Past Events

Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose

Nov14

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Lindsey Fitzharris — Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes - with Raychelle Burks — at Conn Ave

3:00 PM • Saturday, November 14, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

The untold story of the Edinburgh doctor who became Arthur Conan Doyle's model for Sherlock Holmes, and his adventures in the criminal underworld of Victorian Britain.Throughout nineteenth-century Edinburgh, the surgeon Joseph Bell was known for his extraordinary talent for detection and diagnosis. To the amazement of onlookers at the Royal Infirmary, he could read a patient’s ailments, occupation, and personal habits from a single glance. Though such deductive powers were all quite “elementary” to Bell, they had a profound influence on the medical student and budding writer Arthur Conan Doyle. Soon enough, Bell’s methods helped spark the creation of fiction’s most iconic detective.Since Sherlock Holmes first appeared in 1887, he has become a global phenomenon. Yet the man Conan Doyle credited as Sherlock's prototype has slipped into the shadows. In Sleuth-Hound, the New York Times bestselling author Lindsey Fitzharris brings Bell center stage, recounting how his work took him from ward to witness box as a medical detective probing murder and misdeeds. He worked closely and covertly with the police surgeon Henry Duncan Littlejohn and a pioneering ballistics expert named Dr. Watson, and even collaborated with Conan Doyle to overturn a homicide conviction. Bell’s forensic investigations took him from gaslit alleyways to Gilded Age drawing rooms, put him on the trail of poisoners and child killers, and even drew him into the hunt for Jack the Ripper.By scrutinizing a scratch on a desk, a trace of cigar ash, or the slightest peculiarity of a man’s gait, Bell could turn the smallest clues into revelations. His sharp mind forever changed the way we read bodies, detect crimes, and serve justice.Lindsey Fitzharris is the bestselling author of The Butchering Art and The Facemaker. Dr. Fitzharris, who holds a Ph.D. in the History of Science and Medicine from Oxford University, regularly writes for the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, the Guardian, the Lancet, and other major publications. She is also the writer and host of the Smithsonian Channel TV series The Curious Life and Death of….Fitzharris will be in conversation with Raychelle Burks. After working in a crime lab, Dr. Burks returned to academia, teaching, and forensic science research. Her research is focused on the development of field-ready detection techniques for controlled substances and latent fingerprints. She was recently selected as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar for 2026-2027 for Australia. For the Royal Society of Chemistry's magazine Chemistry World, Dr. Burks writes a science-meets-true crime column called “Trace Analysis”. An in-demand science communicator, Dr. Burks regularly appears on TV, in podcasts, at large genre cons such as DragonCon and GeekGirlCon, and other venues to converse on chemistry, forensic science, and STEM meets pop culture. She is the 2020 recipient of American Chemical Society’s Grady-Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public. This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov14

PastPanelWashington, DC

Azadeh Moaveni — The East Wing: Power, Intrigue, and the Untold Story of America's First Ladies - with Roxanne Roberts — at Conn Ave

1:00 PM • Saturday, November 14, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

This event was moved from 10/22/26.An in-depth examination of women and power in Washington through the lens of the complex relationship between First Ladies and their staffs by Pulitzer finalist Azadeh Moaveni.It could be said that every First Lady runs a court—a hub of political power within the White House, a place where enterprising aides vie for influence and patronage, a theatre of intrigue and counsel where great heights are uniquely possible, but so too is ruin. And the First Lady's aides are at the center of it all.Behind the scenes throughout history, East Wing staffers have boldly advanced civil rights legislation, defused tension with America’s enemies, brought more women into government, and backed abortion rights. Their relationships and problems, their management and cultivation of the media landscape and the Georgetown social scene, are at the heart of the forces that have shaped the institution of the East Wing.In The East Wing, academic and journalist Azadeh Moaveni blends original reporting, including extensive interviews with key players from past East Wings, with expert research and analysis to take readers deep inside the fascinating and high stakes world of the First Lady’s office like never before.Spanning the most defining decades of the twentieth century, from the New Deal era, to the myth-making Kennedys, to the turbulent, MAGA-influenced 2020s, The East Wing is the captivating true story of the First Lady’s staffers and their role in the executive branch of governance, as well as the evolution of female leadership in our country.Azadeh Moaveni is Associate Professor of Journalism at New York University, where she directs the program in Global Journalism. She has traveled the world for two decades covering women’s movements across three continents, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine, writing extensively about gender and women’s quest for political leadership. She has served as correspondent for TIME magazine and the Los Angeles Times, a fellow at the New America Foundation, and Director of the Gender and Conflict program at the International Crisis Group, where her work examined how global first ladies influence policy. A Pulitzer finalist, she is the author of Lipstick Jihad, Honeymoon in Tehran, and most recently, Guest House For Young Widows, which was short-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Folio Rathbone Prize, and long-listed for the Orwell Prize in Political Writing. Her writing appears regularly in The London Review of Books, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.Moaveni will be joined in conversation with Roxanne Roberts, a reporter covering Washington's social, political and philanthropic power brokers. She has been at The Washington Post since 1988, working for the Style section as a feature writer and columnist, including the society columns “Reliable Source” and “Out and About.” One of the city’s preeminent chroniclers of society and power, she has covered seven First Ladies, and often appears as a formidable panellist on the NPR quiz show, “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!”. This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov13

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

James Gleick — The Telephone: A New History - with Jennifer Ouellette — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Friday, November 13, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell spoke the words “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you” into a contraption he called the telephone, and for the first time a voice was carried along a wire. This feat has long been celebrated as a triumph of individual ingenuity and vision. In fact, the invention was a contest replete with bribery, fraud, and speculation, and no one, not even its inventors, realized what it was good for or how ubiquitous it would become.Over the next century, the phone would prove less an invention than a continuous revolution. It would teach us new words (starting with the once-unfamiliar “hello” and “goodbye”) and a new way to speak, with instant reaction, instant feeling, instant possibilities. It would create an all-female profession—the operator—that by 1920 outnumbered nurses and waitresses put together. It would enable the skyscraper, the world war, the assembly line, and the multinational corporation. And the Bell System would become the largest monopoly in history: the sole owner of every phone in America. The science that Bell Labs created around the telephone, from pulsing wires to glowing vacuum tubes to the electronic transistor, would usher in the Information Age.Along the way, the telephone changed human nature. It augmented our bodies, a prosthetic extension of mouth and ear. It gave us the party line, the busy signal, dial tones, wiretapping, the late-night D.J., and the booty call. It magnified the possibilities of government, of business, of friendship, of love.For a while, the revolution was so successful that it made telephones themselves seem natural, eternal. They settled into the background, on bedside tables, desks, and kitchen walls; in subways and on corners; in novels, movies, songs, and on TV. No one could remember life without them.Today we are more dependent than ever on little objects called phones, although their ability to make “telephone calls” is incidental. The phone book and the phone booth may be vanishing from memory, but as James Gleick shows, the telephone’s legacy is deeply ingrained—in our networks and our sophistication about networks, in the primacy of information, in the need for connection. Gleick is celebrated for his uncanny ability to make complex ideas vivid, understandable, and concrete. In The Telephone: A New History, he gives us a revelation: a story of technological breakthroughs that is also a universal history of intimate life.James Gleick is a historian and biographer whose books include The Information, winner of the Royal Society and PEN/America science-writing prizes, and Chaos, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist. They have been translated into thirty languages. He lives in New York and London.Gleick will be in conversation with Jennifer Ouellette, a senior reporter at Ars Technica, with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. She has been writing professionally about physics and related topics for more than two decades, and was the founding director of the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange from 2008-2010.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov12

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Nick Paumgarten — The Intangibles: Friendship, Fatherhood, and the Love of the Game - with Evan Osnos — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Thursday, November 12, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

Over the past two decades, Nick Paumgarten has become one of The New Yorker’s most admired and popular staff writers. He brings to journalism what great novelists bring to fiction: an instinct for character, a respect for complexity, and an eye for the telling moment. The Intangibles is his memoir told through the oddly illuminating lens of hockey. Not a book about hockey, really, but one in which a lifetime of obsessively hanging around the game — as player, parent, son, coach, fan, middle-aged white guy in New York, person of privilege, an imperfect man among other imperfect men — provides a vivid and sneaky-exotic window into a cultish world that hides in plain sight. It’s an alternate realm of aspirational vigor and prolonged boyishness, of plucky brutishness and occasional violence, a haven and a release from the pressures of adulthood and city life.In The Intangibles — the name of Paumgarten’s beer league team — we meet an array of hockey-crazy men trying to make their way through the world with the baggage that’s been laid on them by the men who came before, and the growing knowledge that they have laid their own baggage on their sons. Striped through the book are surprising veins of vulnerability, reflection, and reckoning.The Intangibles is also a timely, sharp, and witty exploration of masculinity, of boys and men, and of sons and fathers, of both the toxic and nontoxic kinds. It is a deep, questioning look at a certain world of male friendship, in which sport becomes the common language for a group of men who otherwise might not have one. Paumgarten both explores and undermines some of the mythologies of manhood and sport, while creating a fresh, honest, and funny portrait of men at play — the kind of competitive pursuit that defies logic, age, orthopedics, and the responsibilities of grown-up life.Nick Paumgarten is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He lives in Manhattan. The Intangibles is his first book. Paumgarten will be joined in conversation with Evan Osnos has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008. His most recent book is The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich.

Nov11

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Andrew Roberts — Napoleon and His Marshals: Victory, Rivalry, Betrayal - with Michael F. Bishop — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Wednesday, November 11, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

The award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Churchill vividly captures the team of rivals who propelled history's greatest warrior to victory.Napoleon appointed twenty-six men Marshals of the Empire, a position he created to honor his most important Generals. He encouraged competition among them for titles, for wealth, but above all, for glory. Only instead of creating a team of rivals, as Lincoln so famously did, he forged a nest of vipers. A masterful biographer with a gift for capturing flawed heroes in all their vitality and self-delusion, Andrew Roberts invites us into the lives and loves of these elite warriors, whose rivalries shaped the fate of Europe. The marshals were the swords behind Napoleon's throne. Their valor burnished his aura of invincibility. Through their lives we follow the rise and fall of one of history's most captivating leaders, who forged an empire greater than Caesar's from the embers of France's first failed effort at democracy. Napoleon rose to power amidst the fervor and mayhem of the French Revolution, bringing order after years of violence and upheaval. He established new laws, championed new technologies, and pioneered new approaches to government and education, but his defeat ushered in the return of autocratic absolutism. Was he a genius or a tyrant? From the vantage point of his marshals, the answer may be both. Over a quarter of Napoleon's Marshals died violent deaths. Only two would be at his side at Waterloo. But many would remember what it was like to be there, fighting to make a new world. Napoleon and his Marshals is a profound exploration of transformative leadership by a man uniquely gifted at rallying the troops, who fatefully mistrusted those whose loyalty he needed to survive.Andrew Roberts is the author of four New York Times bestsellers: Churchill: Walking with Destiny, Napoleon: A Life, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, and Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare 1945 to Ukraine, co-authored with General David Petraeus. He is the Bonnie and Tom McCloskey Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he hosts the podcast 'Secrets of Statecraft with Andrew Roberts'. A Distinguished Fellow at the New York Historical Society's Lehrman Institute and member of the House of Lords, he is the Chair of the Conservative Party's Committee on Teaching History in Schools and an Honorary Citizen of Texas.Roberts will be in conversation with Michael F. Bishop, a historian, consultant, and ghostwriter. He is the former executive director of the International Churchill Society and the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, and his reviews and articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, National Review, and elsewhere. This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov10

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Nelio Biedermann — Lázár - with Marcellus Rolle — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Tuesday, November 10, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

