2017 Keynote Presenters

Anthony Doerr

“All the Light We Cannot See” - PRESENTATION SOLD OUT

Description of Presentation

Anthony Doerr’s latest novel, runaway New York Times best seller All the Light We Cannot See (2014), is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and finalist for the National Book Award and Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. The celebrated prose stylist brings his keen naturalist’s eye and his empathetic engagement with humanity’s largest questions to the parallel stories of Marie, a blind girl living in occupied France, and Werner, a German orphan whose extraordinary mechanical abilities earn him a place among the Nazi elite. The novel was on over a dozen year-end lists, including Barnes & Noble, Slate, NPR’s Fresh Air, Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, Kirkus, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor.

Author Biography

“Anthony Doerr writes beautifully about the mythic and the intimate, about snails on beaches and armies on the move, about fate and love and history and those breathless, unbearable moments when they all come crashing together.” – Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

Since the publication in 2002 of his first story collection, The Shell Collector, Anthony Doerr has been lauded for his lyricism, his precise attention to the physical world, and his gift for metaphor. Tamara Straus, a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, characterized Doerr’s literary ancestry as a combination of “Henry David Thoreau (for his pantheistic passions) and Gabriel García Márquez (for his crystal-cut prose and dreamy magic realism).”

Nature is also an important theme in Doerr’s novel About Grace (2004), the story of a scientist who flees the country after having a premonition that he causes the accidental death of his baby daughter. Doerr’s memoir Four Seasons in Rome (2007) is a carefully observed account of the year he spent as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, accompanied by his wife and infant twin sons. His second story collection, Memory Wall (2010), features characters from all over the world who are grappling with issues of preservation and extinction, permanence and evanescence.

Doerr’s fiction has been translated into over 30 languages, and is anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He was notified that he won the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters on the day his wife gave birth to newborn twins. He has won the Story Prize, which is considered the most prestigious prize in the U.S. for a collection of short stories, and The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, which is the largest prize in the world for a single short story. In 2007, the British literary magazine Granta placed Doerr on its list of 21 Best Young American Novelists.

Doerr has lectured at campuses all over the country on originality, the importance of failure, and the role of wonder in contemporary life. He is currently working on two novels, one set in 15th century Europe, and another set in the future. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Doerr now lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.

Photo Credit: Todd Meier

Links

• Elliott Bay Book Company
• Anthony Doerr's Official Web Page
• Anthony Doerr's Lyceum Web Page

Margot Lee Shetterly

“Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race” (moderated by Enrique Cerna of KCTS9) - PRESENTATION SOLD OUT

Description of Presentation

Audiences of all backgrounds will be captivated by the phenomenal true story of the black “human computers” who used math to change their own lives—and their country’s future. Set against the rich backdrop of World War II, the Space Race, the Civil Rights Era, and the burgeoning fight for gender equality, this talk brings to life the stories of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, who worked as mathematicians at NASA during the golden age of space travel. Teaching math at segregated schools in the South, they were called into service during the WWII labor shortages. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had jobs worthy of their skills at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, in Hampton, Virginia. Even as Jim Crow laws segregated them from their white counterparts, the women of this all-black “West Computing” group helped America achieve a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. They were part of a group of hundreds of black and white women who, over the decades, contributed to some of NASA’s greatest successes. 

In this keynote, Margot Lee Shetterly talks about race, gender, science, the history of technology, and much else. She shows us the surprising ways that women and people of color have contributed to American innovation while pursuing the American Dream. In sweeping, dramatic detail, she sheds light on a forgotten but key chapter in our history, and instills in us a sense of wonder, and possibility.

Author Biography

Writer, researcher, and entrepreneur Margot Lee Shetterly is the author of Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (2016). The highly anticipated film based on her book is in theaters now. It stars Taraji P. Henson (Empire), Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Costner.

Shetterly is also the founder of the Human Computer Project, a digital archive of the stories of NASA’s African-American “Human Computers” whose work tipped the balance in favor of the United States in WWII, the Cold War, and the Space Race. Shetterly’s father was among the early generation of black NASA engineers and scientists, and she had direct access to NASA executives and the women featured in the book. She grew up around the historically black Hampton College, where the women in Hidden Figures studied. Along with Aran Shetterly, Shetterly co-founded the magazine Inside Mexico. She graduated from The University of Virginia, and is a 2014 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow.

Links

• Elliott Bay Book Company
• The Lavin Agency - Margot Lee Shetterly

Doreen Carvajal

“The Quest: In Search of Religious Identity, Family Secrets, and Missing Tombs”

Description of Presentation

Deep in every family history is a mystery of who we really are. Doreen Carvajal's The Forgetting River (2013) is an unexpected and moving story of an American journalist who unravels her Catholic family's long-buried Sephardic Jewish ancestry in Spain. As Carvajal searches for proof that her family was forced through the Inquisition to convert to Christianity 600 years ago, she moves into a mystical white pueblo on Spain's southern frontier to crack the secret messages left by hidden Jews—an ancient cry from the past. She comes to understand that her family's history flows like a river through time—and that while the truth might be submerged, it is never truly lost.

Author Biography

Doreen Carvajal is a Paris-based, former reporter at The New York Times who has covered a wide range of stories, from tracking a Serbian war criminal to tracing the heirs of art looted during World War II. She applied her own investigative skills to crack her Catholic family's secret mystery of Jewish identity - a journey which led to the Inquisition archives in Madrid and the hidden tombs of her ancestors in Segovia, Spain.

Links

• Elliott Bay Book Company
• Doreen Carvajal's Official Web Page
• Article from The New York Times