Carnage is a must read.
Dr. Thomas Gabor is President of Thomas Gabor, LLC, a criminal justice consulting firm based in Florida. Dr. Gabor served as a Professor of Criminology at the University of Ottawa from 1981-2011.In 1974, he completed his undergraduate degree in sociology with high honors (magna cum laude) from the University of Montreal (Loyola College Campus). He holds a Master of Arts degree in Criminology from the University of Ottawa (Canada) and a doctorate in Sociology from Ohio State University (1983). He has received the American Society of Criminology’s prestigious Gene Carte Prize for his research on Crime Displacement. The Department of Homeland Security has designated him as an individual of “Extraordinary Ability.” He has also been inducted into the Canadian and Criminology’s Who’s Who and has been nominated for several teaching awards.
Dr. Gabor is a frequent speaker on gun violence and has spoken to groups such as: multiple chapters of the League of Women Voters, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, and the National Council for Jewish Women, as well as religious and interfaith groups, Democratic Party clubs, progressive organizations, and numerous community groups. For more information on Dr. Gabor’s professional activities, please visit: thomasgaborbooks.com
Garbor will be in conversation with Kris Brown. As President of Brady, one of America’s oldest and boldest gun violence prevention groups, Brown combines a lifelong background in policy, law, and grassroots activism with considerable strategic management expertise to help forge the direction of the organization’s programs and ensure the successful impact of its national and field assets. A veteran of gun violence prevention work, Ms. Brown started her career on Capitol Hill working for Rep. Jim Moran, advocating for the bill that would eventually become the groundbreaking Brady Bill requiring background checks on federally licensed gun sales. Ms. Brown has also served as the Chief Legal Officer of a publicly traded company based in Switzerland and as a lawyer practicing at the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges. She lives in Arlington, VA, with her two teenage daughters
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Rachel L. Swarns — The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church — at Conn Ave
In 1838, a group of America's most prominent Catholic priests sold 272 enslaved people to save their largest mission project, what is now Georgetown University. In this groundbreaking account, journalist, author, and professor Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover the harrowing origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States.
Through the saga of the Mahoney family, Swarns illustrates how the Church relied on slave labor and slave sales to sustain its operations and to help finance its expansion. The story begins with Ann Joice, a free Black woman and the matriarch of the Mahoney family. Joice sailed to Maryland in the late 1600s as an indentured servant, but her contract was burned and her freedom stolen. Her descendants, who were enslaved by Jesuit priests, passed down the story of that broken promise for centuries. One of those descendants, Harry Mahoney, saved lives and the church's money in the War of 1812, but his children, including Louisa and Anna, were put up for sale in 1838. One daughter managed to escape. The other was sold and shipped to Louisiana. Their descendants would remain apart until Rachel Swarns's reporting in The New York Times finally reunited them. They would go on to join other GU272 descendants who pressed Georgetown and the Catholic Church to make amends, prodding the institutions to break new ground in the movement for reparations and reconciliation in America.
Swarns's journalism has already started a national conversation about universities with ties to slavery. The 272 tells a bigger story, demonstrating how slavery fueled the growth of the Catholic Church in America and bringing to light the enslaved people whose forced labor helped to build the largest religious denomination in the nation.
Rachel L. Swarns is a journalism professor at New York University and a contributing writer for The New York Times. She is the author of American Tapestry and a co-author of Unseen. Her work has been recognized and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Biographers International Organization, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the MacDowell artist residency program, and others.
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Julia Fine — Maddalena and the Dark - with Natasha Joukovsky — at Conn Ave
Venice, 1717. Fifteen-year-old Luisa has only wanted one thing: to be the best at violin. As a student at the Ospedale della Pietà, she hopes to join the highest ranks of its illustrious girls’ orchestra and become a protégé of the great Antonio Vivaldi. Luisa is good at violin, but she is not the best. She has peers, but she does not have friends. Until Maddalena.
After a scandal threatens her noble family’s reputation, Maddalena is sent to the Pietà to preserve her marriage prospects. When she meets Luisa, Maddalena feels the stirrings of a friendship unlike anything she has known. But Maddalena has a secret: she has hatched a dangerous plot to rescue her future her own way. When she invites Luisa into her plans, promising to make her dreams come true, Luisa doesn’t hesitate. But every wager has its price, and as the girls are drawn into the decadent world outside the Pietà’s walls, they must decide what it is they truly want—and what they will do to pay for it.
Lush and heady, swirling with music and magic, Maddalena and the Dark is a Venetian fairytale about the friendship between two girls and the boundless desire that will set them free, if it doesn’t consume them first.
Julia Fine is the author of The Upstairs House, winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction; What Should Be Wild, which was shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Superior First Novel Award; and the forthcoming Maddalena and the Dark. She teaches writing in Chicago, where she lives with her husband and children.
Fine will be in conversation with Natasha Joukovsky. Joukovsky holds a BA in English from the University of Virginia and an MBA from New York University's Stern School of Business. She spent five years in the art world, working at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before pivoting into management consulting. The Portrait of a Mirror is her debut novel. She lives in Washington, DC.
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Mary Kay Zuravleff — American Ending - with Alice McDermott — at Conn Ave
Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents, who are building a life in a Pennsylvania Appalachian town. This town, in the first decades of the 20th century, is filled with Russian transplants and a new church with a dome. Here, boys quit grade school for the coal mines and girls are married off at fourteen. The young pair up, give birth to more babies than they can feed, and make shaky starts in their new world. However, Yelena craves a different path. Will she find her happy American ending or will a dreaded Russian ending be her fate? In this immersive novel, Zuravleff weaves Russian fairy tales and fables into a family saga within the storied American landscape. The challenges facing immigrants--and the fragility of citizenship--are just as unsettling and surprising today as they were 100 years ago. American Ending is a poignant reminder that everything that is happening in America has already happened.
Mary Kay Zuravleff is the author of The Frequency of Souls, winner of the American Academy’s Rosenthal Award; The Bowl Is Already Broken, which The New York Times called, “a tart, affectionate satire of the museum world’s bickering and scheming”; and Man Alive!, a Washington Post Notable Book. Her essays have appeared in the Washington Post, Washingtonian, Atlantic, and LA Times Book Review, and she has received multiple DC Artist Fellowships, including for 2023. American Ending was inspired by her grandparents, immigrants of the Old Believer Russian Orthodox faith brought here to mine coal in Appalachia.
Zuravleff will be in conversation with Alice McDermott. McDermott's latest novel, Absolution, will be published in November by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She is the author of eight previous novels and a book of essays, What About the Baby?, praised as “a master class on fiction.” Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction, and three of her books, After This, At Weddings and Wakes and That Night, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her stories, essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and Harpers.
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This event is free with first come, first served seating.