This event will be in partnership with the Embassy of Switzerland.An “astonishing…disturbingly dreamlike” (Daniel Kehlmann, The Director) debut, inspired by the author’s own family story—a gothic, inter-generational family saga capturing the rise and fall of an aristocratic Hungarian family against the backdrop of the two world wars.“Lázár is an exquisite and masterly pronouncement that a gifted young writer walks among us.” — Patti SmithAt the turn of the 20th century, the Lázárs welcome their newest member in their rural summer estate, surrounded by a menacingly dark, enchanting forest. Lajos von Lázár is a baby boy with translucent skin and light-blue eyes who looks nothing like the rest of his family. Sándor, the imposing patriarch, is ashamed of his son’s peculiarity. Ilona finds her baby brother quite ugly. Mária is terrified that her son’s uncanny resemblance to the stagehand who died a couple weeks earlier might spell disaster. While Imre, Sándor’s brother whose otherworldly foresight is often confused for insanity, is struck by visions of a great catastrophe.Lajos’s birth is emblematic of the many secrets, affairs, and peculiar otherworldly happenings that plague the Lázárs. As the decades go by, they will continue to fall prey to their desires, leading grand lives, and experiencing even greater tragedies as they’re swept by the tides of war and revolution that befall their country. But time and again, in the lighter years, extraordinary love and hope shine through.Masterfully written and deeply haunting, Lázár is a magisterial novel that presents the sweeping history of a nation through the lives of one extraordinary family.Nelio Biedermann, born in 2003, is the author of Anton will bleiben and Lázár. Originally published in Germany, Lázár is an international sensation and was an instant bestseller. It won the 2025 Favourite Book of Independent Booksellers award and is being translated into more than twenty-five languages. A native of Zurich, Biedermann is studying German literature and film at the University of Zurich.Biedermann will be joined in conversation with Marcellus Rolle, a Head for Communications and Public Policy in the Embassy of Switzerland in the United StatesThis event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov9

PastWorkshopWashington, DC

Chinelo Okparanta — This Impossible Life — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Monday, November 9, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

From the acclaimed author of Under the Udala Trees, a profoundly moving, unforgettable new epic following the aftermath of one catastrophic moment in the lives of two siblings.Eleven-year-old Alohan and his four-year-old sister Ivie are the children of a rainmaker, who performs elaborate rituals to bring or hold back the rain. One day, the rainmaker's luck runs out: it pours on the wrong person’s wedding, and the repercussions for him and for his wife who accompanies him to the wedding are deadly.Orphaned and alone, Alohan is quickly forced into an early adulthood, charged with providing for and protecting Ivie. The two siblings become each other’s entire worlds, bound by loss and loyalty. But just as they begin to build a life for themselves, a lapse of judgment leaves them entangled with a wealthy couple’s nefarious scheme. The two are set on drastically different paths, constricted by the ruthlessness of those who hold great power and privilege, and those who are underfoot – who must, and will, do anything merely to survive. What unfolds is an incredible journey of crime and betrayal, misunderstanding and misfortune, spanning continents and decades: from Nigeria to the United States to Italy, and from the homes of the wealthy elites, to those of the destitute—crossing paths, at each turn, with those who steal, con, and traffic in lives.At the novel’s heart is the love between Alohan and Ivie. Told with captivating force, insight, and compassion, This Impossible Life is a gripping saga of two siblings’ survival, and of whether the love that binds them will be enough to overcome the most unforgiving of fates.Chinelo Okparanta was born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Her debut short story collection, Happiness, Like Water, was nominated for the Nigerian Writers Award, long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, as well as the Etisalat Prize for Literature. Her first novel, Under the Udala Trees, was nominated for numerous awards, including the Kirkus Prize and Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. She has published work in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, the Kenyon Review, AGNI, and other venues, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she is currently Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Swarthmore College.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov8

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Thomas Frank — The Creativity Con: How Innovation Became America's Biggest Racket — at Conn Ave

5:00 PM • Sunday, November 8, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

From the best-selling and always-prescient author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal comes a bold indictment of America’s chronic obsession with creativity and innovation, showing how these beloved ideas came to dominate our political and economic conversation, all while serving to mask inequality and protect elite interestsInnovation and creativity have been the defining watchwords of American exceptionalism for decades, used by business thinkers, tech gurus, military strategists, educators and urban planners to describe our unique standing in the world. While other countries supposedly suffer from regimentation and a fatal lack of imagination, the United States is often portrayed as an unmatched dynamo of new ideas and products. In his new book, Thomas Frank disabuses us of this notion, offering a bold account of the way creativity and innovation have been used as a kind of ideological cover for policies that reinforce the class system.Frank charts the construction of America’s glamorous self-image from Sputnik to Silicon Valley, Apple to Lockheed Martin, Madison Avenue to Main Street, Richard Florida to Donald Trump. He deconstructs the innovation agendas touted by politicians; reads the books of pop psychology; tours SXSW, the mecca of creativity where musicians mingle with Pentagon officials; and looks in on the cafes, sidewalk murals, and bike lanes that populate the neighborhoods built for the creative class. Along the way, Frank uncovers the insidious effects of centering innovation and creativity in our rhetoric while, in practice, nurturing exactly the opposite. In the name of these noble goals, he shows, our leaders have reoriented the American economy around white-collar knowledge work, cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulated banks, off-shored manufacturing, reoriented cities, and destroyed what is truly creative about this country. Deeply original, marked by Frank’s signature brilliance and acerbic wit, Progressland is a troubling X-ray of postwar American business and political culture — and a crushing indictment of the clichés that have undergirded its many failures.Thomas Frank is the bestselling author of What’s the Matter With Kansas?; Listen, Liberal; The People, No; and other books. Frank is a founding editor of The Baffler, a former columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and has written regularly for Harper’s, The Guardian, and Le Monde Diplomatique. He lives outside Washington, DC.This event is free with first come, first serve seating. To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov8

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Mary Morton — Cassatt Reconsidered - with Dorothy Kosinski — at Conn Ave

3:00 PM • Sunday, November 8, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

A sweeping reconsideration of the artist we thought we knew—and the forces that obscured her legacy.Fiercely ambitious and independent, Mary Cassatt defied expectations to become one of the most radical artists of the Impressionist movement, though she was—and remains—the least understood. Cassatt commanded and manipulated strains of old master and contemporary painting to express her female subjectivity through a brilliantly modern oeuvre on par with those of the most revered Impressionists. However, mishandled by the Parisian art establishment during her lifetime, and later by art historians and curators, she became known almost exclusively as a sentimentalizing painter of mothers and children.How did this happen to the most aspiring, revolutionary female artist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? In Cassatt Reconsidered, author Mary G. Morton probes this central question and more, demonstrating how Cassatt disturbed conventional ideals of femininity, childhood, and maternity, an uncompromising feat for which she paid dearly during her lifetime and in the annals of art historiography.Vibrantly illustrated with more than 100 images, Cassatt Reconsidered rewards readers with a fuller understanding of an artist who stands apart for daring to express, on her own terms, the unique, intimate experiences of modern women.Mary G. Morton is curator and head of the French paintings department at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She is the coauthor of Paris 1874 (2024). In 2018, the French government awarded her the title Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.Morton will be in conversation Dorothy Kosinski, Director Emerita of The Phillips Collection, where she served as director from 2008 to 2023. An internationally recognized art historian and curator, she previously held positions at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Douglas Cooper Collection in Basel, Switzerland. Kosinski was appointed by President Barack Obama to the National Council on the Humanities and has received both the Order of the Italian Star and France’s Ordre des Arts et Lettres. A widely published scholar and curator, she was a Getty Museum Scholar in Residence in 2024.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov8

PastStory TimeWashington, DC

Kate Hosford - You and I are Stars and Night - At Conn Ave

10:30 AM • Sunday, November 8, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

Join us for a story time and an art activity!About the Book: Bathtime turns into a magical expedition as the grown-up and child embark on the voyage together, meeting mermaids in the sea, playing hide-and-seek in an enchanted forest, and soaring with the birds before sailing home to read and snuggle in for bedtime, which they know is just another adventure beginning.Through it all, they cherish the most important thing in both dreamland and the real world: being together in a loving, playful, and imaginative relationship.About the Author: Kate Hosford is an award-winning author of many children's books and poetry collections. She is a graduate of Amherst College and Vermont College of Fine Arts where she earned her MFA. Kate lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Nov7

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Steve Winter — Big Cats - with Sharon Guynup — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Saturday, November 7, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

Come face-to-face with lions, tigers, and more in this gorgeous retrospective collection of narrated images from a renowned National Geographic photographer.170 photographs, the best of Steve Winter’s award-winning images of the world’s charismatic felines, jump off the pages of this powerful large-format book.National Geographic photographer Steve Winter has spent his career photographing big cats around the world, from the fierce jaguars of Brazil’s Pantanal to the elusive Himalayan snow leopard. His photographs astound; his stories, even more so. In Big Cats, Winter and wildlife journalist Sharon Guynup share experiences behind the lens.In chapters on every key species—cougar, jaguar, leopard, snow leopard, tiger, and lion—readers will witness the power of Winter’s work, including uplifting stories of how his photographs have made a difference and powered important conservation efforts on behalf of these mighty creatures, including: The famous photo of P-22, the cougar in front of the Hollywood sign, which inspired a wildlife crossing spanning 10 lanes of two L.A. highwaysPhotos of tiger abuse and trafficking behind a tourist trap in a Thai temple, which led the government to shut down the businessPhotos of American lion and tiger amusement venues, dangerous to visitors and inhumane to the cats involved, which prompted exposés including the Tiger King documentary and led to a U.S. law banning big cats as petsWinter and Guynup’s work has changed the world—and it continues to awe and inspire us. But you don’t have to be a serious-minded conservationist to be pulled into their new book. All animal lovers—especially those who love cats, big and small—are invited to look deeply into the eyes and lives of these iconic species, chronicled in this beautiful keepsake book.Steve Winter has won numerous international awards, including BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year and BBC Wildlife Photojournalist of the Year. He lectures internationally on photography and conservation issues and has been interviewed on CBS Nightly News, 60 Minutes, NPR, BBC, and CNN. He contributes regularly to National Geographic magazine, for which he can spend months working on a single story. He’s camped for weeks in steamy jungles, vast grasslands, and at 15,000 feet in the Himalayas to capture cats’ stunning beauty and secret behaviors. He lives in Hoboken, NJ.Winter will be in conversation with Sharon Guynup, an award-winning journalist and producer. She covers wildlife, ecosystems, conservation initiatives, climate change, zoonotic disease and other environmental issues. As a global fellow with the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program and China Environment Forum, Sharon works at the intersection of environmental issues and public policy. Sharon is also a photographer, produces multimedia, and acts as contributing producer on TV and film projects, most recently, National Geographic Channel's TRAFFICKED series, and she lectures widely. Sharon has co-authored three books with Steve Winter, “Tigers Forever: Saving the World’s Most Endangered Big Cat,” “The Ultimate Book of Big Cats,” and “Big Cats”––and created and launched “The State of the Wild” book series. Her work has led her into investigative work, including an investigation for National Geographic into wildlife trafficking from the infamous Tiger Temple in Thailand, which prompted officials to shut it down and seize the monastery’s 147 tigers.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov7

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Gerald J. Steinacher — The Pope Against Nuremberg: How the Vatican Helped Nazis Escape Postwar Justice - with Richard Breitman — at Conn Ave

5:00 PM • Saturday, November 7, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

How Vatican officials aided Nazi war criminals and undermined Allied justice after World War IIIn the aftermath of World War II, the Nuremberg Trials promised a new era of international justice, holding Nazi leaders to account for their crimes. Yet beyond the courtroom, a very different struggle was unfolding--one that played out behind the walls of the Vatican.Provocative and meticulously researched, The Pope Against Nuremberg uncovers how the Vatican shielded Nazi war criminals, undermined the principles of the Nuremberg Trials, and ran ratline networks that spirited perpetrators to safety under the cover of Christian mercy. Drawing on newly opened Vatican archives, as well as government and intelligence records from Europe and the Americas, Gerald Steinacher reveals a campaign that would benefit some of the most notorious Nazi perpetrators by helping them avoid prosecution.Church officials petitioned Allied leaders, including the U.S. president, submitted statements for the defense, coordinated public relations campaigns, resisted extraditions, and, in some cases, sheltered wanted war criminals on Church property. Meanwhile, Pope Pius XII, long criticized for his alleged public silence during the Holocaust, urged the world to "forgive Germany." Steinacher places these actions within the turbulent politics of early Cold War Europe, when fear of communism increasingly outweighed the pursuit of accountability for mass crimes. Combining groundbreaking research and compelling storytelling, The Pope Against Nuremberg provides new answers to decades-old questions about the role and motivations of church officials in the networks that helped Nazis escape justice.Gerald J. Steinacher is the James A. Rawley Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has published eighteen books, including Nazis on the Run, which won the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category.Steinacher will be in conversation with Richard Breitman, distinguished professor emeritus at American University. His most recent book is A Calculated Restraint: What Allied Leaders Said About the Holocaust.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov5

