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Ayad Akhtar new novel Homeland Elegies is the profound and provocative story an immigrant father and his son search for belonging — in post-Trump America, and with each other.

Ayad is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Ayad is the author of American Dervish, published in over 20 languages and named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012. As a playwright, he has written Junk (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Kennedy Prize for American Drama, Tony nomination); Disgraced (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony nomination); The Who & The What (Lincoln Center); and The Invisible Hand (NYTW; Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, Olivier, and Evening Standard nominations). As a screenwriter, he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay for The War Within.

Amitava Kumar is the author of several books of non-fiction and two novels. His novel Immigrant, Montana was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and The New York Times—and included in Barack Obama’s list of favorite books of 2018. Among Kumar’s honors are a Guggenheim fellowship and a fellowship from USArtists. His writing has appeared in Granta, Harper’s Magazine, The Guardian, The Nation, and The New York Times. Kumar is the Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College. His new novel, A Time Outside This Time, will be published by Knopf in 2021.

Rumaan Alam’s latest release, the National Book Award-nominated Leave the World Behind, is a magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong.

Rumaan Alam is the author of the novels Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and Leave the World Behind. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, and the New Republic, where he is a contributing editor. He studied writing at Oberlin College and lives in New York with his family.

Edan Lepucki is the bestselling author of the novels California and Woman No. 17, and editor of Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them.

Neal Allen’s Shapes of Truth is a remarkable new tool for self-realization that describes the thirty-five embodied concepts — physical manifestations — hidden inside you, concepts that describe facets of God. It’s as if you are made of them, as if God is within you already. They appear as imaginary objects distinguished by specific colors, the same for everybody, isolated inside your torso or head. Simply experiencing them provides respite from day-to-day concerns, and over time can help you land a life that feels lighter, more loving, and less difficult.

Neal is a coach and writer who studies and practices traditional and contemporary spiritual traditions. He especially likes Plato, the Middle Way, and Diamond Heart, each its own mystery school. In past lives he was a newspaperman, corporate executive, and memoir publisher. He lives nearby in Fairfax with his wife, the author Anne Lamott.

Anne Lamott is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Hallelujah Anyway; Help, Thanks, Wow; Small Victories; Stitches; Some Assembly Required; Grace (Eventually); Plan B; Traveling Mercies; Bird by Bird; and Operating Instructions. She is also the author of seven novels, including Imperfect Birds and Rosie.A past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inductee to the California Hall of Fame, she lives in Northern California.

Isabel Allende—novelist, feminist, and philanthropist—is one of the most widely-read authors in the world, having sold more than 74 million books. In addition to her work as a writer, Allende devotes much of her time to human rights causes. In 1996, following the death of her daughter Paula, she established a charitable foundation in her honor, which has awarded grants to more than 100 nonprofits worldwide, delivering life-changing care to hundreds of thousands of women and girls. More than 8 million have watched her TED Talks on leading a passionate life.

Julia Alvarez‘s stunning new novel, Afterlife, is set in the current political moment of tribalism and distrust, and asks: What do we owe those in crisis in our families, including—maybe especially—members of our human family? How do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves? And how do we stay true to those glorious souls we have lost?

Julia left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960 at the age of ten. She is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and eleven books for children and young adults. She has taught and mentored writers in schools and communities across America and, until her retirement in 2016, was a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College. Her work has garnered wide recognition, including a Latina Leader Award in Literature from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature, the Woman of the Year by Latina magazine, and inclusion in the New York Public Library’s program “The Hand of the Poet: Original Manuscripts by 100 Masters, from John Donne to Julia Alvarez.” In the Time of the Butterflies, with over one million copies in print, was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its national Big Read program, and in 2013 President Obama awarded Alvarez the National Medal of Arts in recognition of her extraordinary storytelling.

Annie Barrows’ new release, Iggy is Better Than Ever, is the second book in the her wonderful children’s book series that demonstrates how causing a little bit of trouble can sometimes be a whole lot of fun.

Annie wrote several non-fiction books on topics ranging from fortune-telling to opera before turning her attention to children’s books. In 2006, the first book in her children’s series, Ivy + Bean was published. This title, an ALA Notable Book for 2007, was followed by nine others. The Ivy + Bean series appears with some regularity on the New York Times best-seller list and a number of other national best-seller lists. The Ivy + Bean books have been translated into fourteen languages; in 2013 Ivy + Bean: The Musical premiered in the San Francisco Bay Area. A novel for older children, The Magic Half, was published by BloomsburyUSA in 2008. Its sequel, Magic in the Mix, came out in 2014.

In addition to her children’s books, Annie is the co-author, with her aunt Mary Ann Shaffer, of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which was published by The Dial Press in 2008. A New York Times best-seller, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society has been published in thirty-seven countries and thirty-two languages.

She lives in Northern California with her husband and two daughters.

Sam Ricks is the illustrator of the Iggy Series. He has illustrated more than 20 books for kids, including the Geisel Award-winning Mo series. He lives with his family in Utah.

Andrea Bemis’ second cookbook, Local Dirt: Seasonal Recipes for Eating Close to Home is a dazzling collection of inventive recipes using farm-fresh ingredients, inspired by her commitment to supporting the local food movement.

Andrea is the writer, recipe developer, and photographer behind the food blog and cookbook Dishing Up The Dirt. Andrea’s recipes focus on using whole, locally-sourced foods—incorporating the philosophy of eating as close to the land as possible. Her recipes have been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Well and Good NYC, and Eating Well Magazine. She lives and runs a sixty-acre organic farm outside of Portland, Oregon with her husband and their dog.

Erin Gleeson is the author, illustrator, and photographer behind the New York Times bestselling cookbook The Forest Feast, The Forest Feast for Kids, The Forest Feast Gatherings, The Forest Feast Mediterranean and the popular blog by the same name. Erin teaches Photography in Continuing Studies at Stanford University and lives in a cabin in the woods in Northern California.

Dr. Jill Biden‘s Where the Light Enters is a candid, heartwarming glimpse into the creation of a beloved American family, and the life of the woman at its center.

Jill, the wife of former vice president Joe Biden is the New York Times bestselling author of Where the Light Enters and her first children’s book, Don’t Forget, God Bless Our Troops.

She works as a community college professor. She served as second lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. During the Obama-Biden administration, she advocated for military families, community colleges, the fight against cancer, and the education of women and girls around the world. Dr. Biden and her husband founded the Biden Foundation and the Biden Cancer Initiative.

Her forthcoming release, Joey, is the first ever picture book about the young life of Joe Biden, the 47th Vice President of the United States, and includes never before told family stories about the presidential candidate and former vice president’s childhood.

Jill mother of three and grandmother of five, she and her husband live in Wilmington, Delaware, with their two dogs, Champ and Major.

Elaine Petrocelli is co-owner of Book Passage, the fiercely independent bookstore in Corte Madera, California, and at the San Francisco Ferry Building . Over the past 44 years, Book Passage has hosted more than 10,000 classes, conferences, and author events, featuring Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Salman Rushdie, John McCain, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and thousands of new writers. She hosts of the Conversations with Authors series with Isabel Allende, Khaled Hosseini, Anne Lamott, Dave Eggers and other great writers.

Cara Black is a bestselling American mystery writer. She is best known for her Aimée Leduc mystery novels featuring a female Paris-based private investigator. Black is included in the Great Women Mystery Writers by Elizabeth Lindsay 2nd edition. Her first novel Murder in the Marais was nominated for an Anthony Award for best first novel and the third novel in the series, Murder in the Sentier, was Anthony-nominated for Best Novel.

Michael Ian Black‘s A Better Man: A (Mostly Serious) Letter to My Son, is both poignant look at boyhood in the form of a heartfelt letter from the comedian to his teenage son before he leaves for college, and a radical plea for rethinking masculinity and teaching young men to give and receive love.

Michael is an actor, comedian, and writer who started his career with the sketch comedy show The State, on MTV, and has created and starred in many other television shows. Movie appearances include Wet Hot American Summer, The Baxter, and Sextuplets.

Michael is the author of several books for children, including the award-winning I’m Bored, I’m Sad, and I’m Worried, and the parody A Child’s First Book of Trump. His books for adults include the memoirs You’re Not Doing It Right and Navel Gazing, and the essay collection My Custom Van. Michael also co-authored with Meghan McCain America, You Sexy Bitch.

As a stand-up comedian, Michael regularly tours the country, and he has released several comedy albums. His podcasts include Mike & Tom Eat Snacks, with Tom Cavanagh; Topics, with Michael Showalter; How to Be Amazing; and Obscure. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and two children.

Peggy Orenstein is the author of the New York Times best-sellers Boys & Sex, Girls & Sex, Cinderella Ate My Daughter and Waiting for Daisy as well as Don’t Call Me Princess, Flux, and the classic SchoolGirls.

A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and AFAR, Peggy has also written for such publications as The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, New York, The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and has contributed commentaries to NPR’s All Things Considered . She has been featured on, among other programs, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, The Today Show, Morning Joe, NPR’s Fresh Air and The PBS News Hour. Her TED Talk, “What Young Women Believe About Their Own Sexual Pleasure,” has been viewed over five million times.

Jordan Blashek and Christopher Haugh’s just-released Union: A Democrat, a Republican, and a Search for Common Ground, is the story of the two friends’ three-year journey across America. One a Republican and one a Democrat, they traveled together through 44 states and along 20,000 miles of road to find out exactly where the American experiment stands at the close of the second decade of the 21st Century.

Jordan is a military veteran and businessman from Los Angeles. After college, he spent five years in the US Marine Corps as an infantry officer, serving two combat tours overseas, in Afghanistan and the Middle East. He holds degrees from Yale Law School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Princeton University. He is based in New York, where he invests in entrepreneurial efforts to grow the American middle class as part of Schmidt Futures, a new philanthropic venture created by Eric and Wendy Schmidt.

Christopher is a speechwriter and journalist from the Bay Area. He attended UC Berkeley and Oxford University and started speechwriting as an intern in the Obama White House. He went on to join the U.S. Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff where he served as a speechwriter to the Secretary. In 2018, he graduated from Yale Law School where he was a Yale Journalism Scholar. Chris is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York.

Arjun Moorthy is CEO and co-founder the Factual– a company that finds and delivers the most credible stories on the most important news topics using a transparent, unbiased machine-learning engine.

Jean Shinoda Bolen’s book Like a Tree, which grew out of her experience mourning the loss of a Monterey pine that was cut down in her neighborhood, provides an insightful look into the fusion of ecological issues and global gender politics.

Jean is a psychiatrist, Jungian analyst and an internationally known author and speaker. She is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, a former clinical professor of psychiatry at Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, University of California Medical Center and a past board member of the Ms. Foundation for Women, the International Transpersonal Association, and the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. She is the author of thirteen books in over one hundred foreign editions and is in three acclaimed documentaries.

Terry Tempest Williams is the award-winning author of Leap, An Unspoken Hunger, Refuge, Red – A Desert Reader and most recently, Erosion: Essays of Undoing. Terry is also the Provostial Scholar at Dartmouth College. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine, and numerous anthologies worldwide as a crucial voice for ecological consciousness and social change. In 2015, She and her husband divide their time between Castle Valley, Utah and Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Michelle Bowdler’s debut blend of memoir and cultural investigation, Is Rape a Crime?, tells the story of her rape and recovery while interrogating why one of society’s most serious crimes goes largely uninvestigated.

Michelle is a recipient of a 2017 Barbara Deming Memorial Award for non-fiction and has been a Fellow at Ragdale and MacDowell Colony. She has been published in the New York Times and in the anthologies The Anatomy of Silence (Red Press) and We Rise to Resist: Voices from a New Era in Women’s Political Action (McFarland). Her essays: Eventually You Tell Your Kids and Babelogue were both nominated for Pushcart Prizes.

Ayelet Waldman is the author of A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life, the novels Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and Daughter’s Keeper, as well as of the essay collection Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace and the Mommy-Track Mystery series. She is the editor of Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons and of  Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation.

Rhys Bowen‘s latest release, The Last Mrs. Summers, reunites mystery lovers with Lady Georgiana Rannoch, who is just back from her honeymoon with dashing Darcy O’Mara when a friend in need pulls her into a twisted Gothic tale of betrayal, deception and, most definitely, murder.

Rhys is the New York Times bestselling author of more than forty novels, including The Victory Garden, The Tuscan Child, and the World War II-based In Farleigh Field, the winner of the Left Coast Crime Award for Best Historical Mystery Novel and the Agatha Award for Best Historical Novel.

Her work has won twenty honors to date, including multiple Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards. Her books have been translated into many languages, and she has fans around the world, including seventeen thousand Facebook followers. A transplanted Brit, Rhys  divides her time between California and Arizona.

Cara Black is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 19 books in the Private Investigator Aimée Leduc series, which is set in Paris. Cara has received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, a Washington Post Book World Book of the Year citation, the Médaille de la Ville de Paris—the Paris City Medal, which is awarded in recognition of contribution to international culture—and invitations to be the Guest of Honor at conferences such as the Paris Polar Crime Festival and Left Coast Crime. With more than 400,000 books in print, the Aimée Leduc series has been translated into German, Norwegian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew.

Ruby Bridges‘ newest novel, This is Your Time, inspired by the recent wave of activism for racial justice led by young people, is a powerful letter of encouragement to readers, recounting her experience integrating the New Orleans public school system and culminating in a call to action for a new generation of young activists and adults to unite.

Ruby is a civil rights activist who at the age of six was the first Black student to integrate an all-white elementary school in New Orleans. She was born in Mississippi in 1954, the same year the United States Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision ordering the integration of public schools. Her family later moved to New Orleans, where on November 14, 1960, Bridges began attending William Frantz Elementary School, single-handedly initiating the desegregation of public education in New Orleans. Her walk to the front door of the school was immortalized in Norman Rockwell’s painting The Problem We All Live With, in Robert Coles’s book The Story of Ruby Bridges, and in the Disney movie Ruby Bridges. This is Your Time is her first book in over twenty years, following the publication of her award-winning autobiography, Through My Eyes.

She established the Ruby Bridges Foundation to provide leadership training programs that inspire youth and community leaders to embrace and value the richness of diversity. Bridges is the recipient of numerous awards, including the NAACP Martin Luther King Award, the Presidential Citizens Medal, and honorary doctorate degrees from Connecticut College, College of New Rochelle, Columbia University Teachers College, and Tulane University.

