On Thursday, April 12, you’re invited to our annual fundraiser, Pros&Conversation. Amidst hor d’oeuvres, cocktails, and mingling, we will host a conversation with four guest authors and our teen writers. Poised to be a captivating, nuanced, and inspiring, we want to prepare you for the conversation in advance. So let’s meet our authors!
Jabari Asim was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author of four books for adults and six books for children. His most recent works are What Obama Means…For Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Future (William Morrow, 2009) and A Taste of Honey: Stories (Broadway, 2010).
His poetry, drama, and prose have been widely published in various periodicals and anthologies. He was an editor for 11 years at the Washington Post, where he also wrote a syndicated column on politics, popular culture, and social issues. The editor-in-chief of the Crisis, the NAACP’s flagship journal of politics, culture, and ideas, he received a 2009 Guggenheim fellowship in Creative Arts. Most recently, he has taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a scholarin- residence. He is perhaps best known for having appeared twice on The Colbert Report.
Madeleine Blais, professor, earned a bachelor’s degree at the College of New Rochelle in 1969 and a master’s from the School of Journalism at Columbia University in 1970. She was a reporter for the Boston Globe, the Trenton Times and Tropic Magazine of the Miami Herald from 1979 to 1987. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing while at the Miami Herald. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in the class of 1986. She has written for the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Northeast Magazine in the Hartford Courant, Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, Nieman Reports, Detroit Free Press, Boston Globe and San Jose Mercury News. She is the author of In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle (1995), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in nonfiction and named one of the Top 100 sports books of the 20th Century by ESPN; The Heart Is an Instrument; Portraits in Journalism (1992); and Uphill Walkers: Memoir of a Family (2001), honored with a Massachusetts Book Award. She is a member of the advisory board for Goucher College’s MFA program in creative nonfiction and she serves on the editorial boards of Riverteeth and Doubletake: Points of Entry.
Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has covered more than 50 countries on five continents. His articles and books have led the Washington Post to place him “among the best in popular foreign policy storytelling.”
Kinzer spent more than 20 years working for the New York Times, most of it as a foreign correspondent. His foreign postings placed him at the center of historic events and, at times, in the line of fire. After leaving the Times in 2005, Kinzer taught journalism, political science, and international relations at Northwestern University and Boston University. He is now a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, and writes a world affairs column for The Boston Globe. In 2017, Kinzer published The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire. It describes America’s first great debate over military intervention abroad.
The University of Scranton awarded Kinzer an honorary doctorate in 2010. “Where there has been turmoil in the world and history has shifted, Stephen Kinzer has been there,” the citation said. “Neither bullets, bombs nor beating could dull his sharp determination to bring injustice and strife to light.”
Mira T. Lee‘s debut novel, Everything Here is Beautiful, was selected as an Indies Introduce title (Top 10 Debut for 2018) and Indie Next pick by the American Booksellers Association, and named a Top Winter/2018 Pick by more than 30 news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, O Magazine, Poets & Writers, New York magazine, Chicago Review of Books, Seattle Times, Buzzfeed, Marie Claire, Real Simple, and Electric Lit, among others. Her short fiction has appeared in journals such as the Southern Review, the Gettysburg Review, the Missouri Review, Triquarterly, Harvard Review, and American Short Fiction, and has twice received special mention for the Pushcart Prize. She has been the recipient of an Artist’s Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Missouri Review‘s Peden Prize.