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Laurence Leamer — Ladies' Man: The Careless Heart of John F. Kennedy — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Thursday, November 5, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

From the New York Times bestselling author of Capote’s Women, a penetrating examination of President John F. Kennedy’s complicated, tumultuous life as told through the lens of the fascinating women he lovedJohn F. Kennedy was a born leader—bold, charismatic, and able to charm with nothing more than a witty phrase and a winning smile. He was also obsessive, manipulative, and haunted by complex desires for shiny, remarkable women, collecting them voraciously and carelessly, then dismissing them summarily, on his rise to the White House.But these women were perhaps the only witnesses to the real JFK—and it’s time their stories were finally told. Bestselling biographer Laurence Leamer knew three of Kennedy’s mistresses, and Ladies’ Man reveals JFK’s harrowing, intimate life with unprecedented access.From youthful indiscretions at boarding school, early connections with such beautiful aristocratic European women as Inga Arvad and Gunilla von Post, marriage to the stately Jacqueline Bouvier, romances with Pamela Turnure and Diana de Vegh, liaisons with mafia moll Judith Exner and East German spy Ellen Rometsch, to his relationship with Marilyn Monroe shortly before her death, JFK’s affairs were multifaceted and often tragic. His cautious public persona contrasted sharply with his reckless personal life, where he took bewildering chances that could have destroyed his presidency.No one who reads Ladies’ Man will ever think about John F. Kennedy the same way again.New York Times bestselling author Laurence Leamer is a leading biographer of the celebrated and powerful, and his books include Capote’s Women, Hitchcock’s Blondes, Warhol’s Muses, Madness Under the Royal Palms, and The Kennedy Women, among many other books. He lives in Washington, DC, and Palm Beach, Florida.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov4

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

John Reeves — Grant's Betrayal: Power, Corruption, and the Theft of the Black Hills — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Wednesday, November 4, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

The controversial story of the secret conspiracy inside Ulysses S. Grant’s White House that led to the theft of the sacred Black Hills from the Lakota people, set against a backdrop of brazen corruption, Lakota resistance, and Gilded Age greed.A riveting account of the secret, rapacious conspiracy that led to the theft of the sacred Black Hills, Grant’s Betrayal is set against a backdrop of brazen corruption, Lakota resistance, and Gilded Age greed. This unfamiliar story is about capitalism and fraud at the time of America’s first centennial. It’s also about loss. Over a period of several decades, the Lakota people lost most of their land, their bison herds, and their liberty to roam over their once-expansive territory. After initially pursuing a “Peace Policy,” the Grant administration dramatically reversed course, choosing to pressure the Lakota people into relinquishing the Black Hills after the discovery of gold there in 1874. Referring to the unjust land grab by the Grant administration, a U.S. Court of Claims declared, a century later in 1975: “The duplicity of President Grant’s course and the duress practiced on the starving Sioux, speak for themselves. A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history.”Grant’s Betrayal sheds new light on the shocking dispossession of Indigenous lands by corrupt politicians, aggressive military commanders, and Gilded Age capitalists hungry for gold. The heroic resistance offered by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other Native American luminaries is central to the story as well. This poignant narrative helps us better understand what it means to be an American by reconsidering an unjust and regrettable chapter of our history.John Reeves is the author of A Fire in the Wilderness and The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee. He has taught European and American history at Lehman College, Bronx Community College, and Southbank University in London. John received an MA in European History from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. You can learn more about him at john-reeves.com. He lives near Washington, DC.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov3

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Gaël Faye — Jacaranda — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Tuesday, November 3, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

A young man journeys from Paris to Rwanda to discover the truth about his family’s past in this bestselling, prize-winning novel from internationally renowned Rwandan-French novelist and hip-hop artist Gaël Faye.Milan—the twelve-year-old son of a French father and a Rwandan mother—blames flunking his exams on the emotional toll of the genocide in his mother’s homeland. In truth, his mother never talks about Rwanda; the violence is an abstraction that only reaches their French suburb through television broadcasts. That is, until Milan meets Claude, a small boy with a bandaged head whom Milan’s mother introduces as a cousin who has come to France seeking medical treatment. Milan embraces him as the brother he’s always wanted—until, one day, Claude is sent back to Rwanda without warning, leaving him heartbroken and confused.Four years later, the boys reunite as teenagers when Milan visits Rwanda for the first time with his mother in the wake of her divorce and discovers a more fractured and vibrant community than he could have imagined. But the trip raises more questions for him than it answers—about family, the war, and its aftershocks. Over the course of many years, Milan will return to Rwanda again and again, compelled to unearth the secrets that have taken root in the shadows of long silences, confront the past, and imagine a new future.Partly inspired by acclaimed author Gaël Faye’s own relationship with Rwanda and its history, Jacaranda is a rich and deeply felt portrait of a man seeking to understand his family and his nation as it heals from the unthinkable.Gaël Faye was born in 1982 in Burundi to a French father and Rwandan mother. In 1995, after the outbreak of the civil war and the Rwandan genocide, the family moved to France. An author, songwriter, and hip-hop artist, he released his first solo album, Pili Pili sur un croissant au beurre, in 2013. His first novel, Small Country, was an international bestseller awarded numerous literary prizes, including the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov2

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Stephen Kinzer — Boiling Point: How America Brought War to Ukraine — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Monday, November 2, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

From bestselling author Stephen Kinzer, the untold story of the secret 75-year American campaign that set the stage for war in UkraineUntil the Russian invasion in 2022, few Americans could find Ukraine on a map. Once the fighting began, however, support for its cause surged. The reason was clear: Russia was the aggressor, Ukraine its victim.Yet this war did not explode out of nowhere. For seventy-five years, Moscow and Washington have fought over Ukraine. It is the most sustained covert conflict in modern history. Both sides sought to keep this story secret. They succeeded—until now.In his groundbreaking new book, Stephen Kinzer tells this long-hidden story. Beginning in the refugee camps of postwar Europe, where CIA officers recruited their first Ukrainian agents, it follows generations of rebels, exiles, traitors, and covert operatives through decades of clandestine missions. Although nearly all of the guerrilla warriors that the CIA sent into Ukraine were captured or killed, it never gave up. From the late 1940s through the end of the Cold War, American leaders saw Ukrainians as one of their most effective weapons against Moscow. They continued to press that strategy after Ukraine’s independence and the eastward expansion of the US-dominated NATO alliance.Richly detailed and plot-driven, Boiling Point shows how the United States made Ukraine its most important European project of the twenty-first century, culminating in the escalation that led to war. From battlefields in the Carpathians to smoke-filled offices in New York to the Olympic Games, it is full of the wild stories and improbable characters that made All the Shah’s Men a classic. This is the last great untold spy-versus-spy story of our time.Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning writer and correspondent who has reported from 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 postings placed him at the center of historic events and, at times, in the line of fire. His ten books seek to uncover the roots of global conflicts. Most are accounts of American interventions abroad— how they were carried out and what their long-term effects have been. He is a Senior Fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University and writes a world affairs column for The Boston Globe.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov1

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

S.B. — I Am Drawing You: A Mother, a Child, a Sketchbook - with Matthew Klam — at Conn Ave

5:00 PM • Sunday, November 1, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

I Am Drawing You: A Mother, A Child, A Sketchbook is a deeply original and moving hybrid creation—equal parts art book and personal essay. Just ten days after she gave birth, S.B. began drawing her son as he nursed, napped, and awoke to the world. What began as a physical balancing act—supporting her infant’s head and her sketchbook with her left arm while drawing him with her right—soon became a tender chronicle of her child’s first five years. In more than two hundred spontaneous, sensitive, and occasionally comical line drawings, we watch this new human sleeping, crawling, and trying out possible transitional objects. In an engaging introductory essay, S.B. describes—with light doses of psychoanalytic theory, drawing pedagogy, and art history—what her practice meant to her and what it might mean to others. Sketching one’s child at close range requires a paradoxical mix of physical attachment and mental detachment, which S.B. sees as a magical elixir that can help anyone overcome the anxiety, alienation, and (yes) boredom of new parenthood. Indeed, she believes she has found the "fountain of maternal bliss," and she wants to share it with you. I Am Drawing You: A Mother, A Child, A Sketchbook is the perfect gift for new and expectant mothers and fathers!S.B. is an artist and author known primarily for her playful criticism and her anthropomorphic graphic novels. Her writing, published in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and Artforum, has been widely anthologized. She studied drawing at the New York Studio School and the Art Students League and has lectured at Parsons School of Design, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the American Psychoanalytic Association. This is her first book of sketches from life.S.B. will be in conversation with Matthew Klam, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert Bingham/PEN Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts. His first book, Sam The Cat and Other Stories, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year in the category of first fiction, was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, Esquire Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Kansas City Star, and by the Borders for their New Voices series. His second book, Who Is Rich?, was selected as Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and The Washington Post, was nominated for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was named a best book of the year by Vogue. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, GQ Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. He currently teaches at Stony Brook University, and in the New Directions Program in Washington, DC. He’s taught creative writing in many places including Johns Hopkins University, St. Albans School, American University, and Stockholm University in Sweden. This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov1

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Joey Clift — We've Been Here the Whole Time!: A Not So Sacred Guide to All Things Native America - with Caty Borum — at Conn Ave

3:00 PM • Sunday, November 1, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

Peabody and Emmy-nominated Native comedian Joey Clift takes you on a journey to discover the largest population you don’t know in his hilarious debut for fans of Michael Harriott, Mo Rocca, and Phoebe Robinson. Foreword by Shane Hawk, writer and co-editor of Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology!Put away the construction paper: This contraband book is here to teach you everything your high school refused to teach about Native American history, people, and culture. From misunderstood figures like Pocahontas, to sports mascots, to the Land Back movement, to how cool Lily Gladstone is, this hilarious NDN-approved guide is the first of its kind––illustrated in an irreverent, textbook-meets-notebook style by Diné artist Julie Fiveash. Sharewith your loved ones and transform your boring Thanksgiving into a big “You’re Welcome” dance party!Joey Clift (Cowlitz tribe) walks you through a wide range of information that will answer provocative questions and debunk Americans' wildest assumptions, like: “Native American” or “American Indian”: What the heck do we call you?Is it appropriate to do a Land Acknowledgement over Zoom?Why saying “I’m 1/16th Cherokee” is like saying you’re “1/16th Californian’Columbus Day is a holiday for a guy who was bad at pretty much everythingAre Native American people extinct? No! Stop asking!This giftable, conversation-starting book is perfect for history buffs, teachers, and comedy lovers alike. Funny, fearless, and deeply informative, Joey Clift’s debut reminds readers that Native people aren’t just part of history—they’ve been here the whole time.Joey Clift is a Los Angeles-based comedian, TV writer, director, Peabody and Emmy-nominated producer, and enrolled member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe. Joey attended college to become a local TV weather person because he didn’t see any Native American comedians on television as a kid, and that made him believe he wasn’t allowed to work in comedy. He has since proven otherwise, writing for critically acclaimed TV series like Spirit Rangers on Netflix, Molly of Denali on PBS and Paw Patrol on Nickelodeon. Joey created Gone Native, a Webby-winning Comedy Central Digital series and his short films have screened everywhere from Just for Laughs to the Smithsonian Museum.Clift will be in conversation with Caty Borum, Executive Director of the Center for Media & Social Impact (CMSI), and Professor at American University’s School of Communication. She is the author or co-author of four books about entertainment, documentary, and comedy in social justice and human rights, including the latest: Radical Reality: Documentary Storytelling and the Global Fight for Social Justice (Oxford University Press, 2025), co-authored with David Conrad-Perez. In 2019, she co-founded and now co-directs, with Mik Moore, the Yes, And…Laughter Lab (YALL) and YALL Comedy Fest, which lifts up diverse comedians. In 2020, she was named to DOC NYC’s inaugural list of New Documentary Leaders, a recognition given to 16 members of the global documentary industry who have made a substantial positive impact on the field. Her research and creative media programs have been recognized with seven Anthem Awards for mission-driven media work; one Telly Award (silver); a Signal Award (gold) for We Disrupt This Broadcast, the podcast co-created and co-directed by the Center for Media & Social Impact and the Peabody Awards; and multiple book awards.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct31