Paula Farmer curates special panel events focusing on discussions about topical social issues, like “Race in America” and “Immigration in America.” She is Chairwoman of the Diversity & Inclusion Committee for California Independent Booksellers Association (CALIBA). Her background is in journalism.

Tim Cahill is the author of nine books–one of which, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, National Geographic named as one of the 100 best adventure/travel books ever written.

Tim is a pioneer of literary adventure writing. One of the founders of Outside, he is the author of its long-running “Out There” column, and an editor-at-large. His work also appears in National Geographic Adventure, the New York Times Book Review, and other national publications.

Tim’s travel books include, A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg, and Pass the Butterworms, Road Fever and Hold the Enlightenment. He also wrote the introduction for The Best Travel Writing, Volume 9: True Stories from Around the World. He is also the co-author of four IMAX documentary screenplays, two of which were nominated for Academy Awards. He lives in Montana, in the shadow of the Crazy Mountains.

Michael Shapiro writes about travel, food, entertainment, art, and environmental issues for magazines and newspapers. He is the author of The Creative Spark, a collection of interviews with many of the world’s most creative people, as well as A Sense of Place featuring conversations with leading travel writers.

Lan Cao’s dual first-person memoir, Family In Six Tones  — co-authored with her American daughter Harlan Margaret Van Cao — explores their complicated relationship, culture clash and how they have grown both as individuals and as a family.

Lan is a Vietnamese American writer who left Saigon for the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. She is the author of two other novels, Monkey Bridge and The Lotus and the Storm. Both novels tell the stories of Vietnamese refugees in America, set against the Vietnam War and its traumatic aftermath for those who are left with its haunting legacy. In both novels, the war is told from a Vietnamese American perspective.

Lan is also a professor of law and has taught at Brooklyn Law School, Michigan Law School, Duke Law School, William & Mary Law School. She is currently working at Chapman Law School in Orange, CA. She has written numerous articles on public international law, international trade, and rule of law development. Her book Culture in Law and Development: Nurturing Positive Change was published by Oxford University Press in 2015.

Isabel Allende —novelist, feminist, and philanthropist—is one of the most widely-read authors in the world, having sold more than 74 million books. Born in Peru and raised in Chile, she won worldwide acclaim in 1982 with the publication of her hugely popular first novel, The House of the Spirits. In addition to her work as a writer, Allende devotes much of her time to human rights causes.

Marilyn Chase’s compelling new biography, Everything She Touched, recounts the life of WWII prison camp survivor Ruth Asawa, who broke barriers of race and gender to become an artist of genius.

Marilyn is an author, journalist and teacher at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. After more than two decades as a reporter and columnist for The Wall Street Journal, focusing on health science, she returned to independent writing and teaching. She has taught narrative writing at her alma mater Stanford, as well as news, health, business and narrative writing as a Continuing Lecturer for her grad school at U.C. Berkeley. She is also the author of The Barbary Plague: the Black Death in Victorian San Francisco, which tells the story of a young public health doctor treating patients during an outbreak of bubonic plague in the city’s Chinatown in 1900.

Jan Yanehiro is a well renowned broadcast journalist who has won several Emmys for her work. She has also co-authored three books including This is Not The Life I Ordered.

Michael Connelly‘s new release, Fair Warning, returns readers to the world of Jack McEvoy, the journalist who never backs down, as he tracks a serial killer who has been operating completely under the radar–until now.

Michael is the bestselling author of over thirty novels and one work of nonfiction. With over seventy-four million copies of his books sold worldwide and translated into forty foreign languages, he is one of the most successful writers working today.

A former newspaper reporter who worked the crime beat at the Los Angeles Times and the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, Michael has won numerous awards for his journalism and his fiction. His very first novel, The Black Echo, won the prestigious Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992. In 2002, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the movie adaptation of Connelly’s 1998 novel, Blood Work. In March 2011, the movie adaptation of his #1 bestselling novel, The Lincoln Lawyer, hit theaters worldwide starring Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Haller. His most recent #1 New York Times bestsellers include Dark Sacred Night, The Late Show, Two Kinds Of Truth, The Late Show, The Wrong Side Of Goodbye, The Crossing, The Burning Room, The Gods of Guilt, The Black Box, and The Drop.

Michael is the executive producer of Bosch, an Amazon Studios original drama series based on his bestselling character Harry Bosch, starring Titus Welliver and streaming on Amazon Prime. He is also the executive producer of the documentary films, Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story and Tales Of the American. He spends his time in California and Florida.

Bill Petrocelli is co-owner of Book Passage and author of the novels The Circle of Thirteen and Through the Bookstore Window. He is also the author of the soon-to-be-published Electoral Bait & Switch: How the Electoral College Hurts American Voters.

Kelly Corrigan‘s Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say is a wonderfully personal, honest, and hilarious examination of the essential phrases that make love and connection possible.

Kelly has been called “the voice of her generation” by O: The Oprah Magazine and “the poet laureate of the ordinary” by HuffPost. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Middle Place, Lift, and Glitter and Glue. She is also the creative director of The Nantucket Project and host of their conversation series about what matters most. She lives near Oakland, California, with her husband, Edward Lichty, and her daughters, Georgia and Claire.

Matt Nathanson has evolved into one of the most applauded songwriters and engaging performers on the music scene today. His 2007 album, Some Mad Hope, yielded his breakthrough multi-platinum hit “Come on Get Higher.” His 2013 release, Last of The Great Pretenders, debuted at #16 on the Billboard Top 200 while hitting #1 on iTunes’ Alternative Albums chart. Nathanson has performed on The Howard Stern Show, Ellen, CONAN, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Dancing with the Stars, Rachael Ray, and The CMA Awards to name a few.

His most recent album, Sings His Sad Heart spawned the hit single “Used To Be” which was a chart climber – hitting top 15 at Hot AC and is streaming a million streams a month.

Dominique Crenn‘s Rebel Chef: In Search of What Matters is an honest, revealing look at one woman’s evolution from a daring young chef to a respected activist–all as she makes a place for herself in the kitchen, and in the world.

Dominique began her formal kitchen training in San Francisco in 1988. In 1997, she made culinary history as the first female executive chef in Indonesia, heading the kitchen at the InterContinental Hotel in Jakarta. She returned to California in 1998 as executive chef of Manhattan Country Club in Manhattan Beach. She then opened Abode in Santa Monica, but it was Luce that brought her back to San Francisco and where she earned her first Michelin star in 2009.

Atelier Crenn debuted in January 2011, quickly earning its first Michelin star and a second by October 2012. Dominique is the first female chef in the United States to receive a second coveted star and has maintained the distinction through 2018. She was named “Best Female Chef” in 2016 by World’s 50 Best.Fashioned after the food of her childhood in Brittany, she opened Petit Crenn in 2015, followed by Bar Crenn in 2018.

Jasmin Darznik‘s latest release, The Bohemians is a dazzling novel of one of America’s most celebrated photographers, Dorothea Lange, exploring the wild years in San Francisco that awakened her career-defining grit, compassion, and daring.

Jasmin’s debut novel, Song of a Captive Bird, was a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” book and a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Darznik is also the author of The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life. Her books have been published in seventeen countries and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, among others. Darznik was born in Iran and came to America when she was five years old. She holds an MFA in fiction from Bennington College, a J.D. from the University of California, and a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. Now a professor of English and creative writing at California College of the Arts, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

Fiona Davis is the New York Times bestselling author of historical novels set in iconic New York City buildings, including The Lions of Fifth Avenue and The Clelsea Girls. She began her career in New York City as an actress, working on Broadway, off-Broadway, and in regional theater. After getting a master’s degree at Columbia Journalism School, she fell in love with writing, leapfrogging from editor to freelance journalist before finally settling down to write fiction. Her books have been translated into over a dozen languages and she’s based in New York City.

Rameshwar Das is the co-author of Ram Dass’ memoir Being Ram Dass, written together with Ram Dass before his death in 2019.

A writer and photographer, Ramesh met Ram Dass in 1968 and went on to collaborate with Ram Dass on many projects, most recently as coauthor of Be Love Now and Polishing the Mirror. Set against a backdrop of nine decades of sweeping cultural change, Being Ram Dass shares this modern day luminary’s journey from psychologist to renegade Harvard psychedelics researcher to beloved spiritual icon.

Dr. Larry Brilliant is a physician and epidemiologist, CEO of Pandefense Advisory, and a CNN Medical Analyst. He also serves on the board of the Skoll Foundation, as well as co-founded the Seva Foundation, an NGO whose programs have given back sight to more than 5 million blind people in two dozen countries. Dr. Brilliant is the author of Sometimes Brilliant, a memoir about working to eradicate smallpox. He lives in Marin County, CA.

Alex Davies’ Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car tells the dramatic, colorful story of the quest to develop driverless cars—and the fierce competition between Google, Uber, and other companies in a race to revolutionize our lives.

Alex is a senior editor at Business Insider, where he oversees the transportation coverage. He was formerly an editor at WIRED, where he launched the transportation section in 2016. Along with autonomous vehicles, he has covered everything from designing bike lanes to electric aviation to the quest to rebuild American infrastructure. Mr. Davies has written features about how General Motors beat Tesla in the race to build the affordable, long-range electric car, the nascent flying car industry, and X, Alphabet’s “moonshot factory.” A New Yorker by birth, Mr. Davies has lived in California’s Bay Area since 2014.

Aarian Marshall is a staff writer at WIRED covering the business of moving people and things. Before WIRED, Marshall wrote for The Atlantic’s CityLab, GOOD, and Agri-Pulse, an agriculture trade publication. She’s based in Washington, DC.

Wade Davis‘ inspiring tale of hope and redemption, Magdalena: River of Dreams, braids together memoir, history, and journalism to form both a rare, kaleidoscopic picture of Colombia’s most magnificent river and the epic story of a nation on the verge of a new period of peace.

Wade is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker whose work has taken him from the Amazon to Tibet, Africa to Australia, Polynesia to the Arctic. Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society from 2000 to 2013, he is currently Professor of Anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia.

Author of 22 books, including One River, The Wayfinders, and Into the Silence, winner of the 2012 Samuel Johnson prize, the top nonfiction prize in the English language, he holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. His many film credits include Light at the Edge of the World, an eight-hour documentary series written and produced for the NGS.

Wade, one of 20 Honorary Members of the Explorers Club, is the recipient of 12 honorary degrees, as well as the 2009 Gold Medal from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, the 2011 Explorers Medal, the 2012 David Fairchild Medal for botanical exploration, the 2015 Centennial Medal of Harvard University, the 2017 Roy Chapman Andrews Society’s Distinguished Explorer Award, the 2017 Sir Christopher Ondaatje Medal for Exploration, and the 2018 Mungo Park Medal from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. In 2016, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada. In 2018, he became an Honorary Citizen of Colombia.

Don George is an editor-at-large for National Geographic Traveler magazine, as well as host of the National Geographic Live series of conversations with notable authors. In four decades as a travel writer and editor, Don has visited more than 90 countries on five continents. He has traveled throughout—and written extensively about—Europe and Asia. He has also lived in France, Greece, and Japan, working as a translator in Paris, a teacher in Athens, and a television talk show host in Tokyo. Don is the author of The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don George, and has received dozens of writing awards, including the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of the Year Award.

Dave Eggers is known for writing wonderful, gripping stories that tug at the heart. His award-winning body of work consists of several non-fiction, fiction, humor, screenplays, a series on salon.com, several essays and articles. As editor and contributor, he has worked on several works of post-modern literature. Almost all of his works have received significant amount of critical acclaim, not to mention commercial success. This has helped cement his place in the world of post-modern literature. He has thrown the doors open to bridging the divide between ethnic and religious groups through his fresh and honest works of fiction and non-fiction.

He has found more success through his more recent work as a novelist, screenwriter, satirist, album art designer, and a proponent of grassroots journalism and alternative comics. As a philanthropist, he is known for helping students get through college vide monetary and after-school help from his nonprofit foundation and its seven chapters. A visionary and a global thought leader, he is often invited to knowledge forums to deliver keynote addresses and engage eager audiences to fresh forward thinking.

Akwaeke Emezi’s new The Death of Vivek Oji is a propulsively readable, novel teeming with unforgettable characters—a novel of family and friendship that challenges expectations, and a dramatic story of loss and transcendence sure to will move every reader.

Akwaeke is a writer and visual artist based in liminal spaces. A 2018 National Book Foundation ‘5 Under 35’ honoree Akwaeke was born in Umuahia and raised in Aba, Nigeria.

Akwaeke’s debut YA novel PET  was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and a Lambda Literary Award, as well as an Indie Next selection. Praised in The New York Times, it received a Stonewall Honor, a Walter Honor, and an Otherwise Award Honor after debuting with five starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, Bookpage, and Bulletin. PET was also named a 2019 Best Book of the Year by School Library Journal, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Apple, and Amazon, among others. Upon its publication, Akwaeke was featured in Kirkus Review and profiled in The New York Times.

Akwaeke’s debut autobiographical novel Freshwater is in early development as a TV series at FX, with Akwaeke writing and executive producing with Tamara P. Carter. Translated into ten languages, Freshwater won the 2019 Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree) and the Nommo Award. It was a New York Times Notable Book as well as a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and a Lambda Literary Award. Freshwater was long-listed for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence, the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, The Wellcome Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and named a 2018 Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, NPR, the Chicago Public Library, and Buzzfeed. It debuted as an Indies Introduce Title, receiving rave reviews from The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and the LA Times, among others. Akwaeke’s short story ‘Who Is Like God’ won the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa.

Born in Umuahia and raised in Aba, Nigeria, Akwaeke was awarded a Global Arts Fund grant in 2017 for the video art in The Unblinding, and a Sozopol Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction. Akwaeke’s writing has been published by T Magazine, Dazed Magazine, The Cut, Buzzfeed, Granta Online, Vogue.com, and Commonwealth Writers, among others. Akwaeke’s memoir work was included in The Fader’s ‘Best Culture Writing of 2015’ (‘Who Will Claim You?’). Akwaeke’s film UDUDEAGU won the Audience Award for Best Short Experimental at the 2014 BlackStar Film Festival.

