Crime-fiction writer Tana French is the author of bestsellers like The Trespasser, The Witch Elm, In the Woods, and The Secret Place. Her new novel, The Searcher, brings all of French’s powerhouse atmospherics and characterization to a story that plays with the traditions of suspense fiction and won’t fail to keep readers guessing. It’s why the New York Times proclaimed, “She is in a class by herself.” French will be in conversation with fellow crime-fiction writer Ruth Ware.

Join us for a free Zoom reading and conversation with local luminaries Kathleen Flenniken, Tiffany Midge, and Donna Miscolta, moderated by Rena Priest. Each author plays with and against the standard assumptions of American identity—and as we roll toward this most critical of elections, what better time to examine how we learn to become Americans and the marks America leaves on our psyches?

One week after the 2020 presidential election, Yamiche Alcindor will join us for an online-only event to discuss the results. Alcindor is the White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour and a contributor for NBC News and MSNBC. She often tells stories about the intersection of race and politics, and has garnered national attention for her robust and sober questioning of President Donald Trump.

Yaa Gyasi is the author of Homegoing, one of the most celebrated debut novels of 2016. A riveting, kaleidoscopic novel, Homegoing is a story of race, history, ancestry, love, and time that traces the descendants of two sisters torn apart in eighteenth-century Africa across three hundred years in Ghana and America. Gyasi’s new book, Transcendent Kingdom, is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.

Maggie Smith is the author of four award-winning books: Lamp of the Body, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and Good Bones, named by the Washington Post as one of the Five Best Poetry Books of 2017. Her most recent book, Keep Moving, is a beautiful nonfiction work of quotes and essays, in which she writes about new beginnings as opportunities for transformation.

Madeline Miller is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, The Song of Achilles (2012), a reimagining of The Iliad, and Circe (2018), a feminist inversion of The Odyssey. In each book, Miller brings a fresh perspective to ancient tales, re-centering these stories on characters whose voices have been excluded from the narrative for thousands of years.

Gabrielle Hamilton is the chef/owner of Prune restaurant in New York’s East Village and the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. Anthony Bourdain called Blood, Bones & Butter “simply the best memoir by a chef. Ever.” Hamilton also writes for the New York Times on food, memory, and the restaurant industry.

Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for The New Yorker. At the magazine, Wright has written “some of the most astonishing journalism of our time,” according to journalist David Remnick, including reporting on al-Qaeda that shaped his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Looming Tower. Now, Wright presents the pandemic thriller The End of October, as packed with suspense as it is with the fascinating history of viral diseases.

Coming from Des Moines, Iowa – because, as he notes, “somebody had to” – bestselling Anglo-American author Bill Bryson has transformed narrative non-fiction for a generation with his witty, laugh-aloud-funny, observational writing. He has explored far-flung places from the Australian outback to the beginning of the universe itself. This time, in his latest book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants (2019), he turns his attention inwards to explore the human body, how it functions, and its remarkable ability to heal itself.

Award-winning poet, educator, and Cave Canem co-founder Toi Derricotte bravely tackles difficult and universal subject matter such as violence, racism, motherhood, and identity through an autobiographical lens.

The illustrator, author, and designer behind The Principles of Uncertainty, And the Pursuit of Happiness, and many a New Yorker illustration, Maira Kalman’s multi-faceted projects are filled with a sense of wonder, humor, and beauty.

The dynamic Douglas Kearney is a poet, performer, and librettist whose six books bridge thematic concerns such as politics, African American culture, the Trickster figure, and contemporary music. The format for this event will be a talk by Kearney, co-presented with the Bagley Wright Lecture Series.

The author of How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram X. Kendi is one of America’s foremost historians and leading antiracist voices. He is a #1 New York Times best-selling author and the Founding Director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University in Washington, D.C.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Natalie Diaz is the author of two poetry collections: When My Brother Was an Aztec and Postcolonial Love Poem. The New York Times Book Review called her most recent work “no doubt one of the most important poetry releases in years, one to applaud for its considerable demonstration of skill, its resistance to dominant perspectives and its light wrought of desire.”

“America’s funniest science writer” (Washington Post), the ever-curious and darkly irresistible Mary Roach is the author of books like Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, books that are about human beings as much as they are about the human body. Her forthcoming book is about the often fraught encounters between animals and people.

New Yorker staffer and investigative writer, Patrick Radden Keefe is the author of three books including the New York Times best-selling book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. The book is a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and its devastating repercussions. Keefe is also behind the new podcast, Wind of Change, about the wild story behind the classic metal ballad.

One of our most popular events of the year, each Moth Mainstage features simple, old-fashioned storytelling, by five wildly divergent raconteurs who develop and shape their stories with The Moth’s directors. Theme, host, and storytellers to be announced in spring!

Alberto Ríos is the author of fourteen books and chapbooks of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a memoir. He has garnered acclaim as a writer who uses language in lyrical and unexpected ways, containing elements of magical realism, to reflect on his Chicano heritage.

Ocean Vuong is a poet and fiction writer whose work considers class, queerness, family, and identity. His epistolary novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), was an immediate and enduring bestseller described by the Los Angeles Times as a “series of high notes that trembles exquisitely almost without break.”