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Michael Dobbs — The Six Minute War: Reagan, Russia, and the Race to Automate Armageddon - with David Hoffman — at Conn Ave

5:00 PM • Saturday, October 31, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

This event was moved from 10/28/26 at The Wharf.New York Times bestselling author Michael Dobbs reconstructs the thrilling inside story of the climactic nuclear crisis of the Cold War, revealing the tension between “the human in the loop” and the algorithms that could trigger World War III.The year is 1983. Ronald Reagan is obsessed by biblical prophecies of Armageddon. A computer revolution is changing everything—from the way we track incoming ballistic missiles to how we share and consume information. And then, over just three months, a series of dramatic events encapsulates the president’s worst nightmares.In rapid succession, a South Korean airliner is shot down over the Soviet Union after straying off course because of pilot-computer miscommunication. A glitchy Soviet early warning system mistakenly reports an incoming US missile attack. The Kremlin puts its nuclear forces on high alert in response to a routine NATO nuclear release exercise. Reagan deploys missiles capable of destroying the Kremlin in six minutes from their launch positions in West Germany. Soviet nuclear submarines are stationed off Cape Hatteras, ready to obliterate the White House in the same amount of time.“Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to unleash Armageddon!” Reagan recalled many years later, in a little-noticed passage in his memoirs. “How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?”In The Six Minute War, the former Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post explores the challenge confronting fallible human leaders responding to ever-shrinking warning times of a nuclear attack. A nail-biting narrative of the Cold War crisis that heralded the fall of the Soviet Union, The Six Minute War poses an existential question: can we trust the machines at such life-or-death moments—or will we be destroyed by our own technological hubris?Michael Dobbs was born and educated in Britain. He was a longtime reporter for The Washington Post, covering the collapse of Communism as a foreign correspondent. He has taught at leading American universities, including Princeton, the University of Michigan, and Georgetown. His previous books include the bestselling One Minute to Midnight on the Cuban missile crisis, which was part of an acclaimed Cold War trilogy. He lives outside Washington, DC.Dobbs will be in conversation with David E. Hoffman, a contributing editor and member of the editorial board of The Washington Post. He was previously assistant managing editor, foreign editor, Jerusalem correspondent, Moscow bureau chief, and White House correspondent for the newspaper. He is the author of The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, which won the Pulitzer Prize, The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal, a New York Times bestseller, and The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia. This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct31

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Kim Roberts Meikle — The District's Departed: A Guidebook to DC Cemeteries - with Laura Brower Hagood — at Conn Ave

3:00 PM • Saturday, October 31, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

The definitive guidebook to celebrated and obscure cemeteries in and around the nation’s capitalPerfect for the “tombstone tourist,” this guidebook to eleven cemeteries in and around the District of Columbia offers informative walking tours of these places of repose and reflection, mapping each cemetery’s distinct character derived from the landscape, the local community, and the historical era in which it was established, and showcasing exquisite artistic and architectural styles.Kim Roberts Meikle notes how the purposes these cemeteries were designed to serve are interwoven with our histories of race, class, religion, and military service. Tours include Arlington National Cemetery, with its rigid formats for design reflective of a shifting understanding of public memorialization after the ravages of the Civil War; historically Black cemeteries such as Mt. Zion Methodist, where those frequently excluded from municipal or private cemeteries were laid to rest and lovingly remembered; and cemeteries notable for their magnificent funerary art such as Oak Hill and Rock Creek. With these engagingly written walking tours, Meikle vividly shows what the living can learn from the dead.Kim Roberts Meikle is a freelance literary historian, writer, and editor living in Washington, DC. She is the author of A Literary Guide to Washington, DC.Meikle will be in conversation with Laura Brower Hagood, executive director of the DC History Center, who has 25 years of experience as a nonprofit leader and cultural entrepreneur, including a well-established track record in development, audience engagement, and community building. She joined the organization in April 2020, in the early days of the pandemic. Laura was previously vice president of development at the National Building Museum.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct30

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

What’s Next for American Democracy? — William Kristol & María Teresa Kumar moderated by Judy Woodruff — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Friday, October 30, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

Join us for a special conversation with three of the nation's most compelling voices on democracy—a leading conservative commentator, a pioneering advocate for voting rights, and one of the most respected leaders in American journalism—as they come together for a candid conversation about American democracy.The stakes for American democracy are high. What can we expect over the next weeks and months? Can our institutions hold? What sort of pro-democracy coalition is required to meet this moment? What are the compromises such a coalition might need to make? What are the sacrifices?There could not be a more important time for this conversation. Kristol, Kumar, and Woodruff all come to this moment along different paths yet share a conviction that democracy is imperiled, must be preserved, and ultimately will require people power, working together in ways large and small.Kristol and Kumar are Senior Fellows, and Woodruff is the Kay Fanning Fellow in Journalism and Democracy, at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, a nonpartisan operating foundation with a mission to advance inclusive democracies worldwide.William Kristol is editor-at-large of The Bulwark, where he’s lead author of the must-read daily newsletter, Morning Shots. Kristol is also founding director of Defending Democracy Together, an educational and advocacy organization dedicated to defending America’s liberal democratic norms, principles, and institutions, and a Charles F. Kettering Foundation senior fellow.Kristol has long been recognized as a leading participant in and analyst of American politics and has helped shape the national debate on issues ranging from American foreign policy to the meaning of American conservatism. He founded The Weekly Standard in 1995 and edited the influential conservative magazine for over two decades. Before that, he served in senior positions in the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations.Prior to coming to Washington, DC, in 1985, Kristol taught politics at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. He received his undergraduate degree and doctorate from Harvard University.María Teresa Kumar is the founding President and Co-Founder of Voto Latino and Voto Latino Foundation, the nation's premier Latino youth advocacy and voter registration organizations, which together have registered nearly 1.8 million voters.An Emmy-nominated MSNOW analyst and Senior Fellow at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, Kumar serves on the boards of Steve Madden, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. She previously served on President Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing and currently serves on the National Task Force on Election Crises. She is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.Her honors include Forbes' 50 Over 50: Impact, TIME's 13 Latinos Reshaping the Country, Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, and recognition as one of Carnegie Corporation's Great Immigrants.Raised in Sonoma, California, Kumar is a first-generation college graduate of UC Davis and holds a master's degree from Harvard's Kennedy School.Moderating the discussion will be Judy Woodruff, senior correspondent and former anchor and managing editor of the PBS NewsHour. A distinguished journalist for more than five decades, Woodruff is nationally recognized for her integrity, reporting, and media leadership. She is the recipient of numerous awards, among them a Peabody Journalistic Integrity Award and an Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award. Woodruff is the Charles F. Kettering’s Katherine W. Fanning Fellow in Journalism and Democracy.In early 2023, Woodruff stepped away from her anchor duties to devote her time to a new reporting project, “Judy Woodruff Presents: America at a Crossroads,” trying to understand our country and its people better and probing why Americans seem so divided. She has also continued to report on challenges facing people with disabilities.The first 100 attendees to visit our registers before the event will receive a complimentary Kettering Foundation tote bag and a copy of Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.This event is free with first come, first served seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct29

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Daniel Cox — Generation Uncoupled: America's New Gender Divide and the Crisis of Human Connection - with Elena Moore — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Thursday, October 29, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

A sweeping and empathetic portrait of the new gender divide, from a top pollster and cultural commentator—with key insights into what the gap means for the future of relationships, family life, and democracyIn Generation Uncoupled, a leading researcher on American public life investigates the alarming distance between young men and women in America. Drawing on years of original research, wide-ranging interviews, and extensive public writing, Daniel Cox traces how Gen Z men and women are being pulled apart—on campus, in dating culture, and across the political spectrum. Women are more empowered, ambitious, and vocal than ever before, but more anxious about their personal autonomy and rights. Men face growing uncertainty about their roles, identity, and place in modern society. What emerges is a generation caught between rapid technological innovation, widespread cultural change and deepening mistrust.From the fallout of the "Me Too" movement and the loneliness crisis, a transactional dating culture, online harassment, and the illusion of endless choice, Generation Uncoupled explores how young adults have come to fear each other as much as they desire connection. Cox unpacks how family life, gender roles, and romantic norms have been reshaped by an immersive digital culture, a broken politics and overstructured childhoods—and how rising social disconnection has only made things worse. Along the way, he introduces readers to the young people behind the statistics: anxious, avoidant, and often deeply alone.But this isn’t just a story of what’s broken—it’s a call for a cultural reset. With rigor, compassion, and a refusal to take sides, Generation Uncoupled challenges political orthodoxy and media narratives alike. If we want to rebuild trust—between men and women, between left and right, and across generational lines—we must understand how we got here. This is the definitive book for anyone trying to make sense of a generation shaped by freedom, fractured by fear, and longing to connect.Daniel Cox is the director and founder of the Survey Center on American Life and a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Under his leadership, the center is focused on public opinion and survey research on a variety of topics, including the emerging gender divide among young adults, dating and relationships, and social connection. He lives in Washington D.C. with his wife and two sons. He is an unapologetic fan of Chelsea F.C.Cox will be in conversation with Elena Moore. Moore is a political reporter assigned to NPR's Washington Desk. She covers breaking news at the White House, Congress and other government agencies for all NPR platforms. She is also a leading national reporter covering young voters and youth politics. As part of NPR's 2024 election team, Moore traveled around the country reporting on emerging political trends and top issues for young Americans who hold a wide range of political viewpoints. Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, Moore covered the first Gen-Z candidates to run for Congress. During the 2020 election cycle, she did both reporting and production as a researcher for the Washington Desk. She is also a former producer of the NPR Politics Podcast. Before coming to NPR in 2019, Moore worked at NBC News. She is a former Paul Miller Reporting Fellow at the National Press Foundation and a graduate of The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Moore is originally and proudly from Brooklyn, New York.This event is free with first come, first serve seating. To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct29

PastReadingWashington, DC

Marie Lu - Mortal Things - in conversation with Jessica Spotswood - at Conn Ave

6:00 PM • Thursday, October 29, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

About the Event: An evening with Marie Lu as she introduces her exciting new adventure in the world of gods. She will be joined by fellow YA author Jessica Spotswood. A purchase of the book through P&P is needed to join the singing line.About the Author: Marie Lu is the bestselling author of many Young Adult novels, including Legend and Stars and Smoke. She graduated from the University of Southern California and initially jumped into the video game industry, working for Disney Interactive Studios as an artist. Now a full-time writer, she spends her spare time reading, drawing, playing games, and getting stuck in traffic. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.Jessica Spotswood is an eidtor and author of many Young Adult historical fantasy novels including The Cahill Witch Chronicles. Jess lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and she works for the DC Public Library.