Zoé Samudzi is a Zimbabwean-American writer and activist known for her book As Black as Resistance. Samudzi has written for The New Inquiry, The Daily Beast and Vice magazine.

Louise Erdrich’s powerful novel The Night Watchmanis based on the extraordinary life of her grandfather, who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C.

Louise is the author of fifteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel, Love Medicine, was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Louise lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

Ann Patchett is the of the recent The Dutch House and seven other novels. She was the editor of Best American Short Stories, 2006, and has written three books of nonfiction–Truth & Beauty, about her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, What Now? an expansion of her graduation address at Sarah Lawrence College, and This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a collection of essays examining the theme of commitment. In 2019, she published her first children’s book, Lambslide, illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser.

In November, 2011, Ann opened Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, with her business partner Karen Hayes. She has since become a spokesperson for independent booksellers. She lives in Nashville with her husband, Karl VanDevender, and their dog, Sparky.

Elizabeth George’s Mastering the Process: From Idea to Novel offers readers a master class in the art and science of crafting a novel––a subject she knows well, having taught creative writing both nationally and internationally for over thirty years.

Elizabeth’s crime novels have been celebrated by the New York Times and translated into 30 languages and featured on television by the BBC. She is also the author of a young adult series set on the island where she lives in the state of Washington.

A longtime instructor of creative writing, she has taught at colleges, universities, writers’ retreats, and conferences internationally. She most recently taught a live online creative writing class for Hedgebrook Women’s Writers’ Retreat on Whidbey Island. She is the recipient of the Anthony Award, the Agatha Award, France’s Grand Prix di Literatture Policiere, and Germany’s MIMI. She has twice been nominated for an Edgar Award, and she is the recipient of an honorary doctorate of humane letters from California State University Fullerton, and an honorary MFA from Northwest Institute of Language Arts (Whidbey Island MFA Program).

She has also written the longtime best selling creative writing book Write Away, has edited two volumes of short stories, and is the executive chair of the Elizabeth George Foundation, which makes grants to poets, emerging playwrights, and unpublished novelists.

Eddie Glaude Jr‘s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own is one of the great books on James Baldwin and a powerful reckoning with America’s ongoing failure to confront the lies it tells itself about race.

Eddie is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. He is the former president of the American Academy of Religion, the largest professional organization of scholars of religion in the world. In addition to Begin Again, Eddie is the author of a number of books, including Democracy in Black. He hails from Moss Point, Mississippi, a small town on gulf coast, and is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

Nicholas Buccola is a writer, lecturer, and teacher who specializes in the area of American political thought. He is the author of The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America (Princeton University, 2019) and The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass: In Pursuit of American Liberty (New York University Press, 2012). He is the editor of The Essential Douglass: Writings and Speeches (Hackett, 2016) and Abraham Lincoln and Liberal Democracy (University Press of Kansas, 2016). He is the Elizabeth and Morris Glicksman Chair in Political Science at Linfield University in McMinnville, Oregon.

Lori Gottlieb’s new Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed invites us into Lori’s world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change. Rick Hanson’s latest, the ground-breaking Neurodharma, explores the new neuroscience of awakening and offers a bold, plausible plan for reverse-engineering peak experiences, sense of oneness, and even enlightenment itself.

Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and author of the New York Times bestseller Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, which is being adapted as a television series by Eva Longoria and the creators of Emmy and Golden Globe-winning series “The Americans.” In addition to her clinical practice, she writes The Atlantic’s weekly “Dear Therapist” advice column and contributes regularly to The New York Times and many other publications. Her recent TED Talk is one of the top 10 most watched of the year, and she is a sought-after expert in media such as The Today Show, Good Morning America, The CBS Early Show, CNN, and NPR’s “Fresh Air.” Her new iHeart Radio podcast, “Dear Therapists,” produced by Katie Couric, will premiere this year. Learn more at LoriGottlieb.com.

Rick Hanson, PhD is a psychologist, Senior Fellow of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, and New York Times best-selling author. His books have been published in 29 languages and include Neurodharma, Resilient, Hardwiring Happiness, Buddha’s Brain, Just One Thing, and Mother Nurture – with 900,000 copies in English alone.

John Grisham is the #1 New York Times bestselling author whose latest release, Camino Winds, brings readers back to paradise for a little sun, sand, mystery, and mayhem.

Since first publishing A Time to Kill in 1988, John has written one novel a year and all of them have become international bestsellers. There are currently over 300 million John Grisham books in print worldwide, which have been translated into 40 languages. Nine of his novels have been turned into films (The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, A Time to Kill, The Rainmaker, The Chamber, A Painted House, The Runaway Jury, and Skipping Christmas), as was an original screenplay, The Gingerbread Man.

The Innocent Man (October 2006) marked his first foray into non-fiction, and Ford County (November 2009) was his first short story collection.

Elaine Petrocelli is co-owner of Book Passage, the fiercely independent bookstore in Corte Madera, California, and at the San Francisco Ferry Building . Over the past 44 years, Book Passage has hosted more than 10,000 classes, conferences, and author events, featuring Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Salman Rushdie, John McCain, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and thousands of new writers. She hosts of the Conversations with Authors series with Isabel Allende, Khaled Hosseini, Anne Lamott, Dave Eggers and other great writers.

David Harris’ newest release, My Country ‘Tis of Thee: Reporting, Sallies, and Other Confessions is a wide-ranging and incisive anthology conveying the spirit of the 1960s and ’70s.

David Harris is a reporter, a clear-eyed idealist, an American dissident, and, as these selected pieces reveal, a writer of great character and empathy. Harris gained national recognition as an undergraduate for his opposition to the Vietnam War and was imprisoned for two years when he refused to comply with the draft. His writings trace a bright throughline of care for and attention to outsiders, the downtrodden, and those who demand change, and these eighteen pieces of long-form journalism, essays, and opinion writings remain startlingly relevant to the world we face today. This career-spanning collection of writings by an always-independent journalist follow Harris from his early days as a prominent leader of the resistance to the Vietnam War, through regular contributions to many publications, including Rolling Stone and the New York Times, and on into the twenty-first century.

Peter Coyote’s memoir of the 1960’s counter-culture Sleeping Where I Fall which received universally excellent reviews, and has been in continuous print since 1999. His second book, The Rainman’s Third Cure: An Irregular Education, about mentors and the search for wisdom, was nominated as one of the top five non-fiction books published in California in 2015. His third book, Unmasking Your True Self (the Lone Ranger and Tonto Meet the Buddha) conflates 50 years of Buddhist practice and acting and uses masks and improv exercises to foster liberation experiences and teach people “how to get out of their own way.” It will be released by Inner Traditions Press in early 2020, and so will his first book of poems, The Tongue of a Crow.

Peter has performed as an actor in over 160 films for theaters and TV. He is a double Emmy-Award winning narrator of over 150 documentary films. An ordained Zen Buddhist priest and transmitted teacher, Peter is currently giving live weekly dharma talks on Facebook, preparing for a fourth book called Vernacular Buddhism.

Anthony Lee Head’s debut novel, Driftwood: Stories from the Margarita Road, tells the story of modern-day runaways escaping the rat race and heading to a tropical paradise in search of a fresh start — a timely  antidote for anyone who has grown weary of quarantines and sheltering in place.

Anthony knows firsthand the challenges of the expat lifestyle. In a fit of middle-aged madness, he gave up an established career as a trial lawyer in San Francisco to travel 3500 miles to tropical Mexico, where for a decade he and his wife ran a small hotel and a margarita bar near the Caribbean Sea. That adventure became the inspiration for this book. Anthony now lives in San Rafael, California with his wife and an embarrassingly large number of Mexican rescue dogs and cats. He is currently working on both a memoir and a new novel.

Peter Coyote‘s memoir of the 1960’s counter-culture Sleeping Where I Fall which received universally excellent reviews, and has been in continuous print since 1999. His second book, The Rainman’s Third Cure: An Irregular Education, about mentors and the search for wisdom, was nominated as one of the top five non-fiction books published in California in 2015. His third book, Unmasking Your True Self (the Lone Ranger and Tonto Meet the Buddha) conflates 50 years of Buddhist practice and acting and uses masks and improv exercises to foster liberation experiences and teach people “how to get out of their own way.” It will be released by Inner Traditions Press in early 2020, and so will his first book of poems, The Tongue of a Crow.

Peter has performed as an actor in over 160 films for theaters and TV. He is a double Emmy-Award winning narrator of over 150 documentary films. An ordained Zen Buddhist priest and transmitted teacher, Peter is currently giving live weekly dharma talks on Facebook, preparing for a fourth book called Vernacular Buddhism.

Ursula Hegi‘s latest novel, The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls – about three mothers, and set on the shores of the Nordsee – is testament to the ways in which women hold each other up in the most unexpected of circumstances.

Ursula was born in Germany in 1946 and immigrated to the United States as a teenager. She is the author of 12 books. Several of her novels, including Stones from the River and Floating in My Mother’s Palm, explore German and German-American identity in the 20th century. Set in Burgdorf, a fictional village in Germany, they are part of the Burgdorf Cycle, which also includes the novel, Children and Fire published in 2011.

Ursula’s work has been translated into many languages, and her awards include the Italian Grinzane Cavour, an NEA Fellowship, and a PEN/Faulkner Award. She has served as a juror for the National Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle.

Ursula lives with her husband in in New York State. She teaches in the MFA program in Writing and Literature at Stony Brook, Southampton.

Carl Hiaasen‘s new novel Squeeze Me is a hilarious new novel of social and political intrigue, set against the glittering backdrop of Florida’s gold coast.

Carl was born and raised in Florida, where he still lives with his family. A graduate of the University of Florida, at age 23 he joined The Miami Herald as a general assignment reporter and went on to work for the newspaper’s weekly magazine and prize-winning investigations team. Today his column appears on most Sundays in The Herald’s opinion-and-editorial section, and may be viewed online at www.herald.com.

Carl began writing novels in early 1980s with his good friend and fellow journalist, William D. Montalbano. Together they wrote three mystery thrillers – Powder Burn, Trap Line and Death in China – which borrowed heavily from their reporting experiences. Tourist Season, published in 1986, was Carl’s first solo novel. Since then, he has published Double Whammy, Skin Tight, Native Tongue and nine national bestsellers – Strip Tease, Stormy Weather, Lucky You, Sick Puppy, Basket Case, Skinny Dip, Nature Girl, Star Island and Bad Monkey. All the novels are set in Florida.

Carl is also the author of several popular novels for young readers: Hoot, which won a Newbery Honor, Flush, Scat and, most recently, Skink – No Surrender, which introduces one of the wildest characters in his adult books to a teen audience. He has also written two nonfiction books. The first, Team Rodent, is a wry but unsparing rant against the Disney empire and its grip on American culture. In 2008 came The Downhill Lie, which chronicles his ill-advised return to the sport of golf after a “much-needed” 32-year hiatus. He has also published three collections of his newspaper columns, Kick Ass, Paradise Screwed and Dance of the Reptiles.

For his journalism and commentary, Hiaasen has received numerous honors, including the Damon Runyon Award from the Denver Press Club and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. His nonfiction work has appeared in many magazines, including Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Time, Esquire and Gourmet.

Dave Barry was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his syndicated newspaper column, which appeared in more than 500 newspapers. He has also written more than 30 books, including the novels Big Trouble, Lunatics, Tricky Business and, most recently, Insane City. Dave’s most recent books are Best. State. Ever.: A Florida Man Defends His Homeland,  Lessons From Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog and A Field Guide To The Jewish People, which he co-wrote with his friends Adam Mansbach and Alan Zweibel.

Senator Mazie K. Hirono’s memoir, Heart of Fire: An Immigrant Daughter’s Story is the intimate and inspiring story of how a girl born in rural Japan went on to become a hero on the left – and of the mother whose courageous choices made her journey possible.

Senator Mazie K. Hirono is a graduate of the University of Hawaii, Manoa and the Georgetown University Law Center. She has served in the Hawaii House of Representatives (1981-1994), as Hawaii’s lieutenant governor (1994-2002), and in the U.S. House of Representatives (2006-2013). She became Hawaii’s first female senator in 2013, winning reelection in 2018. Hirono serves on the Committee on the Judiciary, the Committee on Armed Services, and the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, among others.

George Takei is best known for his portrayal of Mr. Sulu in the acclaimed television and film series Star Trek. He’s an actor, social justice activist, social media mega-power, New York Times bestselling author, originated the role of Sam Kimura and Ojii-Chan in the Broadway musical Allegiance, and subject of To Be Takei, a documentary on his life and career.

Jane Hirshfield‘s recently released collection, Ledger: Poems has been hailed as the most important and masterly work of her career.

Jane, one of our most celebrated contemporary poets. is the author of nine collections of poetry, including the newly released Ledger; The Beauty, long-listed for the National Book Award and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2015; Come, Thief; After, named a Best Book of 2006 by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the Financial Times, and a finalist for England’s prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize; Given Sugar, Given Salt finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award; The Lives of the Heart; The October Palace; Of Gravity & Angels, winner of the Poetry Center Book Award; and Alaya.

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, where she has taught since 1988. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD from Oxford University. She is a world leader in cognitive science, particularly the study of children’s learning and development.

She is the author of over 100 articles and several books including Words, Thoughts and Theories (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff), The Scientist in the Crib (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl),  and The Philosophical Baby; What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life. She has also written for Science, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, and Slate.

Adam Hochschild‘s Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical tells the astonishing but forgotten story of an immigrant sweatshop worker who married an heir to a great American fortune and became one of the most charismatic radical leaders of her time.

He is the author of ten books. King Leopold’s Ghost was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as was To End All Wars. His Bury the Chains was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and PEN USA Literary Award. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Isabel Allende—novelist, feminist, and philanthropist—is one of the most widely-read authors in the world, having sold more than 74 million books. In addition to her work as a writer, Allende devotes much of her time to human rights causes. In 1996, following the death of her daughter Paula, she established a charitable foundation in her honor, which has awarded grants to more than 100 nonprofits worldwide, delivering life-changing care to hundreds of thousands of women and girls. More than 8 million have watched her TED Talks on leading a passionate life.

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and moved to the United States in 1980. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and And the Mountains Echoed. Hosseini is also a U.S. Goodwill Envoy to the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and the founder of The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a nonprofit that provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan.

