2021 Book Festival Authors
Mark Bittman
Animal, Vegetable, Junk
Mark Bittman is the author of 30 books, including the How to Cook Everything series and the #1 New York Times bestseller VB6. For 30 years, he was a food journalist and the lead magazine food writer at the New York Times. Bittman is currently Special Advisor on Food Policy at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
Orville Vernon Burton
Justice Deferred
Orville Vernon Burton is the prizewinning author of several books, including The Age of Lincoln. He is Judge Matthew J. Perry Jr. Distinguished Professor of History at Clemson University and Emeritus University Scholar and Professor of History at the University of Illinois.
Jelani Cobb
Jelani Cobb is a staff writer at The New Yorker and writes frequently about race, politics, history, and culture. His most recent book is The Essential Kerner Commission Report. He won the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, for his columns on race, the police, and injustice. He is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Armand Derfner
Justice Deferred
Armand Derfner is a nationally known civil rights attorney, arguing his first Supreme Court case in 1968. He has been counsel for, among others, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), and helped desegregate university systems and legislatures across the South.
Danielle Dreilinger
The Secret History of Home Economics
Danielle Dreilinger is an independent journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times and USA Today. She began her career in Boston writing for the Boston Globe, WBUR and WGBH. She was the education reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and a 2018 Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan.
Walter Isaacson
The Code Breaker
Walter Isaacson is the University Professor of History at Tulane and the past CEO of the Aspen Institute, where he is now a Distinguished Fellow, and has been the chairman of CNN and the editor of TIME magazine. He is chair emeritus of Teach for America. His bestselling books include Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Kissinger.
Adam Jentleson
Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate
Adam Jentleson is the Executive Director of Battle Born Collective and a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid. He began his career as a policy researcher and speechwriter for the John Kerry 2004 presidential campaign. He is also a columnist for GQ and frequent political commentator on MSNBC.
Sadeqa Johnson
Yellow Wife
Sadeqa Johnson, a former public relations manager, worked with well-known authors before becoming an author herself. Her debut novel, Love in a Carry-on Bag, was the recipient of the 2013 Phillis Wheatley award for best fiction. Other books include Second House From the Corner and And Then There Was Me. She teaches fiction writing for the MFA program at Drexel University.
John B. Judis
The Politics of Our Time
John B. Judis is Editor-at-Large of Talking Points Memo and a former senior writer at the National Journal, and former senior editor at The New Republic. He is the author of many books including The Socialist Awakening and The Populist Explosion.
Sebastian Junger
Freedom
Sebastian Junger is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Storm. Other books include Fire, A Death in Belmont, and Tribe. He is the co-director of the documentary film Restrepo, which was nominated for an Academy Award. He is also the winner of a Peabody Award and the National Magazine Award for Reporting.
Daniel Kahneman
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment
Daniel Kahneman is Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at the Woodrow Wilson School, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton, and a fellow of the Center for Rationality at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for integrating insights from psychological research into economic science. He is the author of the bestseller, Thinking Fast and Slow.
Cecilia Kang
An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination
Cecilia Kang is an award-winning New York Times reporter covering technology and regulatory policy out of Washington. Before joining the paper in 2015, she reported on technology and business for the Washington Post.
Senator Amy Klobuchar
Anti-Trust: Taking on Monopoly Power
Senator Amy Klobuchar is the senior US senator from Minnesota. She serves as the Chairwoman on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights. She is also the Chairwoman of the Senate Rules Committee. Along with then Rules Committee Chair Senator Blunt, she led the inauguration of Joe Biden. Before serving in the Senate, Senator Klobuchar headed the largest prosecutor’s office in Minnesota for eight years.
Elizabeth Kolbert
Under a White Sky
Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. Her writing for The New Yorker has earned her two National Magazine Awards. She is currently a visiting fellow at Williams College.
Congressman Andy Levin
Congressman Andy Levin is an attorney and politician who serves as the U.S. Representative for Michigan's 9th congressional district. His work has been devoted to championing the working class, human rights and green energy. He serves on the House Committees on Education and Labor, and Foreign Affairs.
Andrew Marantz
Antisocial
Andrew Marantz is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has worked since 2011. His work has also appeared in Harper's, New York, Mother Jones, the New York Times, and other publications. He is a contributor to Radiolab and The New Yorker Radio Hour.
Heather McGhee
The Sum of Us
Heather McGhee is political commentator and strategist, and senior fellow with inequality-focused think tank, Demos. She is a regular contributor to NBC News. She now chairs the board of Color of Change, the nation's largest online racial justice organization.
Louis Menand
The Free World
Louis Menand is a critic, essayist and professor, best known for his Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club, an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America. He is a professor of English at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2016, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.
Torrey Peters
Detransition, Baby
Torrey Peters holds an MFA from the University of Iowa and an MA in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth. Her debut novel, Detransition, Baby has been met with critical success and was long-listed for the prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Deesha Philyaw
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies received the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction and received the 2020/2021 Story Prize and an LA Times Book Prize.
Patricia Sullivan
Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy’s America in Black and White
Patricia Sullivan is the William Arthur Fairey II Professor of History at the University of South Carolina where she specializes in modern US history. She is the author of Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement; Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era; and Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years.
Brandon Taylor
Filthy Animals
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novel Real Life, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, as well as The National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize and the 2021 Young Lions Fiction Award. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow.
Simon Winchester
Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World
Simon Winchester is a journalist and the author of many bestsellers, including The Professor and the Madma, A Crack at the Edge of the World, and Krakatoa. In 2006, Winchester was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty the Queen.