Oct28

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Lawrence Wright — at Redemption: Faith, Justice, and Sisterhood on Death Row - with Glenn Frankel — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Wednesday, October 28, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

A powerful and startling account of the unlikely connection between a convent of cloistered nuns and the condemned women on Texas’s death row, exploring questions around crime and punishment, faith, and retribution in America as only Lawrence Wright canIn the fall of 2014, Deacon Ronnie Lastovica visited a women’s prison in Gatesville, Texas and gave communion to the women on death row. Moved by the meeting, the Deacon vowed to return weekly, but he knew he couldn’t help these women alone. He called upon the Sisters of Mary Morning Star, a group of contemplative nuns in Waco, Texas, to visit the seven condemned women with him. What followed is an incredible story of a spiritual alliance between two groups of women living uniquely similar lives. In these pages, Lawrence Wright takes us into the death row unit, laying bare these women’s daily lives, histories, and their horrific crimes. Some of the women wrestle with the guilt of the suffering they caused, others fiercely maintain their innocence. As Wright learns more about their cases, unethical police practices and improper forensic methodologies pose disturbing questions of whether some of the condemned women actually committed the crimes for which they’re paying the ultimate price.Clear-eyed and rousing, layered and morally complex, Wright explores ideas of retribution, spirituality, and the ultimate question of absolution.Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a playwright, a screenwriter, and the author of ten books of nonfiction, including The Looming Tower, Going Clear, and God Save Texas, and four previous novels, The Human Scale, Mr. Texas, The End of October, and God's Favorite. His books have received many honors, including a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower. He and his wife are longtime residents of Austin, Texas.Wright will be in conversation with Glenn Frankel. Frankel worked for many years for The Washington Post, serving as bureau chief in Richmond VA, London, Southern Africa and Jerusalem, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. He has taught journalism at Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin, where he directed the School of Journalism. He is the author of five books, has won a National Jewish Book Award and was a Motion Picture Academy film scholar for his most recent book, Shooting Midnight Cowboy. This event is free with first come, first serve seating. To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct27

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Janet Reitman — The Inheritance: An American Tragedy in Five Acts - With Annie Karni — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Tuesday, October 27, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

A stunning work of narrative nonfiction that traces the lives of nine Americans over three decades, offering a vivid account of a nation in crisis—from award-winning New York Times Magazine writer Janet Reitman A thrill-seeking former Navy pilot chases adventure in Afghanistan, while in suburbia, his teenage son spirals into extremism. The grandson of African freedom fighters joins the FBI to save America from terrorism and ends up terrorizing the African immigrants he’d sworn to protect. A young Marine who sees himself as a true-blue American goes to war in Iraq, comes home broken, and is reborn as white nationalist. An idealistic young attorney defends a Palestinian engineer she believes is wrongly accused of funding Hamas. These four people, and five others, struggle to find their way in a country reimagining itself in the wake of 9/11. In The Inheritance, Janet Reitman, the bestselling author of Inside Scientology, delivers an intimate and urgent account of American disillusionment—and a paean to hope. From the bucolic suburbs of Boston to the immigrant enclaves of Dallas, from the deserts of Iraq to the encrypted chatrooms that fuel hatred and extremism, The Inheritance unfolds in repeating narratives of people moving through the decades, from the end of the Reagan era to the present day, painting a sweeping and deeply affective portrait of how a country revered for its democratic ideals became a nation defined by its fears. Rigorously reported and brimming with novelistic detail, The Inheritance reveals the hidden cost of the war on terror, exposing the psychic wounds that haunt us to this day.Janet Reitman is an award-winning journalist and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. Formerly a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, she has twice been a finalist for the National Magazine Award and was a fellow at the New America Foundation. Reitman’s previous book, Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion, was a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book.Reitman will be in conversation with Annie Karni, a congressional correspondent and a former White House correspondent for The New York Times. She is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller “Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man with Rats in His Walls Broke Congress”This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct26

PastReadingWashington, DC

Rachel A. Shelden — The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History - with Steve Vladeck — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Monday, October 26, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

Today's Supreme Court justices bristle at the label "politicians in robes," insisting that they operate above the fray of partisan politics. But for the first century of the nation's history, the Court was unmistakably a political institution, both by design and in practice. Justices were fully expected to engage in partisan politics--there was no concern that such engagement would lead to corruption or undue bias--and they remained deeply involved in civic debate and the electoral process while on the bench. In addition to hearing cases in the capital, each justice spent much of his time "riding circuit" and presiding over federal trial courts. On circuit and in Washington, nineteenth-century justices wrote for partisan newspapers, drafted legislation, advised partisan allies, campaigned for colleagues, and even ran for political offices from the bench. Through these political interactions, members of the Court helped shape debates about the Constitution's meaning at a time when most Americans did not believe in judicial supremacy.In this sweeping history, Rachel A. Shelden, one of America's leading voices on the history of the Court, brings readers inside the social and political world of its justices, recovering their essential role in the era's turbulent politics. She also charts shifts at the turn of the twentieth century, when members of the Court and the legal community refashioned the judiciary as an apolitical institution, setting the stage for an increasingly more powerful--and more isolated--modern Court. The Political Supreme Court is required reading for anyone interested in the legal and political underpinnings of today's judicial power.Rachel A. Shelden is associate professor of history and director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University. A leading scholar of nineteenth-century America, Shelden is a member of the Historians Council on the Constitution at the Brennan Center for Justice.Shelden will be in conversation with Stephen I. Vladeck, the Agnes Williams Sesquicentennial Professor of Federal Courts at the Georgetown University Law Center, is a nationally recognized expert on the Supreme Court, the federal courts, national security law, and military justice. He is the author of The Court We Need: What's Really Wrong With the Supreme Court—and How to Fix It, forthcoming from Viking Books on May 4, 2027, and of the New York Times-bestselling The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic. He serves as CNN’s Supreme Court analyst and writes One First, a popular weekly newsletter about the Court. And he is the inaugural holder of the National Institute of Military Justice’s Professor Edmund Morgan Chair in Military Justice.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct25

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Roz Chast & Jason Adam Katzenstein — The Two Saddest Kitchens: A Comics Conversation — at Conn Ave

5:00 PM • Sunday, October 25, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

#1 New York Times bestselling, award-winning author Roz Chast teams up with her fellow New Yorker cartoonist Jason Adam Katzenstein to rip the Tupperware lid off what's really going on in their kitchens.The kitchen is the “heart of the home,” or at least it's supposed to be. But wait! What's that lurking under the sink? Behind the cabinets? In the back of the refrigerator?! When celebrated New Yorker cartoonists Roz Chast and Jason Adam Katzenstein confessed to each other that their kitchens were far from Martha Stewart perfect, they knew they couldn't be the only ones cracking under the pressure of their pressure cookers.In The Two Saddest Kitchens, Roz and Jason combine their hilarious cartoon sensibilities to take (chicken) stock of everything from tragic pantries to the secret double life of Mr. Clean. Let Roz and Jason guide you through their divine kitchen comedy as they ponder the fancy utensils that will never be used, the recipes that will never be followed, and the dream kitchens that exist only on the astral plane, which is maybe for the best.Roz Chast’s cartoons began appearing in the New Yorker in 1978, where she has since published more than one thousand. She is the author of the graphic memoirs Can We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, a #1 New York Times bestseller (100+ weeks), a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize winner and finalist for the National Book Award; National Bestseller I Must Be Dreaming; Going Into Town (Winner of the New York City Book Award); What I Hate: From A to Z; and her cartoon collections The Party, After You Left and Theories of Everything, among others. She was awarded the Harvey Hall of Fame Award. She lives in Connecticut and New York.Jason Adam Katzenstein is a cartoonist and comedy writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times and MAD Magazine. He is the author and illustrator of the graphic memoir Everything Is an Emergency.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct25

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Robin Maril — A Queer Guide to Saving American Democracy - with Charlotte Clymer — at Conn Ave

3:00 PM • Sunday, October 25, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

Since the early 2000s, American courts and legislatures have delivered a series of generation-defining LGBTQ legal victories. Today, this progress and the very institutions that made it possible are under attack. A Queer Guide to Saving American Democracy is an introduction to this democratic crisis, speaking directly to the queer and transgender people navigating the intensifying political and cultural fault lines. It argues that the current denigration of queer and transgender lives in the US is a symptom of the broader degradation of American democracy, representing the newest threat of American fascism. By centering queer and trans identity in the larger history of authoritarianism, the book highlights the strategic villainization of nonconforming groups as a tool to consolidate power and political control. In response, this book empowers readers to adopt pro-democracy frameworks rooted in the defiant authenticity and stubborn joy of queer existence, forging pathways committed to transformative social change.Robin Maril is a writer and Constitutional Law professor based in Portland, Oregon. Her work engages questions of democratic integrity and the growing threat of fascism and authoritarian regimes within America. She also hosts the podcast A Queer Guide to Saving Democracy. She is a widely recognized scholar on LGBTQ rights and policy, Executive power, and the law of democracy. Before teaching, Robin worked in the LGBTQ civil rights movement at the Human Rights Campaign for nearly a decade. Robin began her legal career as a Presidential Management Fellow at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. She and her wife have two sons, two dogs, and an unknown number of snails. She is a proud graduate of the University of Oklahoma and Temple University Beasley School of Law.Maril will be in conversation with Charlotte Clymer, a writer and activist. She's the author of Charlotte's Web Thoughts, an award-winning Substack blog on politics, religion, and foreign policy.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct24

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Brian Jay Jones — The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building - with David O. Stewart — at Conn Ave

5:00 PM • Saturday, October 24, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

An in-depth exploration of history of the US Capitol building and the incredible personalities who built it, full of dramatic stories, surprising facts, and offering a powerful testament to what the Capitol has meant to generations of Americans, and how it’s endured.The Capitol is a unique biography of a place, encompassing architecture, history, politics, popular culture, and race in a fascinating exploration of our Capitol's secret history; a history rife with political intrigue, assassination attempts, thwarted bombings, and gunmen on the run. Never mind ghostly cat prints, mysteriously bloodstained steps, and charming “fairy doors” that have delighted visitors for hundreds of years. Spanning across three centuries of American history, it focuses on iconic and easily recognizable names and personalities from the past—from George Washington to Davy Crockett to Ronald Reagan—as well as countless colorful characters readers may not have heard of before, with a focus on restoring the stories of enslaved people and recognizing their contributions. The story of the Capitol is the story of America itself, and, for the first time, that story will be told in this sweeping, aspirational biography of the building at the very heart of the American experiment.Brian Jay Jones is the critically acclaimed, bestselling biographer of some of the world’s most iconic creative geniuses. Born in the Midwest and raised in the Southwest, Brian has a degree in English from the University of New Mexico. He spent more than two decades as a public policy analyst and speechwriter for thought leaders and elected officials at all levels of government, including nearly ten years in the US Senate. He presently lives in New Mexico.Jones will be in conversation with David O. Stewart, who has published eleven award-winning and best-selling books of history and historical novels. In 2023, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Washington Independent Review of Books. His most recent fictional series, the Overstreet Saga, is inspired by family stories his mother told. He lives in Maryland with the light of his life, Nancy Floreen; they have three children and six grandchildren.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct24

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Roberto Tejada & Christina Wiginton — Art & Water: Volume 2 - with Kaira M. Cabañas — at Conn Ave

3:00 PM • Saturday, October 24, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

Essays, personal meditations, and images that explore water in all its renewing, destructive, corrosive, and connecting powerWater and its transmutations link the contributions in Art & Water, the second volume in the series Art & from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. The series situates the study of art at the intersection of various disciplines—here, they include modernist literature, poetry, film, and both natural and built environments. Essayists use water to address hydrolatry practices in India; ritual objects and practices of enslaved Afro-Surinamers; traces of millstones in the architecture of Seville; and visualizations of sea-level change in the nineteenth-century United States. Their research places art within broader conversations in the humanities considering a water-oriented rather than terrestrial historical framework.The book is enlivened by first-person narratives that examine deeply embedded meanings of water. Continuing the series’ tradition of exciting book design, an enclosed poster from Brazilian multimedia artist Aline Motta addresses ancestry, memory, and belonging across the Black Atlantic while compellingly conjuring water’s capacity to transform, bring together, and renew. Water as a connective theme offers a fitting lens to advance understandings of how art, as both material object and practice, remains entangled with the natural, supernatural, and scientific—and, like water, remains inseparable from our daily lives.Distributed for the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual ArtsRoberto Tejada is an award-winning poet and the author of art histories that include Along the Diagonal: Art / Essays / América (2026), National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (2009), as well as the poetry collections Carbonate of Copper (2025), Why the Assembly Disbanded (2022) and Exposition Park (2010). A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Tejada serves as the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston, where he teaches creative writing and art history.Christina Wiginton is an art book publishing specialist focused on color-critical print production for visually ambitious museum publications and nonfiction books. She has worked extensively in illustrated book development, first at the Smithsonian Institution and now at the National Gallery of Art.Tejada and Wiginton will be in conversation with Kaira M. Cabañas, the award-winning author of several volumes, including Immanent Vitalities: Meaning and Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Art (2021), which received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award. Her previous work, Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art (2018), was recognized as a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. Since 2023, she has served as Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Publications at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.This event is free with first come, first serve seating. To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct23

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Claudia Castro Luna — The Flowers Along the Way: A Memoir — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Friday, October 23, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

This event will be in partnership with Salvadoran Cultural Institute.Passionately demonstrating the dormant trauma of political violence and the redemption waiting beyond itFrom El Salvador’s lush countryside to the streets of Oakland, California, a young mother wrestles with the intersecting forces of memory, history, and language in order to chart a new path for herself and her growing family. Fleeing political unrest and civil war violence in El Salvador, fourteen-year-old Claudia Castro Luna arrived in the United States with her family in 1981. Two decades later, holding her two-year-old and pregnant with her second child, she survives a public shooting by hiding behind shrubs in front of her house in Oakland. This event unleashes disorienting and traumatic memories, plunging her into a journey of discovery as she grapples with PTSD, recovers family stories, and begins to make sense of all that was torn asunder within her by the experiences of war and emigration. Beauty, longing, fear, and joy entwine in this powerful story of love, self-determination, and the search for home.CLAUDIA CASTRO LUNA is a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, a former Washington State Poet Laureate, and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet. She is the author of the poetry collections Green, the World; Cipota Under the Moon; Killing Marías; One River, A Thousand Voices; and This City, a chapbook. Her nonfiction has appeared in anthologies, journals, and newspapers. Born in El Salvador, Castro Luna lives and dreams in English and Spanish.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct22