Elaine Petrocelli is co-owner of Book Passage, the fiercely independent bookstore in Corte Madera, California, and at the San Francisco Ferry Building . Over the past 44 years, Book Passage has hosted more than 10,000 classes, conferences, and author events, featuring Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Salman Rushdie, John McCain, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and thousands of new writers. She hosts of the Conversations with Authors series with Isabel Allende, Khaled Hosseini, Anne Lamott, Dave Eggers and other great writers.

Pico Iyer’s A Beginner’s Guide to Japan draws on his years of experience — his travels, conversations, readings, and reflections — to craft a playful and profound book of surprising, brief, incisive glimpses into Japanese culture. His Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells is a moving elegy on the passage of time and the passing of loved ones, including Pico’s Japanese father-in-law.

Pico is a British-born essayist and novelist, often known for his travel writing. He is the author of numerous books on crossing cultures including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul. An essayist for Time since 1986, he also publishes regularly in Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and other publications. He has travelled widely, from North Korea to Easter Island, and from Paraguay to Ethiopia, while writing thirteen works of non-fiction and two novels. Since 1992 Pico has spent much of his time at a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California, and most of the rest in suburban Japan.

Michael Shapiro writes about travel, food, entertainment, art, and environmental issues for magazines and newspapers. A former staff reporter and editor at newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area, he’s the author of The Creative Spark, a collection of interviews with many of the world’s most creative people, as well as A Sense of Place featuring conversations with leading travel writers. His stories appear in National Geographic Traveler, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.

Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interruptedis a searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission and, ultimately, a road trip of healing and self-discovery.

Suleika is an Emmy Award-winning writer, speaker, cancer survivor and activist.Born in New York City to a Tunisian father and a Swiss mother, Suleika’s career aspirations as a foreign correspondent were cut short when, at age 22, she was diagnosed with leukemia. She began writing the acclaimed New York Times column and video series “Life, Interrupted” from the front lines of her hospital bed, and has since become a fierce advocate for those living with illness and chronic pain.

Suleika served on Barack Obama’s Presidential Cancer Panel, and her advocacy work, reporting and speaking engagements have brought her everywhere from the main stage of TED, the United Nations and Capitol Hill to a maximum security prison and a two-room schoolhouse in rural Montana. When she’s not on the road with her 1972 Volkswagen camper van and rescue dog Oscar, she lives in Brooklyn..

Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, as well as the short story collection, Pilgrims — a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the 1999 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. A Pushcart Prize winner and National Magazine Award-nominated journalist, she works as writer-at-large for GQ. Her journalism has been published in Harper’s Bazaar, Spin, and The New York Times Magazine, and her stories have appeared in Esquire, Story, and the Paris Review.

Pramila Jayapal’s Use the Power You Have offers a wealth of ideas and inspiration for a new generation of engaged citizens interested in fighting back and making change, whether in Washington or in their own communities.

Pramila is the Congresswoman who represents Washington’s 7th District, which encompasses most of Seattle and surrounding areas. The first Indian American woman in the House of Representatives, Pramila has spent nearly thirty years working internationally and domestically as an advocate for women’s, immigrant, civil, and human rights. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

Meena Harris was born into a family of strong women whose legacy continues to inspire her. Her grandmother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a cancer researcher and civil rights activist; her mother, Maya Harris, is a lawyer and policy expert; and her aunt, Kamala Harris, is a United States senator from California. Meena herself is a lawyer and entrepreneur. In 2017 she founded the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign, a female-powered organization that brings awareness to social causes. She currently resides in San Francisco with her partner and two daughters.

Meena’s Kamala and Maya’s Big Idea, an empowering picture book about two sisters who work with their community to effect change, inspired by a true story from the childhood of her aunt, US Senator Kamala Harris, and mother, lawyer, and policy expert Maya Harris.

Mikel Jollett‘s remarkable new memoir of a tumultuous life, Hollywood Park, is both the story of a man born into one of the country’s most infamous cults and subjected to a childhood filled with poverty, addiction, and emotional abuse; and the story of fierce love and family loyalty told in a raw, poetic voice that signals the emergence of a uniquely gifted writer.

Mikel is the frontman of the indie band The Airborne Toxic Event. Prior to forming the band, he graduated with honors from Stanford University. Mikel was an on-air columnist for NPR’s All Things Considered, an editor-at-large for Men’s Health and an editor at Filter magazine. His fiction has been published in McSweeney’s.

Tom Barbash is the author of the novels The Dakota Winters and  The Last Good Chance and the non-fiction books On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11; A Story of Loss and Renewal, which was a New York Times bestseller. His stories and articles have been published in Tin House, McSweeney’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other publications, and have been performed on National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts series. He currently teaches in the MFA program at California College of the Arts. He grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and now lives in Marin County, California.

Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night is a remarkably moving and lyrical novel that follows three generations of Syrian Americans who are linked by a mysterious species of bird and the truths they carry close to their hearts.

Zeyn Joukhadar is also the author of The Map of Salt and Stars, which has been translated into twenty languages, was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner in Youth Literature, a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist in Historical Fiction and was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. He is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in KINK: Stories (edited by RO Kwon & Garth Greenwell), Salon, The Paris Review, Shondaland, [PANK], and elsewhere, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. Joukhadar has received fellowships from the Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Program, the Arab American National Museum, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Camargo Foundation, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

Catherine Hernandez is a proud queer woman of colour, radical mother, theatre practitioner, award-winning author, and the Artistic Director of b current performing arts. Catherine’s first full-length fiction, Scarborough, won the Jim Wong-Chu Award for the unpublished manuscript and was shortlisted for various awards. Her one-woman show, The Femme Playlist, premiered at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in 2014 as part of the afterRock Play Series co-produced by b current, Eventual Ashes and Sulong Theatre. She has released two children’s books, M is for Mustache: A Pride ABC Book and I Promise, and her second novel, Crosshairs, is coming soon.

Catherine Grace Katz‘s first book, The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War, draws on newly accessible sources to bring to light both the untold story of the three intelligent and glamorous young women who accompanied their famous fathers to the Yalta Conference with Stalin seventy-five years ago, and the fateful reverberations during the waning days of World War II.

Catherine is a writer and historian from Chicago. She graduated from Harvard in 2013 with a BA in History and received her MPhil in Modern European History from Christ’s College, University of Cambridge in 2014, where she wrote her dissertation on the origins of modern counterintelligence practices. After graduating, Catherine worked in finance in New York City before a very fortuitous visit to the book store in the lobby of her office in Manhattan led her to return to history and writing. She is currently pursuing her JD at Harvard Law School.

Stacy Schiff  is the author of Véra: (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Award. Her most recent new novel The Witches, Salem, 1692, has been hailed by the New York Times “an almost novelistic, thriller-like narrative.” Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. The recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in New York City.

Thomas Keller and David Breeden‘s The French Laundry, Per Se is filled with meticulously detailed recipes for 70 beloved dishes that will change how young chefs, determined home cooks, and dedicated food lovers understand and approach their cooking.

Thomas is the author of Bouchon, Under Pressure, Ad Hoc at Home, and Bouchon Bakery and has six restaurants and five bakeries in the United States. He is the first and only American chef to have two Michelin Guide three-star-rated restaurants, the French Laundry and Per Se, both of which continue to rank among the best restaurants in America and the world. In 2011 he was designated a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, the first American male chef to be so honored. He has received countless accolades, including The Culinary Institute of America’s “Chef of the Year” Award and the James Beard Foundation’s “Outstanding Chef” and “Outstanding Restaurateur” Awards.

Steph Kent and Logan Smalley’s book, The Call Me Ishmael Phone Book, is a revival of the yellow-pages directory you remember, but instead of contact information, it is filled with messages collected from book lovers all over the United States about the books that have changed their lives.

Stephanie Kent is a writer and multimedia producer. Her recent work includes the Webby Award–winning Masters of Scale podcast, The Wall Street Journal’s premiere mobile-first news app, and a series of book reviews for Boxing Insider. During her time on staff at TED, Steph built community programs and brand engagement strategies. She was awarded a 2017 Creative Community Fellowship with National Arts Strategies Foundation and holds a BA in playwriting and literature from Emerson College. Stephanie writes a weekly newsletter on creativity, and is a competitive boxer.

Logan is the founding director of TED’s youth and education initiative, TED-Ed—an award-winning website, content format, and program offering that serves millions of teachers and students every day. Prior to working for TED, Logan was selected as a TED Fellow for his roles as director, editor, and composer of the nonprofit, feature-length film, Darius Goes West. Logan began his career as a special education teacher in his hometown of Athens, GA, and he currently lives and works in New York City.

Sue Monk Kidd‘s latest release The Book of Longings is an extraordinary story set in the first century about a woman who finds her voice and her destiny.

Sue’s debut, The Secret Life of Bees, spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, has sold more than 6 million copies in the U.S., was turned into an award-winning major motion picture and a musical, and has been translated into 36 languages. Her second novel, The Mermaid Chair, was a #1 New York Times bestseller and was adapted into a television movie. Her third novel, The Invention of Wings, an Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 pick, was also a #1 New York Times bestseller.

She is the author of the acclaimed memoirs The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, a groundbreaking work on religion and feminism, and the New York Times bestseller Traveling with Pomegranates, written with her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Elaine Petrocelli is the co-owner of Book Passage and the host of the Conversations with Authors series. Over the past 44 years, Book Passage has hosted more than 10,000 classes, conferences, and author events, featuring Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Salman Rushdie, John McCain, Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and thousands of new writers. She hosts of the Conversations with Authors series with Isabel Allende, Khaled Hosseini, Anne Lamott, Dave Eggers and other great writers.

Laurie R. King‘s Riviera Gold brings back Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes – this to the Riviera, where they’re challenged to crack their most captivating case yet.

In her Russell & Holmes stories, Laurie explores ideas—the roots of conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan; feminism and early Christianity; patriotism and individual responsibility—while also having a rousing good time. Five of Laurie’s novels concern San Francisco homicide inspector Kate Martinelli, Kate’s SFPD partner Al Hawkin, and her life partner Lee Cooper. Her stand-alone suspense novels include A Darker Place, Folly and Keeping Watch. She has also collaborated on nonfiction works including Crime & Thriller Writing and The Grand Game, and on several short story anthologies.  

Laurie is the third generation in her family native to the San Francisco area. She spent her childhood reading her way through libraries up and down the West Coast; her middle years raising children, renovating houses, traveling the world, and doing a BA and MA in theology.  (Her long autobiography goes into detail about how she uses these interests.) She now lives a genteel life of crime, on California’s central coast.

Cara Black is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 19 books in the Private Investigator Aimée Leduc series, which is set in Paris. Cara has received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, a Washington Post Book World Book of the Year citation, the Médaille de la Ville de Paris—the Paris City Medal, which is awarded in recognition of contribution to international culture—and invitations to be the Guest of Honor at conferences such as the Paris Polar Crime Festival and Left Coast Crime. With more than 400,000 books in print, the Aimée Leduc series has been translated into German, Norwegian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew.

Mary Ladd‘s The Wig Diaries is an irreverent cancer book, delivered with bold gallows humor to intimately address the gravity of cancer. Illustrated by San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Don Asmussen, this uniquely fresh modern and black comedy covers and pokes fun at everything from diagnosis to treatment to medical bills.

Mary‘s writing has appeared in Playboy, Time Magazine, Health, the San Francisco Chronicle, and in five anthologies, including Lit Starts: Writing Humor from Abrams and the best-selling 642 Things series. You may have seen her onstage at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Breast Cancer Action, Bay Area Young Survivors (BAYS) and Litquake. She is a Writers Grotto member who collaborated with Anthony Bourdain on his Bay Area episodes of No Reservations.

Don is the creator of Bad Reporter, a twice-weekly political comic strip in the San Francisco Chronicle that is syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate and the author of Dog vs. Cat: A Nation Divided and The San Francisco Comic Strip Book of Big-Ass Mocha.

Michael Krasny is the host of the award winning KQED FORUM, a program discussing news and public affairs, current events, culture, health, business and technology.

Anne Lamott is an author of several novels and works of non-fiction. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, her non-fiction works are largely autobiographical, with strong doses of self-deprecating humor and covering such subjects as alcoholism, single motherhood, and Christianity.

She appeals to her fans because of her sense of humor, her deeply felt insights, and her outspoken views on topics such as her left-of-center politics and her unconventional Christian faith. She is a graduate of Drew College Preparatory School in San Francisco, California. Her father, Kenneth Lamott, was also a writer and was the basis of her first novel Hard Laughter.

Erik Larson is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, including Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, which hit no. 1 on the Times list soon after launch, and his newest book, The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz. The latter is in large part a domestic drama that examines how Winston Churchill and his “Secret Circle” really went about surviving the German air campaign of 1940-41. Erik’s The Devil in the White City is set to be a Hulu limited series; his In the Garden of Beasts is under option by Tom Hanks, for a feature film. Erik lives in Manhattan with his wife, who is a writer and retired neonatologist; they have three grown daughters.

Chang-rae Lee‘s My Year Abroad is an exuberant, provocative story about a young American life transformed by an unusual Asian adventure – and about the human capacities for pleasure, pain, and connection.

Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, as well as On Such a Full Sea, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has also written stories and articles for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time (Asia), Granta, Conde Nast Traveler, Food & Wine, and many other publications. Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Stanford University.

R.O. Kwon’s nationally bestselling first novel, The Incendiaries, is being translated into seven languages. Named a best book of the year by over forty publications, The Incendiaries received the Housatonic Book Award and was a finalist or nominated for seven other prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award for Best First Book and Los Angeles Times First Book Prize. Kwon’s next novel, as well as an essay collection, are forthcoming.

R.O’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Paris Review, NPR, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Born in Seoul, Kwon has lived most of her life in the United States.

Elizabeth Lesser’s newest book Cassandra Speaks: When Women are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes reveals how humanity has outgrown its origin tales and hero myths, and empowers women to trust their instincts, find their voice, and tell new guiding stories.

Elizabeth is a bestselling author and the cofounder of Omega Institute, the renowned conference and retreat center located in Rhinebeck, New York. Elizabeth’s first book, The Seeker’s Guide, chronicles her years at Omega and distills lessons learned into a potent guide for growth and healing. Her New York Times bestselling book, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow, has sold more than 300,000 copies and has been translated into 20 languages. Her Marrow: Love, Loss and What Matters Most is a memoir about Elizabeth and her younger sister, Maggie, and the process they went through when Elizabeth was the donor for Maggie’s bone marrow transplant.

Julie Lythcott-Haims is the author of the anti-helicopter parenting manifesto How to Raise an Adult as well as the critically-acclaimed and prose poetry memoir Real American, which illustrates her experience with racism and her journey toward self-acceptance.

Julie believes in humans and is deeply interested in what gets in our way. Her TED Talk on the raising children was one of the top talks of 2016, and in 2020 she became a regular correspondent with CBS This Morning on parenting. Her second book, Real American, illustrates her experience with racism and her journey toward self-acceptance.

She wrote the foreword for Writing Memoir, a book of writing prompts developed by Julie and her colleagues at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto for those hungry to share their lived experiences. A fourth book, It’s Your Turn: The Real How-to on Adulting, will be out in April 2021.

Alec MacGillis‘ Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One Click America investigates Amazon’s impact on the wealth and poverty of towns and cities across the United States.

Alec MacGillis is a senior reporter for ProPublica and the recipient of the George Polk Award, the Robin Toner prize, and other honors. He worked previously at The Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and The New Republic, and his journalism has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other publications. His ProPublica reporting on Dayton, Ohio was the basis of a PBS Frontline documentary about the city. He is the author of The Cynic, a 2014 biography of Mitch McConnell. He lives in Baltimore.

Stacy Mitchell is the Co-Director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which produces research and develops policy to counter corporate control and build thriving, equitable communities. Stacy has written extensively about the dangers of monopoly power and her articles and reports have influenced lawmakers, journalists, and advocates. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.  She’s the author of a book, Big-Box Swindle, and several in-depth reports, including  “Amazon’s Stranglehold,” which has drawn wide praise for illuminating the scope of the company‘s power and impact.  In 2020, the New York Times profiled Stacy, describing her as “the strategist of the demise of Amazon as we know it.”  She lives in Portland, Maine.

Deborah Madison’s An Onion in My Pocket: My Life With Vegetables is a warm, bracingly honest memoir that gives us an insider’s look at the vegetarian movement.

Deborah is the author of 14 cookbooks and countless articles on food, cooking, and farming. She is revered for bringing vegetarian cooking to a wide audience, including non-vegetarians, via Greens restaurant and her cookbooks. A bestselling author, her first cookbook was The Greens Cookbook and her recent books include The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone and Vegetable Literacy, which was awarded both a James Beard award and an IACP award. She lives in Northern New Mexico with her husband, painter Patrick McFarlin.

Jane Hirshfield‘s recently released collection, Ledger: Poems has been hailed as the most important and masterly work of her career. She is the author of nine collections of poetry, including the newly released Ledger; The Beauty, long-listed for the National Book Award and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2015; Come, Thief; After, named a Best Book of 2006 by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the Financial Times, and a finalist for England’s prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize; Given Sugar, Given Salt finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award; The Lives of the Heart; The October Palace; Of Gravity & Angels, winner of the Poetry Center Book Award; and Alaya.

Pam Mandel ‘s new memoir, The Same River Twice: A Memoir of Dirtbag Backpackers, Bomb Shelters and Bad Travel is a thrilling account of a life-defining journey from the California suburbs to Israel to the Himalayan peaks and back.

Pam is an acclaimed travel writer from Seattle, Washington where she lives with a small dog and multiple ukuleles. She was an early adopter of blogging as the go-to format for sharing stories about travel, starting her still online blog, Nerd’s Eye View, in 1998. Pam was included in the Best Women’s Travel Writing of 2017 and has won a handful of Solas Best Travel Writing Awards with stories from her blog.

Lavinia Spalding is series editor of The Best Women’s Travel Writing, author of Writing Away, and co-author of With a Measure of Grace and This Immeasurable Place. She introduced the e-book edition of Edith Wharton’s classic travelogue, A Motor-Flight Through France, and her work appears in such publications as AFAR, Longreads, Tin House, Yoga Journal, Sunset, AirBnB magazine, Ms., Post Road, Inkwell, The Bold Italic, Westways, San Francisco magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Guardian UK, and has been widely anthologized. Lavinia lives in New Orleans.

Ian Manuel‘s memoir, My Time Will Come: A Memoir of Crime, Punishment, Hope, and Redemption is the wrenching, and inspiring, story of a fourteen-year-old sentenced to life in prison, of the extraordinary relationship that developed between him and the woman he shot, and of his release after twenty-six years of imprisonment through the efforts of America’s greatest contemporary legal activist, Bryan Stevenson.

Ian Manuel lives in New York City. He is a motivational speaker at schools and social organizations nationwide.

Judith Martin’s Minding Miss Manners in an Era of Fake Etiquette, is a modern guide to modern manners in which Miss Manners guides you through these turbulent times with her timeless wisdom and archly acid wit.

Also known as Miss Manners, Judith has made tireless efforts to expand the understanding and exercise of etiquette which have not escaped official notice. During a White House ceremony In November, 2005, she was awarded the nation’s highest honor in the humanities, the National Humanities Medal, in recognition of her contributions to society as America’s foremost etiquette columnist and author.

Judith’s “Miss Manners” newspaper column — distributed thrice-weekly by the Universal UClick and carried in more than 200 newspapers in the United States and abroad — has chronicled the continuous rise and fall of American manners since 1978. Since 1996, she has been writing an additional “Miss Manners” column for the Microsoft Network, and she is a contributor to the Financial Times.

Bobbie Ann Mason‘s new release, Dear Ann, is beautifully crafted and profoundly moving novel which follows a woman as she looks back over her life and her first love.

Her first short stories were published in The New Yorker, during the 1980s renaissance of the short story, when writers such as Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Tobias Wolff came to prominence. Her first book of fiction, Shiloh & Other Stories, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was nominated for the American Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She received an Arts and Letters Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The title story, “Shiloh,” about a disabled trucker whose wife is not used to having him at home, has been widely anthologized in college textbooks. The couple’s trip to the Civil War battleground of Shiloh began for Mason a recurring preoccupation with the theme of war.

Her first novel, In Country is taught widely in classes and was made into a Norman Jewison film starring Bruce Willis and Emily Lloyd. It is about a teenager whose father died in Vietnam before she was born. She is coming of age, now desperate to know more about her father. The Girl in the Blue Beret, ventures into World War II and the ways it is remembered. Her memoir, Clear Springs, about an American farm family throughout the twentieth century, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her book of linked stories, Nancy Culpepper, is inspired by this family, and she says that while the circumstances are different, this is the work of fiction most closely identified with her own life and sensibility.

Jill McCorkle’s first two novels were released simultaneously when she was just out of college, and the New York Times called her “a born novelist.” Since then, she has published seven novels (most recent, Hieroglyphics) and four collections of short stories. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories several times, as well as The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Five of her books have been New York Times Notable books, and her novel, Life After Life, was a New York Times bestseller.

James McBride’s Deacon King Kong was already one of the most celebrated novels of the year – before it was selected by Oprah Winfrey as her Oprah Book Club Pick.  “In a moment when our country roils with righteous anger and grief,” Oprah says, “Deacon King Kong reminds us that when we come together as a community in compassion and empathy, our love triumphs.”

Colum McCann is the author of seven novels and three collections of stories. Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, he has been the recipient of many international honors, including the National Book Award, the International Dublin Impac Prize, a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government, election to the Irish arts academy, several European awards, the 2010 Best Foreign Novel Award in China, and an Oscar nomination. In 2017 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts. His work has been published in over 40 languages. He is the co-founder of the non-profit global story exchange organization, Narrative 4, and he teaches at the MFA program in Hunter College. He lives in New York with his wife, Allison, and their family.

Claire Messud‘s latest release Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on her own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and literature.

Claire is a recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Author of six works of fiction including, The Burning Girl, The Emperor’s Children, and The Woman Upstairs. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.

Sheila Heti is the author of eight books of fiction and non-fiction, including the novels Motherhood,  How Should a Person Be? and Ticknor, and the story collection, The Middle Stories. She was named one of “The New Vanguard” by The New York Times; a list of fifteen women writers from around the world who are “shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”

Her books have been translated into twenty-two languages. Her most recent novel, Motherhood, was chosen by the book critics at the New York Times as one of their top books of 2018, and New York magazine chose it as the best book of the Year. Her novel, How Should a Person Be? was named one of the 12 “New Classics of the 21st century” by Vulture. It was a New York Times Notable Book, a best book of the year in The New Yorker, and was cited by Time as “one of the most talked-about books of the year.”

Sue Miller’s latest release, Monogomy, is an engrossing and haunting novel about marriage, love, family, happiness and sorrow.

Sue is recognized internationally for her elegant and sharply realistic accounts of the contemporary family. Her books have been widely translated and published in 22 countries around the world.

The Good Mother (1986), the first of her ten novels, was an immediate bestseller (more than six months at the top of the New York Times charts). Subsequent novels include three Book-of-the-Month main selections:  Family Pictures (a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), While I Was Gone (an Oprah’s Book Club selection), and The Senator’s Wife. Her non-fiction book, The Story of My Father, was heralded by BookPage as a “beautiful, spare memoir about her relationship with her father during his illness and death from Alzheimer’s disease.”  Her numerous honors include a Guggenheim and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship.

Sue is a committed advocate for the writer’s engagement with society at large, having held a position on the Board of PEN-American Center. For four years she was Chair of PEN New England, an active branch that worked with writing programs in local high schools and ran classes in prisons.  She has taught fiction at, among others, Amherst, Tufts, Boston University, Smith, and MIT.

Susan Minot‘s latest release, Why I Don’t Write, is the first collection of short fiction in thirty years from the critically acclaimed author of Monkeys, Evening, and Thirty Girls.

Susan is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter. Her first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Étranger in France. Her novel Evening was a worldwide best seller and became a major motion picture. She received her MFA from Columbia University and lives with her daughter in New York City and on an island off the coast of Maine.

Jordan Pavlin is Senior Vice President and Editorial Director at Alfred A. Knopf.

David Mitchell is the author of the novels Ghostwritten, number9dream, Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, The Bone Clocks, and Slade House. Twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 2018 he won the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence.

Utopia Avenue is the strangest British band you’ve never heard of. Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967, and fronted by folk singer Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss and guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet, Utopia Avenue embarked on a meteoric journey from the seedy clubs of Soho, a TV debut on Top of the Pops, the cusp of chart success, glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome, and a fateful American sojourn in the Chelsea Hotel, Laurel Canyon, and San Francisco during the autumn of ’68.

David Mitchell’s kaleidoscopic novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue’s turbulent life and times; of fame’s Faustian pact and stardom’s wobbly ladder; of the families we choose and the ones we don’t; of voices in the head, and the truths and lies they whisper; of music, madness, and idealism. Can we really change the world, or does the world change us?

Dr. Christine Montross’ important new work, Waiting for an Echo, reveals the psychological toll of incarceration and examines how we disproportionately punish people of color, people who are poor, and people who are mentally ill.

A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, Christine is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She is a practicing inpatient psychiatrist and performs forensic psychiatric examinations. She completed medical school and residency training at Brown University, where she received the Isaac Ray Award in Psychiatry and the Martin B. Keller Outstanding Brown Psychiatry Resident Award.

Her first book, Body of Work, was named an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times and one of The Washington Post’s best nonfiction books of 2007. Her second book, Falling Into the Fire, was named a New Yorker Book to Watch Out For. She has also written for many national publications including The New York Times, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Washington Post Book World, Good Housekeeping and O, The Oprah Magazine.

Christine has been named a 2017-2018 Faculty Fellow at the Cogut Center for the Humanities, a 2010 MacColl Johnson Fellow in Poetry, and the winner of the 2009 Eugene and Marilyn Glick Emerging Indiana Authors Award. She has also had several poems published in literary journals, and her manuscript Embouchure was a finalist for the National Poetry Series.

Susannah Cahalan is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling, author of The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness as well as Brain On Fire: My Month Of Madness, a memoir about her struggle with a rare autoimmune disease of the brain. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Mark Nepo‘s #1 New York Times bestseller The Book of Awakening is the result of his journey of the soul, speaking of spirit and friendship, and urging readers to stay vital and in love with this life, no matter the hardships

Mark has been called “one of the finest spiritual guides of our time,” “a consummate storyteller,” and “an eloquent spiritual teacher.” His work is widely accessible and used by many and his books have been translated into more than twenty languages. A bestselling author, he has published twenty-two books and recorded fifteen audio projects. In 2015, he was given a Life-Achievement Award by AgeNation. In 2016, he was named by Watkins: Mind Body Spirit as one of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People, and was also chosen as one of OWN’s SuperSoul 100, a group of inspired leaders using their gifts and voices to elevate humanity. And In 2017 Mark became a regular columnist for Spirituality & Health Magazine.

Mark’s recent work includes The Book of Soul (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2020); Drinking from the River of Light (Sounds True, 2019); More Together Than Alone (Atria, 2018) cited by Spirituality & Practice as one of the Best Spiritual Books of 2018; Things That Join the Sea and the Sky (Sounds True, 2017), a Nautilus Book Award Winner; The Way Under the Way: The Place of True Meeting (Sounds True, 2016), a Nautilus Book Award Winner; The One Life We’re Given (Atria) cited by Spirituality & Practice as one of the Best Spiritual Books of 2016; Inside the Miracle (Sounds True) selected by Spirituality & Health Magazine as one of the top ten best books of 2015; The Endless Practice (Atria) cited by Spirituality & Practice as one of the Best Spiritual Books of 2014; and Seven Thousand Ways to Listen (Atria), which won the 2012 Books for a Better Life Award.

Brooke Warner is publisher of She Writes Press, president of Warner Coaching Inc., and author of Write On, Sisters!, Green-light Your Book, What’s Your Book?, and three books on memoir. Brooke is a TEDx speaker, weekly podcaster, and the former Executive Editor of Seal Press. She writes a monthly column for Publishers Weekly.

Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley‘s Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine is as compelling as it is definitive, not only urgent reading for social-distanced times but also an up-to-the-minute investigation of the interplay of forces –biological, political, technological – that shape our modern world.