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Raj Haldar - What Rhymes with Pterodactyl?: The Worst Rhyming Book Ever - in Conn Ave

10:30 AM • Thursday, October 22, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

About the Book: Ptolemy the Pterodactyl loves to write rhyming poetry and rap. He’s discovered that there are lots of tricky words in the English language like orange, gulf, and circus that don’t rhyme with anything. But, using slant rhyme and internal rhyme, Ptolemy and his crew of hip-hop word nerds have figured out how to make the most unrhymable words rhyme. When you read this book, be sure to make up some zany rhymes of your own, and you’ll be a rapper too! About the Author: Raj Haldar is an American rapper, composer, and producer, and best selling children's author. His first book book was P Is for Pterodactyl. bAlso known by his stage name Lushlife, Haldar is from Philadelphia, PA.Ages 3 - 7

Oct21

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Claudia Rankine — Triage - with Sarah Blake and Kali Cyrus — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Wednesday, October 21, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

A groundbreaking new direction for Claudia Rankine, the best-selling author of Citizen and Just UsClaudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet.Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of collapse: Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, “collapse” takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.Triage is an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for action in our time of relentless loss. “No matter our posture,” Rankine writes, “we are all among the rubble.” This is a book for those complicated but beautiful friendships that we come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.Claudia Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Her work has appeared recently in the Guardian, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and a contributing editor of Poets & Writers. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016. Rankine is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.Rankine will be in conversation with Sarah Blake and Kali Cyrus.Sarah Blake is the author of Full Turn, a book of poems, and three novels: Grange House, and the New York Times bestsellers, The Postmistress and The Guest Book. She lives in Washington, DC.Kali D. Cyrus, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins and practices in the DMV area. Known for her disarming sense of humor and grounded clinical, academic, and personal experience, she brings nuance to public conversations about race, identity, and conflict. She is also featured on Showtime’s hit series Couples Therapy as an on-screen consultant.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct20

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

April Ryan — Notes on a Blacklash: When a Black Woman Goes Viral — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Tuesday, October 20, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

The veteran White House correspondent follows up Black Women Will Save the World with a gripping, soul-baring, and deeply personal examination of online misogynoir—specific and relentless online bullying attacks based solely on race and gender.Notes on a Blacklash is veteran White House reporter April Ryan’s gripping, soul-baring look at what happens when the world suddenly turns its full attention on you. This isn’t just the story of one viral moment with President Trump. It’s about the avalanche that follows: the scrutiny, the emotional and physical toll, and the way your identity can become fuel for headlines and hashtags.April pulls back the curtain on what it truly costs to be seen and what it takes to survive it. With vulnerability and power, she recounts the moments that made her go viral, not because she chased attention, but because she showed up authentically. Her presence, her truth, and her refusal to shrink under pressure struck a chord and sparked cultural firestorms.From a high-stakes press room showdown to the history-making decision by Vice President Kamala Harris, from the public disrespect of Stevie Wonder to the slap heard around the world, April explores how race, gender, and power collide in a world addicted to outrage and instant opinions.At its core, this book explores visibility—its price, its power, and the fight to reclaim your story when millions are watching. What does it mean to go viral when your hair is politicized, your voice is policed, and your very existence is treated as a threat? Sometimes, this is what it feels like when the spotlight finds you: uninvited, unrelenting, and impossible to ignore.White House Correspondent April Ryan has a unique vantage point as the only Black female reporter covering urban issues from the White House—a position she has held since the Clinton era. April can be seen almost daily on CNN as a political analyst and is the Washington, DC, Bureau Chief for The Grio. She has been featured in Essence, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Elle magazine, and other top publications, has served on the board of the prestigious White House Correspondents Association, and is an esteemed member of the National Press Club. April is the author of the award-winning book, The Presidency in Black and White, and At Mama’s Knee: Mothers and Race in Black and White. She lives in Baltimore County, Maryland.

Oct20

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Paula Chase - Off Balance - in conversation with Ciera Burch - at Conn Ave

6:00 PM • Tuesday, October 20, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

About the Book: Teammates Selena and Leesh must navigate rumors, new teammates, and social media gossip while preparing their school team for the elite Diamond Cup gymnastics competition. The pressure is on to win, can these girls pull off a win?About the Author: Paula Chase is the author of nine critically acclaimed Upper Middle Grade and YA novels including the first in this series, Balancing Act. A Maryland native, she is the cofounder of The Brown Bookshelf, a site designed to increase awareness of African American voices writing for young readers.Ciera Burch is the author of many children's and teens books, including Something Kindred and Out of Step, into You. She has a B.A from American University and an MFA from Emerson College. Originally from New Jersey, she currently resides in Washington, D.C. with her stuffed animals and far too many books.Ages 14+

Oct19

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Yiyun Li — Music Against the Night: A Novel (The Nocturne Trilogy) - with Rabih Alameddine — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Monday, October 19, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

This event is in partnership with PEN/Faulkner Foundation.Figures of the past find new life in Yiyun Li’s thrillingly imagined saga following two musicians as they mature, study, travel, love, grieve, and, above all, chase their ambitions.In Dublin, as the eighteenth century nears its end, a young musical virtuoso comes of age. John Field, an awkward and sensitive child, is preternaturally gifted, and his family has visions of him becoming the next Mozart. His talent takes him far—to England, France, and then Russia, where he becomes a famous pianist and composes dreamy, languorous melodies that enchant the night air. John calls them nocturnes, but the prodigy who immortalizes them is Chopin.Oceans away in Pondicherry, in French India, Adelaide Percheron has a startling rise of her own. Orphaned at a young age, she is raised by her imperious, enterprising grandmother. Her cousins give her the name Percherette, an impish reminder that despite their shared relations, Adelaide is not one of the crowd, owing to her parents’ differing ancestry. Without a connection to aristocracy or the luxury of riches, only marriage seems to offer prosperity—until she sets her sights on a pianoforte. Driven by her secret love of music and a desire to see the world, Percherette engineers her exodus, escaping to Paris and later to Moscow, as Napoleon’s army sets out to conquer the continent.Peopled by rival prodigies, irate tutors, begrudging guardians, and the true-to-life masters of the trade, Yiyun Li’s magisterial, polyphonic novel depicts two aspiring musicians—destined to be husband and wife—in pursuit of success. Their struggles unfold amid political and artistic upheaval and pit them against the forces of their time. As John and Adelaide each try to chart a path between talent and genius, success and legacy, profit and passion, they must decide what, and even who, is worth sacrificing along the way. Drawing inspiration from the past but finding entirely new forms, Music Against the Night comes to life with the sweep and dimension of the Romantic era and a deep understanding of the demands of living and of art.Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction—Wednesday’s Child; The Book of Goose; Must I Go; Where Reasons End; Kinder Than Solitude; Gold Boy, Emerald Girl; The Vagrants; and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers—and the memoirs Things in Nature Merely Grow and Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Faulkner Award, a PEN/Malamud Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham–Campbell Prize, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.Li will be in conversation with Rabih Alameddine, the author of the novels The Wrong End of the Telescope; The Angel of History; An Unnecessary Woman; The Hakawati; I, the Divine; and Koolaids, as well as the story collection The Perv. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages. His most recent awards include the 2019 Dos Passos Prize, the 2021 Lannan Prize for Fiction, the 2022 Pen/Faulkner award and the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award in March 2025. He divides his time between his bedroom and his living room. He is co-editing The Penguin Book of the International Short Story, forthcoming from Penguin Press in 2026, and his new novel, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) was published by from Grove in September 2025 and won the National Book Award for Fiction.This event is free with first come, first serve seating. To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct18

PastAuthor EventNon-FictionWashington, DC

Eric Caplan — When Healing Harms: The Doctor Who Put a Hospital on Trial—and the Case That Shook Psychiatry - with Sally Satel — at Conn Ave

5:00 PM • Sunday, October 18, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

The legal case that changed psychiatry and forced a reckoning within the profession.In 1979, Dr. Raphael Osheroff admitted himself to Chestnut Lodge, a prestigious psychiatric hospital, expecting world-class care for his severe depression. Instead, he was confined to a locked ward, denied medication, and subjected to seven months of talk therapy. The experience rendered him physically frail and emotionally devastated before his parents secured his transfer to a hospital willing to prescribe the antidepressants he desperately needed. But the damage was done: his marriage, his practice, and his reputation all lay in tatters.Then he did something unprecedented. He sued Chestnut Lodge.When Healing Harms excavates the long-buried story behind one of the most consequential—and most misunderstood—malpractice cases in modern psychiatry and surfaces its impact that persists to this day. Drawing on thousands of pages of court transcripts, medical files, legal archives, hundreds of letters, video testimony, and interviews, Eric Caplan provides the definitive account of how a world-renowned psychiatric hospital failed a patient in crisis, and how the story of that failure has been obscured and misrepresented for more than four decades. The result is a revelatory examination of how psychiatry confronted its limitations—and unwittingly gave rise to a system that has failed seriously ill patients even more than the one Osheroff fought to change.Eric Caplan is author of Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy and recipient of the University of Chicago's Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.Capan will be in conversation with Sally Satel, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, practicing psychiatrist, and lecturer at the Yale University School of Medicine. Her most recent book is Mind the Children: How to Think About the Youth Mental Health Collapse (2025)This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct18

PastAuthor EventPoliticsWashington, DC

Cal Hoffman — Judah Can't Tell - with Harry Lennix — at Conn Ave

3:00 PM • Sunday, October 18, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

On the morning a powerful US senator is accused of a long-buried sexual scandal, his son Harris wakes to a world suddenly unrecognizable.A journalist, husband, and father, Harris has built his life on reason, responsibility, and restraint. But as headlines spread and reputations unravel, he is pulled back into the unresolved gravity of his childhood—into memories of political ambition, parental absence, and a father whose public idealism shaped Harris’s private life in ways he is only beginning to understand.Opening on a single charged day—as Harris navigates work, marriage, parenthood, and a culture hungry for judgment—Judah Can’t Tell becomes a powerful meditation on power, consent, masculinity, and moral inheritance. What do we owe the people we love when the truth threatens to destroy them? And what do we owe our children when silence feels safer than honesty?Written with emotional acuity and moral clarity, Judah Can’t Tell is a timely, deeply human novel about reckoning—personal, political, and generational.Cal Hoffman is the author of Easy to Slip, an acclaimed debut novel. He graduated from Catholic University and attended Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London and the MFA Fiction Writing Program at Columbia University. He taught English and creative writing, and as an actor performed in regional theater across the country, starring in the acclaimed New York revival of Jules Feiffer's play, Elliot Loves. Cal lives with his wife, Victoria Leacock Hoffman, and their son, Harry, in Washington, DC.Hoffman will be joined in conversation with Harry Lennix. Lennix is a world-class actor across theater, film, and television. For ten seasons, he starred as Harold Cooper on NBC's acclaimed series The Blacklist. Films include: Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Justice League; The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions; and the Academy Award®-winning film Ray, and as Dresser in the beloved film The Five Heartbeats. On television, Lennix portrayed legendary Congressman Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. for Showtime and had a recurring role on Billions. Lennix made his Broadway debut in August Wilson's Tony-nominated Radio Golf, in a role created specifically for him by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. His long-standing collaboration with Wilson also includes acclaimed performances in King Hedley II at the Mark Taper Forum and as Levee Green in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, for which he received the Joseph Jefferson Award. In 2025, he received a Tony Award® nomination for his role as Solomon "Sonny" Jasper in the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning play Purpose. Lennix will return to that role in November at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event. "Judah Can't Tell is a morally urgent novel about fatherhood, ambition, and the long shadow of inherited failure. Cal Hoffman's Harris Belkind is one of the most scrupulously rendered American men I've encountered in recent fiction—alive on every page, and unable, finally, to look away from himself."– John Burnham Schwartz, author of The Commoner and The Red Daughter"Judah Can't Tell is a powerful reminder that scandal is just the detonation that occurs when the inconvenient truth hits the light. And that the reason we can never truly escape the past is because we are its creation. Intimate and intense, Cal Hoffman's Judah Can't Tell is a page-turner that speaks directly to the moment."– Mat Johnson, author of Invisible Things"Judah Can't Tell is the timeliest of political-intrigue thrillers. It is also a first-rate piece of work—emotionally charged, psychologically penetrating, and almost unbearably exciting."– Lili Anolik, author of Didion & Babitz"In these fraught times, a book about a fictional political scandal might seem a faint echo of the daily news, but in Cal Hoffman's masterful Judah Can't Tell, a long-buried sex scandal bursts into furious light, and—thanks to Hoffman's nuanced insight and muscular prose—it all feels vitally new. He's written a bracing moral parable for a nation on edge"– Doug Wright, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of I Am My Own Wife"Judah Can't Tell is a compassionate, timely political novel about fathers and sons. Cal Hoffman writes with authority and grace and I stayed up way too late finishing this insightful novel, all the while questioning my assumptions and greedily turning pages"– Joanna Hershon, author of Saint Ivo"Cal Hoffman has written a novel that speaks to our fraught times—a journalist grappling with his U.S. senator father scandalized by long ago accusations of sexual misconduct. With a sure grasp of the landscape and political culture of the nation's capital, Cal Hoffman adroitly explores the never ending tensions between truth, loyalty and love."– Michael Isikoff, author of Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story and co-author of Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump

Oct17

PastAuthor EventNon-FictionWashington, DC

Joe Rohde — Floating Mountains: The Art of Imagining the Impossible - With Bethanee Bemis — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Saturday, October 17, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

Disney Legend and Imagineer Joe Rohde unlocks the secrets of creativity in this powerful exploration of imagination, innovation, and life lessons for turning vision into reality.In this inspiring narrative, Imagineer, explorer, and Disney Legend Joe Rohde offers a master class in creativity on a world-spanning journey to discover the origins of personal creativity, the power and potential of enterprising groups, and the remarkable parallels between collaboration and exploring the real world.With lessons drawn from his celebrated career and life experiences—leading projects such as Disney’s Animal Kingdom, ventures into space tourism, field expeditions to far-flung corners of the world, managing design teams, and working with corporate executives—Rohde dives deep into the nature, nurture, and practice of collaboration. He explains how to keep ideas to true to their origins while allowing for improvisation and accident to enhance, not derail, creative endeavors.These are stories of inspiration and invention, challenge and transgression, success and failure, laced with humor, contemplation, poignancy, and even life-threatening danger. Whether your interest in creativity is personal, professional, or you just want to peek behind the curtain of a renowned creative mind, Rohde’s lessons provide a guide for connecting your creative pursuits with others and the larger world.Joe Rohde is a Disney Legend, creative consultant, former Disney Imagineer, artist, traveler, storyteller, and conservationist. An Experience Architect for Virgin Atlantic, he was previously the Executive Designer and Vice President, Creative, of the Walt Disney Imagineering division, where he was the lead designer of Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park and Aulani, a Disney Resort & Spa, among other projects. A graduate of Occidental College, he is well known for his trademark earring, made up of souvenirs from decades traveling to remote corners of the world. He lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife.Rohde will be in conversation with Bethanee Bemis, a museum specialist with the Division of Political and Military History at the National Museum of American History, where she works to ensure the intellectual and physical care of the division's 150,000+ political history objects. She has been part of the exhibit team for several exhibits at NMAH, including most recently the forthcoming Mirror, Mirror for Us All: Disney Theme Parks and the American Experience. Her fields of interest include the development of national symbols and the evolution of the national narrative. Her current research focuses on the Disney them parks as locations of the formation and negotiation of the American identity.This event is free with first come, first serve seating. To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct17

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Spencer Weber Waller — Power and Greed: Monopolies, Mergers, and Cartels on the American Stage - with Sara Gay Forden — AT CONN AVE

5:00 PM • Saturday, October 17, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

Since the second half of the 19th century, live entertainment in the United States has been governed by monopolies and powerful business cartels who together through power and greed controlled who could produce, book, and present live performance and legitimate theatre, affecting audiences in New York City and across North America.Far from being a historical problem, it took the botched rollout of the 2023 Taylor Swift Eras tour via Live Nation/Ticketmaster for people and Congress to question this established history, and more importantly, ask what could be done to change it via stronger enforcement of the antitrust laws to help prevent high prices and poor service suffered by concert-goers who buy their tickets online.But how did we get to this point? This is the story of the real battle for Broadway, where the men who controlled the business determined not only who produced for the theatrical and vaudeville stage but also what they produced, who would perform, where the show would play, how much the audience would pay, and how those profits would be divided. Discover how it took the law nearly sixty years to catch up to the illegal anticompetitive strategies of the Barons of the Gilded Age and their successors and why this story matters today.Including 18 images, many of which are exclusives from the Shubert Archives, Power and Greed unpacks the shady world of the Syndicate, the Shuberts, the Vaudeville Combine, and their modern-day successors. Combining archival research, lively discussion and historical narrative this is a perfect read for theatre and entertainment fans, history enthusiasts and students of anti-trust law that shows us how market competition and competition law can shape, but never eliminate, the worst impulses of those in power and those who seek power over what we see in live entertainment.Spencer Weber Waller is deeply involved in the Broadway and touring theatre industry, having represented actors, playwrights, marketing professionals, and theatre companies. He was co-producer of the 2024 Broadway revival of The Who's Tommy and has invested in Broadway shows and global touring productions Professor Waller also is an internationally recognized expert in antitrust and consumer protection law. He is widely published in law and related subjects and frequently interviewed in the press.Weber Waller will be in conversation with Sara Gay Forden.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct17

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Kim Ghattas — The Best Kind of American: A True Story of Murder, War, and America's Undoing in the Middle East - with Joby Warrick — at Conn Ave

3:00 PM • Saturday, October 17, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

A work of true crime following one American family’s search for answers after a 1984 murder in war-torn Beirut, where the Iranian revolution collided with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, setting off the geopolitical conflagration that burns to this dayOn January 18, 1984, Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, was assassinated by a pair of gunmen outside his office. His murder, in the wake of the bombing of the US Marines’ barracks, Palestinian guerrilla warfare, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, was just one more shocking headline in a city ravaged by the chaos of nine years of war. There was no investigation. Four decades later, the question of who killed Malcolm, and why, is still not fully resolved.In The Best Kind of American, Kim Ghattas embarks on a quest to shed new light on Kerr’s forgotten assassination, weaving together the family’s story with that of Lebanon’s warlords and peacemakers, Hezbollah hostage takers and Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and American presidents from Reagan to Trump. She also tells the definitive story of how Beirut came to be the point of origin for the policies and people who went on to shape the Middle East for decades, from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was then assassinated in a joint US-Israeli strike in the opening salvo of their 2026 war against the Islamic Republic. With the nuance, clarity, and storytelling that made Black Wave an era-defining work on the Middle East, Ghattas delivers a riveting, deeply human saga—a must-read for understanding why this conflict continues to shape today’s world.Kim Ghattas is a Middle East expert, author, and Emmy-award-winning journalist. She’s a contributing writer for The Atlantic magazine, a contributing editor for The Financial Times, and a regular guest on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR. She was a Distinguished Inaugural Fellow at the Columbia University Institute for Global Politics. She previously reported for the BBC from the Middle East and Washington, DC. She is the author of Black Wave, a New York Times notable book on the Saudi-Iran rivalry, and of The Secretary: A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power, a New York Times bestseller. She splits her time between her hometown in Beirut and writing desks around the world.Ghattas will be joined in conversation with Joby Warrick, a bestselling author, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and national security correspondent for The Washington Post, where he has served for almost three decades. He has written extensively on topics ranging from Middle East conflicts and terrorism to nuclear proliferation. Warrick is the author of three previous works of narrative nonfiction, including the 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS. A native of North Carolina, he has two adult children and lives in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct16

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Emily Feng — Our Hearts Burned for Home: Uyghur Militants in Syria's Civil War - With Abigail Hauslohner — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Friday, October 16, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

What drove a few thousand men from the deserts of western China to the front lines of Syria's war?In Our Hearts Burned for Home, journalist Emily Feng unearths the untold story of Uyghur exiles who fled China's expanding police state--only to become a pivotal force in the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime. At the heart of this narrative is a startling paradox: Beijing's repression, meant to crush dissent, instead scattered and radicalized a generation.Tracing the journey from the crushed student protests of 1990s Xinjiang to the Islamist battlegrounds of Idlib, this book reveals how a campaign of surveillance and cultural erasure helped give rise to a Uyghur militant movement far from home. Through vivid reporting and rare access to fighters and families, Feng explores how these men became both victims and agents of global jihad--and how their stateless revolution now shapes Syria's fragile future.Emily Feng is an international correspondent for NPR covering China, Taiwan and beyond. Her human rights coverage has been shortlisted by the British Journalism Awards in 2018 and won two Human Rights Press awards, and her radio coverage of the coronavirus epidemic in China was recognized by the National Headliners Award. She lives in Washington DC.Feng will be in conversation with Abigail Hauslohner,the Financial Times' US-Middle East Foreign Affairs Correspondent, writing about Washington's evolving policy, relationships and actions in the Middle East and Africa. She previously covered national security for The Washington Post, and was based in the Middle East for many years before that, first as a correspondent for TIME Magazine and then as the Post's Cairo bureau chief.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct15

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Kerry Kennedy — Ethel: The Extraordinary Life and American Legacy of Ethel Kennedy - with Michael Beschloss — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Thursday, October 15, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

A vivid, intimate biography of Ethel Kennedy written by her daughter Kerry Kennedy, who takes us inside the life of an American icon through her firsthand memories and exclusive access to her mother's unpublished writings.When her husband Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, Ethel Skakel Kennedy—then pregnant with their eleventh child—drew national attention for her grace, dignity, and resolute commitment to furthering his work in human rights, even in her grief. But as no one knows better than her daughter, Kerry, Ethel was so much more than a dutiful wife and keeper of Robert's extraordinary legacy of service. She was extraordinary in her own right: courageous, curious, compassionate, and witty, always guided by faith and an instinct for speaking truth to power.At once a deeply-researched biography and an intimate tribute, Ethel tells the remarkable story of this woman who spent more than seventy years at the center of American political life, but always remained somewhat enigmatic to the public. Kerry delves into her own memories, her family's recollections, and her mother's private papers to paint a true-to-life portrait of her beloved mother, one that captures her humor, resilience, and hope. Until her recent passing, Ethel was the last survivor of Camelot, and she is remembered as a pillar of endurance, strength, and religious belief who rarely revealed anything about her interior life to the media. With a daughter’s insight and care, as well as access to family papers and unpublished letters not available to historians or journalists, Kerry tells her story:Ethel's family's journey from a working-class Chicago background to life in the tony Greenwich, ConnecticutEthel's fairytale romance with Kerry's father RFK—a courtship that inspired a Taylor Swift song half a century laterHow the bold, athletic Ethel quickly became "more Kennedy than the Kennedys"The years on the famed family properties in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, and the Hickory Hill estate in Virginia, where Kerry and her ten siblings grew up amidst presidents and politicians, Olympians and Hollywood stars, and a rambunctious menagerie of pet animalsMoments of pain and loss—RFK’s assassination just five years after that of his brother; and the tragic deaths of two of Kerry’s siblingsEthel’s unflagging commitment to global human rights causes that carried on through the decadesEthel offers an account of all that she accomplished as a wife, matriarch, and political activist, who inspires us to reject cynicism and to live bigger and bolder.Ethel includes sixteen pages of color photographs,Kerry Kennedy is a human rights lawyer, activist, New York Times-bestselling author, and daughter of Ethel Skakel Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. Kerry is the president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the organization Ethel founded in 1968 to continue Robert's unfinished work, and served as chair for the Amnesty International USA Leadership Council for over a decade. During her forty years working in human rights, she has led hundreds of delegations and negotiated with leaders around the globe. She is the author of three previous books: Robert F. Kennedy: Ripples of Hope; Speak Truth to Power; and Being Catholic Now.Kennedy will be joined in conversation with Michael Beschloss, the author of nine books on presidential history, including, most recently, the New York Times bestsellers Presidents of War, Presidential Courage and The Conquerors, as well as two volumes on Lyndon Johnson’s White House tapes. He was also editor of the number-one global bestseller Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy. He is the NBC News Presidential Historian and a PBS NewsHour contributor and has received an Emmy and six honorary degrees.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct15