Geoff is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the author of A Burglar’s Guide to the City, on the relationship between crime and architecture. A Burglar’s Guide to the City was a New York Times-bestseller for two months, and, in 2016, was optioned for television by CBS Studios. He is also the creator of BLDGBLOG (“building blog”), which explores architecture and the built environment through an expansive lens, including technology, literature, crime, history, archaeology, acoustics, science fiction, warfare, subterranean space, the planetary sciences, and more.

Nicola is a science journalist, a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and co-host of the “Gastropod” podcast. She is at work on two books: one about refrigeration and the other about quarantine.

Sigrid Nunez’s new novel What Are You Going Through – a surprising story about empathy and the unusual ways one person can help another through hardship – offers a moving and provocative portrait of the way we live now.

Sigrid is the author of the novels Salvation City, The Last of Her Kind, A Feather on the Breath of God, For Rouenna, and the National Book Award-winning The Friend, among others. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. She has been the recipient of several awards, including a Whiting Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. Nunez lives in New York City.

Laura van den Berg is the author of the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She is the recipient of a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Prize, a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and is a two-time finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her third collection of stories, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, was published in July. Born and raised in Florida, Laura splits her time between the Boston area and Central Florida, with her husband and dog.

P. J. O’Rourke‘s latest, A Cry from the Far Middle, asks his fellow Americans to take it down a notch, offering a new collection of essays about our nation’s propensity for anger and perplexity.

P.J has written twenty books on subjects as diverse as politics and cars and etiquette and economics. Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance both reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. He is also H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute, a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me, and editor-in-chief of the web magazine American Consequences. His latest book, A Cry from the Far Middle: Dispatches from a Divided Land will be published in September. He lives in rural New England, as far away from the things he writes about as he can get.

Michael Krasny has been in broadcast journalism since 1983. He was with ABC in both radio and television and migrated to public broadcasting in 1993. He has been Professor of English at San Francisco State University and also taught at Stanford, the University of San Francisco and the University of California, as well as in the Fulbright International Institutes. A veteran interviewer for the nationally broadcast City Arts and Lectures, he is the author of a number of books, including Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life, Spiritual Envy, and Let There Be Laughter, as well as the twenty-four lecture series Short Story Masterpieces.

Téa Obreht’s new novel, Inland: A Novel, is an imaginatively mythic journey across the American West that was named one of the best books of the 2019 by publications including Time, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal  and BookPage.

Téa is also the author of The Tiger’s Wife, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. An international bestseller, it has sold over a million copies worldwide, with rights sold in 37 countries.

Téa was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. She was the 2013 Rona Jaffe Foundation fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers and was a recipient of the 2016 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

She was born in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, in 1985 and has lived in the United States since the age of twelve. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at Hunter College.

R.O. Kwon’s nationally bestselling first novel, The Incendiaries, is being translated into seven languages. Named a best book of the year by over forty publications, The Incendiaries received the Housatonic Book Award and was a finalist or nominated for seven other prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award for Best First Book and Los Angeles Times First Book Prize. Kwon’s next novel, as well as an essay collection, are forthcoming.

R.O’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Paris Review, NPR, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Born in Seoul, Kwon has lived most of her life in the United States.

Sara Paretsky’s latest release Love & Other Crimes, is a collection of 14 stories about Chicago shamus V.I. Warshawski, her friends and family, and a remarkably diverse group of other people.

Sara revolutionized the mystery world in 1982 when she introduced V I Warshawski in Indemnity Only. By creating a believable investigator with the grit and the smarts to tackle problems on the mean streets, She challenged a genre in which women typically were either vamps or victims. Hailed by critics and readers, Indemnity Only was followed by nineteen more best-selling Warshawski novels. Publishers Weekly says, “Among today’s PIs, nobody comes close to Warshawski.”

Called “passionate” and “electrifying,” V.I. reflects her creator’s own passion for social justice. As a contributor to the New York Times and the Guardian newspapers, and a speaker at such venues as the Library of Congress and Oxford University, Sara is an impassioned advocate for those on society’s margins. She has mentored teens in Chicago’s most troubled schools, and works closely with literacy and reproductive rights groups.

Not only has Sara own work broken barriers, she has helped open doors for other women. In 1986 she created Sisters in Crime, a worldwide organization to support women crime writers, which earned her Ms. Magazine’s 1987 Woman of the Year award. Other awards include the British Crime Writers Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement; the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master; and a number ofhonorary doctorates. Her work is celebrated in Pamela Beere Briggs’s documentary, Women of Mystery. Her books are published in 30 countries.

Executive Editor Emily Krump has been with William Morrow since 2006. She works on a wide range of projects with award-winning and bestselling authors, but is most passionate about smart, commercial fiction and suspense. Recent and upcoming titles include November Road by Lou Berney, You, Me, and the Sea by Meg Donohue, The Silent Treatment by Abbie Greaves, Never Have I Ever by Joshilyn Jackson, The Brilliant Life of Eudora Honeysett by Annie Lyons, To Tell You the Truth by Gilly Macmillan, Dead Lands by Sara Paretsky, The Lucky One by Lori Rader-Day, The Book of M by Peng Shepherd, The Silent Wife by Karin Slaughter, and A Divided Loyalty by Charles Todd among others.

Ann Patchett‘s The Dutch House explores the bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go. It’s a story of a paradise lost–one that digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are.

Ann is the author of seven novels, The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, The Magician’s Assistant, Bel Canto, Run, State of Wonder, and Commonwealth. She was the editor of Best American Short Stories, 2006, and has written three books of nonfiction–Truth & Beauty, about her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, What Now? an expansion of her graduation address at Sarah Lawrence College, and This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a collection of essays examining the theme of commitment. In 2019, she published her first children’s book, Lambslide, illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser.

In November, 2011, Ann opened Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, with her business partner Karen Hayes. She lives in Nashville with her husband, Karl VanDevender, and their dog, Sparky.

Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager’s new book,The Writer’s Library: The Authors You Love on the Books That Changed Their Lives is an inspiring collection of interviews with America’s most notable and influential writers, conversations about the books that shaped them and inspired them to leave their own literary mark.

Nancy regularly speaks about the importance and pleasure of reading at libraries, literacy organizations, and community groups around the world. She can be found on NPR’s Morning Edition and KWGS-FM in Tulsa, Oklahoma talking about her favorite books. Her monthly television show on the Seattle Channel, Book Lust with Nancy Pearl, features interviews with authors, poets, and other literary figures. Among her many honors are the 2011 Librarian of the Year Award from Library Journal and the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. Nancy is the creator of the internationally recognized program If All of Seattle Read the Same Book, and was the inspiration for the Archee McPhee “Librarian Action Figure.” Nancy is a best-selling author, librarian, and literary critic, but first and foremost, she is a reader and has spent her life promoting reading as one of the most beneficial and joyful experiences anyone can have.

Jeff is a Seattle-based journalist and playwright. Book-It Repertory Theatre produced his adaptation of Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson in 2013. The following year, the company’s five-hour stage version of his adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay won Theatre Puget Sound’s Gregory Award for Outstanding Production. He lives on Queen Anne Hill, in a Craftsman house built in 1913, with his partner Megan and his pug Edgar.

Andrew Sean Greer is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of six works of fiction, including the bestsellers The Confessions of Max Tivoli and Less. He has taught at a number of universities, including the Iowa Writers Workshop, been a TODAY show pick, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, a judge for the National Book Award, and a winner of the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Andrew is the recipient of a NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in San Francisco.

Louise Penny, a former CBC radio journalist, is the #1 New York Times, USA Today, and Globe and Mail bestselling author of the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novels. She has been awarded the CWA Dagger, Nero, Macavity and Barry Awards, as well as two each of the Arthur Ellis and Dilys Awards. In addition, she has won the Agatha Award (seven times), and was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. In 2017, she received the Order of Canada for her contributions to Canadian culture. Louise Penny lives in a small village south of Montréal.

Shelagh Rogers is a veteran broadcast-journalist and the host and a producer of The Next Chapter, the award-winning CBC Radio program devoted to writing in Canada. In 2011, she received an Order of Canada for promoting Canadian culture and for advocacy in mental health, truth and reconciliation, and adult literacy. That same year, she was named an Honorary Witness for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She is the co-editor of Speaking My Truth: Reflections on Reconciliation and Residential School, Reconciliation and the Way Forward, and Speaking My Truth: The Journey to Reconciliation, launched in Sioux Lookout this summer.

Paige Peterson‘s Growing Up Belvedere-Tiburon, transports readers to a real-life Brigadoon, merging her memories of her magical childhood with archival photographs that trace the history of these small, lovingly protected communities.

As a journalist, Paige has reported extensively about the Middle East and contributed to Marin Magazine, New York Social Diary and the National Council on U.S. Arab Relations. With Christoper Cerf, she is also the co-author and illustrator of Blackie: The Horse Who Stood Still, and the illustrator of “A Christmas Carol,” adapted by Jesse Kornbluth. As a painter, she is represented by Gerald Peters Gallery in New York and has been honored by The Guild Hall Academy of the Arts in East Hampton. She is Author and Artist in Residence at Literacy Partners and a board member of Catmosphere, National Council on U.S. Arab Relations, and Safari West Wildlife Foundation. Raised in Belvedere, Ms. Peterson has two adult children and lives in New York City.

Jesse Kornbluth writes books and plays and edits a cultural concierge site.  As a magazine journalist, he has been a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and New York, and a contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times. As an author, his books include “Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken,” “Pre-Pop Warhol,” and two novels, Married Sex and JFK and Mary Meyer: A Love Story. His play about Henri Matisse, “The Color of Light,” has been produced in California and New York. On the Web, he co-founded Bookreporter.com. From 1997 to 2003, he was Editorial Director of America Online. In 2004, he launched HeadButler.com.

Bill Petrocelli’s newest book, Electoral Bait & Switch argues that the Electoral College has changed from the institution that the framers of the Constitution intended to President a mere rubber-stamp operation with only one function: to distort the result of the popular vote for President.

Bill is an author, attorney, and co-owner of Book Passage, the fiercely independent bookstore in Corte Madera, California, and at the San Francisco Ferry Building. In addition to several years in private practice, Bill has also served as a California Deputy Attorney General, the head of a poverty law office in Oakland, a member of the Board of the American Booksellers Association and an attorney for the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association. He is a frequent advocate on women’s issues and on the problems of local businesses.

Bill is also the author of Low Profile: How to Avoid the Privacy Invaders and Sexual Harassment on the Job: What it is and How to Stop It, the first book published on the subject of stopping workplace harassment and sexual violence. He has also written two novels: The Circle of Thirteen and Through the Bookstore Window, which Foreword Magazine calls “an unusual, rewarding take on the nature of memory: how it haunts and heals, how single moments set the future in motion, and how it binds survivors together in ways they seldom expect.”

Joel Richard Paul is a Professor of Constitutional Law at U.C. Hastings Law School in San Francisco. He has lectured and published throughout Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He is the author of Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution and the biography of Chief Justice John Marshall, Without Precedent: Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times.

Chris Rainier’s Mask presents a striking collection of rare masks steeped in ancient tradition, captured through the lens of one of the world’s most celebrated documentary photographers.

Chris is a documentary photographer and National Geographic explorer who is highly respected for his documentation of endangered cultures and traditional languages around the globe. He is a fellow at the Royal Geographic Society in London. Prior to Mask, he published five books documenting traditional cultures around the globe, from the Stone Age tribes of New Guinea to the ancient tradition of tattoo body marking. Rainier is the director of the Cultural Sanctuaries Foundation, a global program focused on legally preserving biodiversity and cultural heritage. Rainier has photographed on all seven continents, focusing on the preservation of the planet’s last wildernesses and traditional cultures.

Phil Cousineau is an award-winning writer and filmmaker, teacher and editor, lecturer, and travel leader, storyteller and TV host. His fascination with the art, literature, and history of culture has taken him from Michigan to Marrakesh, Iceland to the Amazon, in a worldwide search for what the ancients called the “soul of the world.” With more than 35 books and 15 scriptwriting credits to his name, the “omnipresent influence of myth in modern life” is a thread that runs through all of his work. His books include Stoking the Creative Fires, Once and Future Myths, The Art of Pilgrimage, The Hero’s Journey, Wordcatcher, The Painted Word, The Oldest Story in the World, The Book of Roads, and The Accidental Aphorist.

Janine Urbaniak Reid’s The Opposite of Certainty is the story of her reluctant journey beyond easy answers and platitudes. Drawn deeply and against her will into herself, and into the eternal questions we all ask, she discovers hidden reserves of strength, humor, and a no-matter-what faith that looks nothing like she thought it would.

Janine writes about her imperfect life, what connects us, and addresses the question of what it means to love fiercely in a sometimes dangerous and always uncertain world.

Anne Lamott is the author of seven novels, Hard Laughter, Rosie, Joe Jones, Blue Shoe, All New People, Crooked Little Heart, and Imperfect Birds. She has also written several bestselling books of nonfiction, including, Operating Instructions, an account of life as a single mother during her son’s first year; Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son’s First Son; and the classic book on writing; Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

Jason Rezaian served as Tehran bureau chief for the Washington Post and is now an opinion writer for the paper and contributor to CNN. He was convicted—but never sentenced—of espionage in a closed-door trial in Iran in 2015. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife. His book Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison, published in January 2019, details his experience in captivity in Iran.

Ben Rhodes’ upcoming release, After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, details a deeply personal, beautifully observed quest for answers to the questions: Why is democracy so threatened in America and around the world? And what can we do about it?

Ben is also the author of the New York Times bestseller The World as It Is, co-host of Pod Save the World, a contributor for NBC News and MSNBC, and an adviser to former president Barack Obama.

Dan Pfeiffer is a former White House communications director, noted political and digital strategist, Pod Save America co-host, CNN contributor, and best-selling author. His New York Times #1 best-seller, Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter and Trump is a colorful account of how politics, the media and the internet changed during the Obama presidency alongside the evolution of social media. His newest book is Un-Trumping America: A Plan to Make America a Democracy Again.

Jamie Ritchie, head of Sotheby’s wine, is proud to present The New Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia, an essential reference for oenophiles – long used as the go-to text for the prestigious Master Sommelier examination – and the most comprehensive guide to the world of wine, featuring authoritative information on the history, culture, geography, and taste of vintages around the globe.

Jamie became head of Sotheby’s global wine business in May of 2016. He joined Sotheby’s in London in 1990 and was responsible for launching Sotheby’s wine auctions in New York in 1994 and in Hong Kong in 2009. More recently, Mr. Ritchie was responsible for launching Sotheby’s Wine, a retail store and online wine business, becoming the only major global auctioneer offering fine wines at retail. He is also a respected authority in the wine market and has been regularly featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Forbes and Wine Spectator Magazine.

Avram Kosasky lives and works in New York City selling natural and terroir driven wines to the city’s best restaurants and retailers. Raised in the rolling hills of Marin County, wine country was never far away. After studying conceptual art and working in magazines and industrial design, he found himself always drawn back to the many and exquisite expressions of the vine. He devotes himself to seeking out new wines and producers and sharing them with his community and friends.

Jason Rosenthal’s My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me is an inspiring memoir of life, love, loss, and new beginnings by the widower of bestselling children’s author and filmmaker Amy Krouse Rosenthal, whose last of act of love before her death was setting the stage for her husband’s life without her in the viral New York Times Modern Love column, “You May Want to Marry My Husband.”

Jason and Paris are co-authors of the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Dear Boy, the #1 New York Times bestselling follow-up picture book to the #1 New York Times bestseller Dear Girl, co-written by Paris and her mother Amy Krouse Rosenthal.

Jason is also the board chair of the Amy Krouse Rosenthal Foundation, which supports childhood literacy and research in early detection of ovarian cancer. A lawyer, public speaker, and devoted father of three, he is passionate about helping others find ways to fill their blank space as he continues to fill his own. Jason resides in Chicago, a city he is proud to call home.

Gretchen Rubin‘s recent release, The Four Tendencies, considers what happens when people respond to Epicurus’ simple question: “How do I respond to expectations?” and explores how understanding your own response can help you make better decisions, meet deadlines, suffer less stress, and engage more effectively.

Gretchen is also the author of the bestselling books The Happiness Project, Happier at Home, Better than Before, and Outer Order, Inner Calm. She’s also written a bestselling biography of Winston Churchill, Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill, and one of John Kennedy, Forty Ways to Look at JFK. She hosts a popular, award-winning podcast, “Happier with Gretchen Rubin” and a blog, where she writes about her daily adventures in happiness and habit-formation. She is also a regular columnist for O, The Oprah Magazine and makes regular appearances on CBS This Morning. Before turning to writing, Gretchen had a career in law. A graduate of Yale and Yale Law School, she clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.

Deborah Tannen’s newest release, Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow, traces her father’s life from turn-of-the-century Warsaw to New York City in an intimate memoir about family, memory, and the stories we tell.

Deborah is University Professor and Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University and author of many books and articles about how the language of everyday conversation affects relationships.  She is best known as the author of the New York Times Bestseller, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. This is the book that brought gender differences in communication style to the forefront of public awareness. In addition to her eight books for general audiences, Deborah is author or editor of sixteen books and over one hundred articles for scholarly audiences. She is also a frequent guest on television and radio news and has been featured in and 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 lives with her husband in the Washington, D.C., area.

Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig‘s bestseller, A Very Stable Genius, is the definitive insider narrative of Donald Trump’s unique presidency, one packed with shocking new reporting and insight.

Philip is the White House Bureau Chief at The Washington Post, leading its coverage of President Trump and his administration. He and a team of Post reporters won the Pulitzer Prize and George Polk Award for their reporting on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. Rucker joined the Post in 2005 and previously has covered Congress, the Obama White House, and the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns. He serves as an on-air political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, and graduated from Yale University with a degree in history.

Carol is a national investigative reporter at The Washington Post, where she has worked since 2000 and covers Donald Trump’s presidency and other subjects. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on security failures and misconduct inside the Secret Service. She also was part of the Post teams awarded Pulitzers in 2017, for reporting on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, and in 2014, for revealing the U.S. government’s secret, broad surveillance of Americans. Carol is also an on-air contributor to NBC News and MSNBC.

Joan Ryan‘s fascinating new Intangibles: Unlocking the Science and Soul of Team Chemistry explores how team chemistry—that perfect combination of biological and social forces that boosts selfless effort—drives sports teams toward a common goal, encourages players to be the best versions of themselves, and pushes individuals to exceed their own potential as they work together.

Joan is an award-winning journalist and author. She was one of the first female sports columnists in the country, and has covered every major sporting event, from the Super Bowl to the Olympics and championship fights. Her work has earned her thirteen Associated Press Sports Editors Awards, the National Headliner Award and the Women’s Sports Foundation’s Journalism Award by the San Francisco chapter of the National Organization for Women. Her book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters was named one of the Top 100 Sports Books of All Time by Sports Illustrated (the only one to be authored by a woman), and one of the Top 50 Sports Books of All Time by the Guardian. Joan now works as a media consultant to the San Francisco Giants.

Join Kate Hudson in conversation with Kate Schatz and Miriam Klein Stahl, the New York Times bestselling author and illustrator of the Rad Women book series.

The three women will discuss Kate and Miriam’s newest book, Rad American History A-Z, an illustrated history book that explores centuries of radical and transformative political, social, and cultural moments and movements in American history. They’ll touch on multiple topics including the importance of reading and learning about our nations’ lesser-known histories, engaging in honest conversation with their children about current events, and broadening our minds to create a just and sustainable future.

Orville Schell, a uniquely experienced observer of China gives us My Old Home: A Novel of Exile, a sweeping historical novel that takes us on a journey from the rise of Mao Zedong in 1949 to the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, as a father and his son are swept away by a relentless series of devastating events.

Orville Schell is the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. From 1996 to 2007 he was the dean of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He has written ten nonfiction books on China and contributed to many publications, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, Foreign Affairs, and The New York Review of Books. He is also an Emmy Award-winning producer for PBS, NBC Nightly News, and 60 Minutes. He divides his time between New York City and Berkeley, California.

Elaine Pagels, a historian of religion, is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor at Princeton University and an Aspen Institute Trustee. Perhaps best known as the author of “The Gnostic Gospels,” “The Origin of Satan,” and “Adam, Eve and the Serpent,” she has published widely on Gnosticism and early Christianity, and continues to pursue research interests on topics that include sexuality and politics, visions, and the origins of Christian anti-semitism. Her most recent books include “Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas” (was on The New York Times best-seller list) and “Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation” (2012).

Mark Danner has written about foreign affairs and American politics for more than two decades, covering Latin America, Haiti, the Balkans and the Middle East among other stories. He was for many years a staff writer at The New Yorker and contributes frequently to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and other publications. He teaches at the University of California and at Bard college and speaks and debates widely about America’s role in the world.

Lisa Scottoline‘s new release, Eternal, offers a sweeping and shattering epic of historical fiction fueled by shocking true events, the tale of a love triangle that unfolds in the heart of Rome, in the creeping shadow of fascism.

Lisa is the bestselling and Edgar Award–winning author of thirty-three novels. She has over thirty million copies of her books in print in the United States and has been published in thirty-five countries. Lisa also writes a weekly column with her daughter, Francesca Serritella, for the Philadelphia Inquirer. These stories, along with many other never-before-published stories, have been collected in a New York Times bestselling series of humorous memoirs including their most recent, I Need A Lifeguard Everywhere But The Pool. Lisa reviews popular fiction and non-fiction, and her reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She has served as President of the Mystery Writers of America and has taught a course she developed, “Justice in Fiction,” at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, her alma mater. She lives in the Philadelphia area.

Lisa See is the New York Times bestselling author of The Island of Sea Women, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, Shanghai Girls, China Dolls, and Dreams of Joy, which debuted at #1. She is also the author of On Gold Mountain, which tells the story of her Chinese American family’s settlement in Los Angeles. See was the recipient of the Golden Spike Award from the Chinese Historical Association of Southern California and the Historymaker’s Award from the Chinese American Museum. She was also named National Woman of the Year by the Organization of Chinese American Women.

Lisa See’s new novel, The Island of Sea Women, is about the free-diving women of South Korea’s Jeju Island. Lisa is also the New York Times bestselling author of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, Shanghai Girls, China Dolls, and Dreams of Joy, which debuted at #1. She is also the author of On Gold Mountain, which tells the story of her Chinese American family’s settlement in Los Angeles. Lisa has also written a mystery series that takes place in China. Her books have been published in 39 languages.

John Shea is the co-writer of the instant New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle bestseller 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid in which the legendary Willie Mays shares the inspirations and influences responsible for guiding him on and off the field.

John is the San Francisco Chronicle’s national baseball writer and columnist. He is in his 33rd year covering baseball, including 28 in the Bay Area. He wrote three baseball books, including Rickey Henderson’s biography (Confessions of a Thief) and Magic by the Bay, an account of the 1989 World Series.

John has also won several Associated Press Sports Editors awards, including first place in the nation for a World Series game story. He’s a two-time Bay Area chairman of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America and created the Bill Rigney Good Guy Award, given each year to a Giant and Athletic who is most accommodating to the media.

Phil Cousineau is an award-winning writer and filmmaker, teacher and editor, lecturer, and travel leader, storyteller and TV host. His fascination with the art, literature, and history of culture has taken him from Michigan to Marrakesh, Iceland to the Amazon, in a worldwide search for what the ancients called the “soul of the world.” With more than 35 books and 15 scriptwriting credits to his name, the “omnipresent influence of myth in modern life” is a thread that runs through all of his work. His books include Stoking the Creative Fires, Once and Future Myths, The Art of Pilgrimage, The Hero’s Journey, Wordcatcher, The Painted Word, The Oldest Story in the World, The Book of Roads, and The Accidental Aphorist.

David Sibley’s new What it’s Like to Be a Bird is the definitive bird book for birders and nonbirders alike, one sure excite and inspire by providing a new, deeper understanding of what common, mostly backyard, birds are doing–and why.

David is the author and illustrator of the series of successful guides to nature that bear his name, including The Sibley Guide to Birds. He has contributed to Smithsonian, Science, The Wilson Journal of Ornithology, Birding, BirdWatching, and North American Birds, and to The New York Times. He is the recipient of the Roger Tory Peterson Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Birding Association and the Linnaean Society of New York’s Eisenmann Medal. He lives and birds in Massachusetts.

John (Jack) Muir Laws has written and illustrated several books including How to Teach Nature Journaling (co-authored with Emilie Lygren), The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling (2016), The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds (2012), Sierra Birds: a Hiker’s Guide (2004), and The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada (2007). He is a regular contributor to Bay Nature magazine with his “Naturalists Notebook” column.

Jane Smiley’s latest novel, Perestroika in Paris, is a captivating, brilliantly imaginative story of three extraordinary animals – and a young boy – whose lives intersect in Paris.

Jane is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and more recently, the New York Times best-selling Last Hundred Years Trilogy: Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age. She is also the author of several works of nonfiction and books for young adults. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has also received the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. Jane lives in Northern California.

David Francis, based in Los Angeles where he works for the Norton Rose Fulbright law firm, spends part of each year back on his family’s farm in Australia. He is the author of The Great Inland Sea, published to acclaim in seven countries, and Stray Dog Winter, Book of the Year in The Advocate, winner of the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Prize for Literature and a LAMBDA Literary Award Finalist. He has taught creative writing at University of California, Los Angeles, Occidental College and in the Masters of Professional Writing program at University of Southern California. His short fiction and articles have appeared in publications including Harvard Review, The Sydney Morning Herald, Southern California Review, Best Australian Stories 2012 and 2014, Australian Love Stories, Los Angeles Times and The Rattling Wall. He is Vice President of PEN Center USA.

Sherry L. Smith‘s new book, Bohemians West: Free Love, Family and Radicals in the Twentieth Century is a revelatory biography of a radical romance at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Sherry L. Smith is a historian and author who grew up in Northwest Indiana, a place tucked between Chicago’s cultural treasures and the natural wonders of the Indiana Dunes. Yet, the American West won her over as a subject of historical study and place to live. She is University Distinguished Professor of History at Southern Methodist University.  Her award-winning books include Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power and Reimagining Indians: Native Americans Through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940. Smith is a former president of the Western History Association and received the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellowship at the Huntington Library, which supported research for Bohemians West. She has also been honored with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, and Yale University. Smith lives in Moose, Wyoming, and Pasadena, California.

Peter Coyote’s memoir of the 1960’s counter-culture Sleeping Where I Fall which received universally excellent reviews, and has been in continuous print since 1999. His second book, The Rainman’s Third Cure: An Irregular Education, about mentors and the search for wisdom, was nominated as one of the top five non-fiction books published in California in 2015. His third book, Unmasking Your True Self (the Lone Ranger and Tonto Meet the Buddha) conflates 50 years of Buddhist practice and acting and uses masks and improv exercises to foster liberation experiences and teach people “how to get out of their own way.” It will be released by Inner Traditions Press in early 2020, and so will his first book of poems, The Tongue of a Crow.

Peter has performed as an actor in over 160 films for theaters and TV. He is a double Emmy-Award winning narrator of over 150 documentary films. An ordained Zen Buddhist priest and transmitted teacher, Peter is currently giving live weekly dharma talks on Facebook, preparing for a fourth book called Vernacular Buddhism.

Jennifer Steinhauer’s latest work, The Firsts, breathtakingly chronicles the first-year experiences of the history-making women who entered Congress in November 2018, detailing their transition from running trailblazing campaigns to the daily work of governance.

Jennifer went to work for The New York Times as a news clerk when she was still a journalism student at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She has covered health care and business in New York, was City Hall bureau chief, Los Angeles bureau chief, congressional correspondent, Mid-Atlantic correspondent and veterans reporter.

Teaming with co-author and friend Jessica Hendra, Jennifer capped her years in Los Angeles with a satirical novel Beverly Hills Adjacent, at times hilarious, at times touching, that sends up the television industry and the ways of those in and near the entertainment industry.

One of the earliest writers for Food52, Jennifer has been writing about food, sharing her recipes and entertaining her public for years. Her first cookbook, Treat Yourself, taught us how to make our own junk food, at home. She then teamed with friend and colleague Frank Bruni to extol the power and diversity of the lowly meat loaf, in A Meat Loaf in Every Oven.

Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent with The New York Times. She joined the paper in 2004 as assistant editorial page editor, before becoming diplomatic correspondent in 2006 and White House correspondent in 2009.

Brad Stone’s new book, Amazon Unbound, is an unvarnished picture of Amazon’s unprecedented growth and its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, revealing the most important business story of our time.

Brad is senior executive editor of global technology at Bloomberg News. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, which has been translated into over thirty-five languages, and The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley. He has covered Silicon Valley for more than twenty years and lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Michael Krasny is the former host of the award-winning KQED Forum, a program discussing news and public affairs, current events, culture, health, business and technology.

Darin Strauss’ new novel, The Queen of Tuesday: A Lucille Ball Story, mixes fact and fiction, memoir and novel, to explore the conceit  that the author’s grandfather may have had an affair with Hollywood’s Lucille Ball.

Darin is the acclaimed author of the memoir Half a Life, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, an Entertainment Weekly “Must List” selection, a Chicago Tribune Editor’s Pick, and one of the Best Books of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle.  He is also the renowned author of the novels Chang and Eng, The Real McCoy, and the international bestseller More Than It Hurts You. He is a compelling speaker whose experience includes universities, libraries, book festivals, and corporations.

The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction writing, Darrin is a clinical associate professor at NYU’s creative writing program.

Kelly Corrigan‘s Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say is a wonderfully personal, honest, and hilarious examination of the essential phrases that make love and connection possible.

Kelly has been called “the voice of her generation” by O: The Oprah Magazine and “the poet laureate of the ordinary” by HuffPost. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Middle Place, Lift, and Glitter and Glue. Kelly is the host of Tell Me More with Kelly Corrigan premiering on PBS October 5 and the host of a new podcast coming from PRX, also in October

She lives near Oakland, California, with her husband, Edward Lichty, and her daughters, Georgia and Claire.

Elizabeth Strout‘s latest, Olive Again, continues the life of her beloved Olive Kitteridge, a character who has captured the imaginations of millions.

Elizabeth is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Olive, Again, an Oprah’s Book Club pick; Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Prize; My Name is Lucy Barton, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; The Burgess Boys, named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and NPR; Abide with Me, a national bestseller; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize.

She has also been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the International Dublin Literary Award, and the Orange Prize. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker and O: The Oprah Magazine. Elizabeth lives in New York City.

Cathleen Schine most recent work is the best-selling novel The Grammarians. She is also the author of The Love Letter, Rameau’s Niece, Alice in Bed, To the Bird House, The Evolution of Jane, She is Me, The New Yorkers, The Three Weissmanns of Westport, Fin & Lady, They May Not Mean To, But They Do. In addition to novels she has written articles for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. Her essays have been included in Best American Essays 2005, Fierce Pajamas, an Anthology of New Yorker Humor, and The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs. She grew up in Westport, Ct. and lives in Venice, California.

Alka Joshi’s intriguing new novel The Secret Keeper of Jaipur follows henna artist Lakshmi as she arranges for her protégé, Malik, to intern at the Jaipur Palace – it’s a tale rich in character, atmosphere, and lavish storytelling.

Alka was born in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India ,and has lived in the U.S. since the age of nine. She has a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from California College of the Arts. She ran her own advertising and PR agency for 30 years. The Henna Artist was her first novel. Currently, she is working on the third book of the trilogy and a screen adaption of The Henna Artis.

Sujata Massey is the author of fourteen novels, two novellas and numerous short stories that have been published in eighteen countries. Her novels have won the Agatha, Lefty and Macavity awards and been finalists for the Edgar, Anthony and Mary Higgins Clark prizes. Sujata writes mystery and suspense fiction set in pre-Independence India, as well as a modern mystery series set in Japan.

Julia Sweig‘s recent release, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight is a magisterial portrait of Lady Bird Johnson, and a major reevaluation of the profound yet underappreciated impact the First Lady’s political instincts had on LBJ’s presidency.

Julia Sweig is an award-winning author of books on Cuba, Latin America, and American foreign policy. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, and the National Interest, among other outlets. Her book Inside the Cuban Revolution won the American Historical Association’s 2003 Herbert Feis Award. She served as senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations for fifteen years and concurrently led the Aspen Institute’s congressional seminar on Latin America for ten years. She holds a doctorate and a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University. She is a nonresident senior research fellow at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas–Austin and lives with her family outside of Washington, DC.

Marianne Szegedy-Maszak is a journalist, author, book editor, and ghost writer. She’s a Senior Editor at Mother Jones and has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, THe LA Times, Esquire, US New & World Report and many other publications. She has been the ghostwriter for a number of books and has written her own, a Holocaust memoir entitled, I Kiss Your Hands Many Times: Hearts Souls, and Wars in Hungary.

John Muir Laws‘ How to Teach Nature Journaling (co-authored by Emilie Lygren) is the first-ever comprehensive book devoted to helping educators use nature journaling as an inspiring teaching tool to engage young people with wild places. Bestselling author Amy Tan wrote the book’s foreword.

An author, artist, and educator, John is the founder of the Nature Journal Club, a community of people (on Facebook and at in-person groups all over the world) who love to explore the wonder, beauty, and mysteries of the world through the pages of their nature journals. For the last five years, Amy has been a member of that community and a devoted nature journaler. These two artists have become friends and sketching buddies, and they enjoy exploring nature together and finding new things to observe and wonder about in nature.

John (Jack) Muir Laws has written and illustrated several other books including The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling (2016), The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds (2012), Sierra Birds: a Hiker’s Guide (2004), and The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada (2007). He is a regular contributor to Bay Nature magazine with his “Naturalists Notebook” column.

Deborah Tannen’s newest release, Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey from World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow, traces her father’s life from turn-of-the-century Warsaw to New York City in an intimate memoir about family, memory, and the stories we tell.

Deborah is University Professor and Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University and author of many books and articles about how the language of everyday conversation affects relationships.  She is best known as the author of New York Time Bestseller, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. This is the book that brought gender differences in communication style to the forefront of public awareness.

In addition to her eight books for general audiences, Deborah is author or editor of sixteen books and over one hundred articles for scholarly audiences. She is also a frequent guest on television and radio news and has been featured in and 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 lives with her husband in the Washington, D.C., area.

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club remains a classic examination of the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. Her other novels are The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Saving Fish from Drowning, and The Valley of Amazement (2013), all New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of a memoir, The Opposite of Fate, two children’s books, The Moon Lady and Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat and numerous articles for magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, and National Geographic.

Julia Turshen’s Simply Julia: 110 Recipes for Healthy Comfort Food is her first collection of recipes featuring a healthier take on the simple, satisfying comfort food for which she’s known.

Julia is the bestselling cookbook author of Small Victories, named a Best Cookbook by the New York Times and NPR, Feed the Resistance, Eater’s Book of the Year, 2017, and Now & Again, named the Best Cookbook of 2018 by Amazon. She hosts the IACP-nominated podcast “Keep Calm and Cook On” and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, and Saveur. She is the founder of Equity At The Table, an inclusive digital directory of women and non-binary individuals in food. Julia lives in the Hudson Valley with her wife and pets.

Pati Jinich is the host of the popular PBS TV series, Pati’s Mexican Table. She is also the author of MEXICAN TODAY: New and Rediscovered Recipes for Contemporary Kitchens and Pati’s Mexican Table; the resident chef of the Mexican Cultural Institute in DC; and busy mother of three.

Pati is known for making Mexican food that is both irresistible and accessible. Born and raised in Mexico City in a family of accomplished cooks, many of Pati’s go-to dishes are adaptations of the food that nurtured her while growing up.

Terry Virts‘ How to Astronaut is an insider’s guide to an experience few will ever know firsthand – the highs, lows, humor, and wonder of experiences including survival training, space shuttle emergencies, bad bosses, putting on a spacesuit, time travel, and more.

Colonel Terry Virts is a pilot, astronaut, author and photographer. Terry earned a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the United States Air Force Academy in 1989, and a master of aeronautical science degree in aeronautics from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. He began his career as an Air Force officer and pilot he was stationed in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, South Korea, Germany, California, and Texas. He has logged over 5,300 flight hours in more than 40 different aircraft including combat time in the F-16 “Viper.” He has also served in multiple flying commands, Space Command, and Cyber Command.

In 2010 he made his first spaceflight as pilot of the Space Shuttle Endeavour on mission STS-130 ; delivering the now-famous Cupola, which provides astronauts with a 360° view of our planet and the universe. Virts attended Harvard Business School in the fall of 2011 and completed the General Management Programme, having been selected as NASA’s only candidate for that programme.

Selected by NASA in 2000, he was the pilot of STS-130 mission aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour. In March 2015, Terry assumed command of the International Space Station, and spent over 200 days on it. He is one of the stars (and photographers) of the IMAX film, A Beautiful Planet, released in April 2016. He is also the author of View from Above. He is also one of only 4 astronauts ever to have piloted a space shuttle, flown on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, performed space walks and commanded the ISS.

Chuck Wendig is the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Aftermath, as well as the Miriam Black thrillers, the Atlanta Burns books, and the Heartland YA series, alongside other works across comics, games, film, and more. A finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the cowriter of the Emmy-nominated digital narrative Collapsus, he is also known for his popular blog, terribleminds.com, and his books about writing. He lives in Pennsylvania with his family.

Clarissa Ward’s remarkable new memoir On All Fronts is the unforgettable story of an extraordinary journalist and a changing world.

Clarissa is CNN’s chief international correspondent. In her fifteen-year career spanning Fox, CBS, and ABC, she has reported from front lines across the world. Clarissa has won five Emmy Awards, two George Foster Peabody Awards, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, two Edward R. Murrow Awards for distinguished journalism, honors from the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association, the 2016 David Kaplan Award from the Overseas Press Club, and the Excellence in International Reporting Award from the International Center for Journalists. She graduated with distinction from Yale University, and in 2013 received an honorary doctor of letters degree from Middlebury College in Vermont. She lives in London.

Lisa Ling is the executive producer and host of This is Life with Lisa Ling, on CNN. For five seasons prior, Lisa executive produced and hosted Our America on OWN: the Oprah Winfrey Network. As the former field correspondent for The Oprah Winfrey Show and contributor to ABC News’ Nightline  and National Geographic’s Explorer, Lisa has reported from dozens of countries, covering stories about gang rape in the Congo, bride burning in India, the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang in Central America, Lisa is the co-author of Mother, Daughter, Sister, Bride: Rituals of Womanhood  and Somewhere Inside: One Sister’s Captivity in North Korea and the Other’s Fight to Bring Her Home, which she penned with her sister, Laura. She is also a co-founder of SecretSocietyofWomen.com, and a contributor to ivolunteer.org.

Eric Weiner’s Socrates Express:In Search of Life Lessons From Dead Philosophers combines his twin passions for philosophy and global travel in a pilgrimage that uncovers surprising life lessons from philosophers around the world, from Marcus Aurelius to Arthur Schopenhauer, Confucius to Montaigne.

Eric is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author, and speaker. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Geography of Bliss and The Geography of Genius, as well as the critically acclaimed Man Seeks God. Eric is a former foreign correspondent for NPR, and reporter for The New York Times. He is a regular contributor to The Washington Post, BBC Travel, and AFAR, among other publications. He lives in the Washington, D.C. area

Don George is an editor-at-large for National Geographic Traveler magazine, as well as host of the National Geographic Live series of conversations with notable authors. In four decades as a travel writer and editor, Don has visited more than 90 countries on five continents. He has traveled throughout—and written extensively about—Europe and Asia. He has also lived in France, Greece, and Japan, working as a translator in Paris, a teacher in Athens, and a television talk show host in Tokyo. Don is the author of The Way of Wanderlust: The Best Travel Writing of Don George, and has received dozens of writing awards, including the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of the Year Award.

Dorothy Wickenden‘s newest release, The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women’s Rights tells the fascinating and crucially American stories of abolition, the Underground Railroad, the early women’s rights movement, and the Civil War from the intimate perspective of three friends and neighbors in mid-nineteenth century Auburn, New York.

Dorothy Wickenden is also the author of Nothing Daunted  and has been the executive editor of The New Yorker since January 1996. She also writes for the magazine and is the moderator of its weekly podcast The Political Scene. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Wickenden was national affairs editor at Newsweek from 1993-1995, and before that was the longtime executive editor at The New Republic. She lives with her husband in Westchester, New York.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Taylor’s writing and scholarship engage issues of contemporary Black politics, the history of Black social movements and Black radicalism, and issues concerning public policy, race and racial inequality. Taylor’s writing has been published in the New York Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Al Jazeera America, Jacobin, In These Times, New Politics, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, and beyond. Taylor is also author of the award-winning From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation published by Haymarket Books in 2016. She is also author of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective which won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction.

Jacqueline Winspear‘s The American Agent was published in 2019, as was What Would Maisie Do? – a non-fiction book based on her acclaimed Masie Dobbs series.

Jacqueline is the creator of the award-winning New York Times and National Bestselling series featuring psychologist and investigator, Maisie Dobbs. Jacqueline’s “standalone” novel set in WW1, The Care and Management of Lies, was a finalist for the 2015 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her memoir, This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing, will be published in November. Originally from the UK, Jacqueline now lives in northern California.

Naomi Wolf‘s latest release, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love explores the history of state-sponsored censorship and violations of personal freedoms through the inspiring, forgotten history of one writer’s refusal to stay silenced.

Naomi made a sensation with her landmark international bestseller The Beauty Myth in 1991. She’s lectured widely on the themes in Outrages, presenting lectures on John Addington Symonds at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, at Balliol College, Oxford, and to the undergraduates in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. Naomi has written eight nonfiction bestsellers about women’s issues and civil liberties, including Vagina: A New Biography, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot and Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries. She is also the cofounder and president of the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership. She lives in New York City.

Johanna Baldwin is a writer and producer whose work includes film, television, theatre and short stories. All (Wo)men Desire To Know is her debut novel. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications from The New York Times to The London Evening Standard. One of those stories, “Her Private Serenade,” is featured in the book More New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of The New York Times.

Johanna’s body of work is influenced by her travels and many homes over the years—from her birthplace Dallas to Kansas City, Los Angeles, Paris, London and now New York City. Her greatest inspiration however comes from individuals and their true stories. oShe began her career as a literary agent at Creative Artists Agency.