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Nafissa Thompson-Spires — The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford - with Nic Stone — at Union Market

7:00 PM • Thursday, October 15, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

From the author of the multi-award-winning, National Book Award–longlisted, “vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive” (George Saunders) story collection Heads of the Colored People, comes a sly, spry, tall tale of a debut novel about the murder of an infamous moonshiner and the cacophony of true stories a small town can tell about itself.Rich Milford is dead. At last.We find ourselves in Oklahoma, just far enough out of Tulsa, just long enough after the Massacre of 1921. For as long as anyone can remember, the Milfords have led plentiful lives on the backs of the townspeople of Newville. Now, on the ominous brink of the Great Depression and at the height of Prohibition, Richard Milford is an infamous moonshiner and womanizer and, it seems, finally crossed the wrong person at the wrong time. He’s dead and buried with no one but his women to mourn him but a question remains: who killed him, and why?Top suspects are his four “wives,” Lally, Sophronia, Georgette, and Vivianne. But as their stories burst to light in a volley of competing narratives, the very idea of a true story comes apart before our eyes.In an electric follow-up to her beloved and critically acclaimed debut collection, Nafissa Thompson-Spires once again serves up a brilliant distillation of front-of-mind happenings—think, cults of personality, capitalism run amok in politics, and rampant societal distrust—this time magicked into taut historical fiction structured as a stupefying line dance. In her uniquely powerful, humorous manner, Thompson-Spires takes on the interdependent clash of the traditional and the new-fangled in this genre-bending, gob-smackingly excellent debut.Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of Heads of the Colored People, which won the PEN Open Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her collection was longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and several other prizes, including an NAACP Image Award. She is also the recipient of a Whiting Award. She earned a doctorate in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Illinois. With dark humor and covering topics from identity to chronic illness, her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review’s “The Daily,” New York magazine’s “The Cut,” The Root, The White Review, Ploughshares, 400 Souls: A Community History of African America 1619-2019, and The 1619 Project, among other publications. New writing appears in Fourteen Days, edited by Margaret Atwood. She is the recipient of a United States Artists Grant. Her young adult debut is forthcoming with Make Me a World. The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford is her debut novel.Thompson-Spires will be joined in conversation with Nic Stone, the author of many novels, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Dear Martin, its New York Times bestselling sequel Dear Justyce, and the final national bestselling installment Dear Manny, a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults selection and a CBC Kids Top Ten Favorite in the 9th–12th grade category. She also penned the young adult titles Odd One Out, an NPR Best Book and an ALA Rainbow Book Top Ten; Jackpot, the YALSA Quick Pick selection that takes a searing look at economic inequality; and Chaos Theory, a Southern Book Prize finalist and a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults selection. Her middle-grade novels include Clean Getaway, a New York Times bestseller, and Fast Pitch, a YALSA Quick Pick selection. Nic lives in Atlanta and will continue to write the books she feels are missing.This event is free with first come, first served seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct15

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Malcolm Gladwell — The American Way of Killing - with Jerusalem Demsas — at Lincoln Theatre

7:00 PM • Thursday, October 15, 2026Lincoln Theater$45.65

The United States has far more homicides than any of its peers around the world. Why?In this groundbreaking book, Malcolm Gladwell explores the American “peculiarity”—how the world’s wealthiest country came to suffer from a problem typically only seen in the world’s poorest countries.Drawing on original interviews, archival and social science research, and his trademark insight, Gladwell approaches the American paradox through a series of stories. What can we learn from the miracle of a young gunshot victim in Washington, D.C.? How have the legal troubles of a seventeenth-century English knight influenced American attempts at gun control? Why would a European police chief be baffled by the graduation ceremony at any American police academy?In a sweeping narrative, Gladwell travels from a shooting range in North Carolina, to the South Side of Chicago, to an old plantation house in Alabama, painting a picture of a country that does not understand its most pressing social problem, and as result, does not understand how to fix it.Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist, a speaker, and the author of eight New York Times bestsellers, including The Tipping Point, Outliers, David and Goliath, Talking to Strangers, and The Bomber Mafia. He is the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, where he hosts the hit podcast Revisionist History.Gladwell will be in conversation with Jerusalem Demsas. Demsas is CEO, founder, and editor-in-chief of The Argument, a new magazine revitalizing liberalism through evidence-driven journalism and debate. The Argument covers politics, policy, and culture with original polling, and rigorous analysis. She was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic, a policy journalist at Vox, and author of On the Housing Crisis

Oct14

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Adam Grant — Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World - with Daniel Pink — at Lincoln Theatre

7:00 PM • Wednesday, October 14, 2026Lincoln Theater$45.65

When we vibe with other people, it fuels our happiness and success. Yet building meaningful ties is one of the most pressing problems of our time. As face-to-face interaction gives way to digital screens, communication gets outsourced to AI, and the world becomes more polarized, our loneliness crisis shows no signs of slowing.To reveal how we can forge faster, stronger, and longer bonds, Adam Grant offers groundbreaking studies, expert insights, and myth-busting stories. Filled with the eye-opening takeaways that have brought millions of readers to his books, Vibe teaches us that similarity is not necessary for solidarity, chemistry doesn’t always happen quickly, and closeness doesn’t always take time.Along the way, Grant introduces us to a crew of astronauts who learned to trust people they don’t like, a comedy troupe that swears by taking time apart as a key to staying together, a band that grew closer by learning to fight more, and a journalist who designed a gathering that led to seventy-eight marriages. He also opens up about his personal struggles to find his place as a shy introvert and the lessons that propelled his transformation into an enthusiastic convener. Through these examples and more, Grant uncovers the keys to creating deeper relationships and tighter communities.Vibe will change how you interact with people. No matter how good you are at connecting, you can always get better—and help others get better too. Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at The Wharton School, where he has been the top-rated professor for seven straight years. His books have sold millions of copies, his TED talks have been viewed more than thirty-five million times, and he hosts the hit podcast Re:Thinking. His pioneering research has challenged widespread assumptions about motivation, success, character, and change, and his viral piece on languishing was the most-read New York Times article of 2021 and the most-saved article across platforms. He has been recognized as the world’s number-two most influential management thinker and one of Fortune’s 40 Under 40, and he has received distinguished scientific achievement awards from the American Psychological Association and the National Science Foundation. Grant received his BA from Harvard University and his PhD from the University of Michigan, and he is a former Junior Olympic springboard diver and magician. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Allison Sweet Grant, a novelist and poet; their two cats (who don’t get along); and their three children (who mostly do).Grant will be in conversation with Daniel Pink. Pink is the author seven bestselling nonfiction books, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers, Drive and To Sell is Human. His books have been translated into 46 languages and have sold more than 5 million copies around the world. Pink is also a playwright, with two plays — Fielder’s Choice and Julia C — now in development.

Oct14

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Raj Panjabi, MD — Safer: A Playbook—Turning Fear into Action and Crisis into Community - with Dr. Vivek Murthy — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Wednesday, October 14, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

"Raj Panjabi is one of the smartest people around on health issues... and one of the best-placed people to guide us through this terrain and keep us safe." —Nicholas KristofThe essential guide for navigating crisis and uncertainty from the acclaimed physician who led the White House response to the world’s most dangerous health emergencies.When crisis hits — a sudden illness, a global disruption, or a career upheaval — our instinct is to retreat. Yet decades of research prove that our greatest protection isn’t isolation, it’s connection.From high-stakes decisions in the White House Situation Room and hospital emergency room to dramatic shocks of violence and illness his family struggled with in their own living room, Dr. Raj Panjabi has navigated humanity’s most precarious moments. Now, he translates hard-earned wisdom into a step-by-step roadmap. Through gripping storytelling and cutting-edge science, Safer reveals the eight practical "plays" to protect what matters most at home and work.You will learn how to:Navigate Fear and Denial: Use Situation Room insights to take decisive action without falling into paralysis.Cut Through the Noise: Use science to assess your risk and protect those you love amidst the flood of misinformation.Build Trust in Divided Times: Move from isolation to connection and find common ground.Gain Control Despite Chaos: Adapt to change and transform vulnerability into your greatest strength.In an era of uncertainty, you don’t have to live in fear. You just need a better playbook. Safer gives us the tools for emerging from any crisis more connected than ever before.Raj Panjabi, MD, is one of the world’s leading experts in health care, public policy, and pandemics. He has spent the last two decades on the ground studying epidemics and community health around the globe and creating groundbreaking strategies to keep us safer in increasingly dangerous times. Dr. Panjabi is on faculty at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He served in the Biden-Harris Administration (2021-2023) in roles focused on pandemic response and public health. As White House Senior Director and Special Assistant to President Biden, Panjabi served as the top pandemic and health official at the National Security Council.Dr. Panjabi is regular guest and expert on television and radio, and is asked both to offer editorials and expertise to leading newspapers, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, and others. Dr. Panjabi lives in Washington, DC, with his wife Amisha, their three children, and a huge amount of stuffed animals.Dr. Panjabi will be in conversation with Dr. Vivek Murthy. Dr. Murthy served as the 19th and 21st Surgeon General of the United States. As Vice Admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, he commanded a uniformed service of 6,000 public health officers. Dr. Murthy’s service as the “Nation’s Doctor” has widened the lens through which we understand the forces shaping our health and well-being, particularly the epidemic of loneliness, mental well-being among youth, parents, and in workplaces, and the impact of social media on youth mental health.Following his tenure as Surgeon General, Dr. Murthy founded The Together Project, an initiative to prioritize social connection and community building in America. As part of this effort, he hosts Staying Human, a podcast and Substack community exploring how we can live truly fulfilling lives—grounded in belonging, joy, and meaning —while grappling with a world where powerful forces, especially technology, are edging out the very qualities that make us human: our relationships, our compassion, and our commitment to the common good. Dr. Murthy is the author of the New York Times best-seller “Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.” His 2025 “Parting Prescription to America,” published as his last act as U.S. Surgeon General, lays out his vision for rebuilding community as the key to health, happiness, and fulfillment. Raised in Miami and an ardent lover of mangoes, Dr. Murthy graduated from Harvard College and received his MD from the Yale School of Medicine and his MBA from the Yale School of Management. He trained in internal medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Murthy lives in Washington, DC with his wife, Dr. Alice Chen, and their two children.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct13

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Eric Liu — Live Like a Citizen: 8 Ways to Change your Mindset and Our Country — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Tuesday, October 13, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

A spiritual guide to creating hope and healing in American civic life.We live in a time of fracture and lost faith. But most Americans don’t want this feeling. Most of us, the exhausted majority, want to be invited into something better. That’s the call of Live Like a Citizen: to give everyone the tools to turn away from the resentment and cynicism eroding democratic life. To turn toward a healthier way of living together. Eric Liu, CEO of Citizen University, gives readers eight deep practices for rekindling our belief in democracy—and our own humanity.Each chapter centers on a single verb—an elemental civic way to be and to be with. Through powerful stories of Americans from many backgrounds, we learn anew how to:1. See: Seeing too quickly makes us manipulable by algorithms and exploitable by politicians. We’ve got to retrain our eyes to stop making three-dimensional humans as flat as our screens.2. Listen: Listening can’t solve everything—but nothing can be solved without listening. We’ve forgotten the transformative civic power of making someone feel truly heard.3. Feel: We will learn how to practice civic joy, civic love, and civic grief. To face ourselves so we can face each other. To make pain into a bridge rather than a moat.4. Join: Joining is more than lurking on the sidelines or being “alone together” online. It is finding purpose by committing to others, in person and in place, over and over.5. Fight: We don’t need fewer arguments. We need fewer stupid ones. When we argue to understand rather than to win, we make relationship possible. Fighting like a citizen means fighting like we must live together perpetually.6. Change: You cannot truly change another person’s mind unless you are willing to change your own. And you cannot change it unless you know your own mind and learn the minds of others—and resist being too sure you’re right.7. Imagine: Civic imagination is a powerful force—but it can be used to harm as well as heal. Imagining a shared future in our diverse society is therefore a practice—and an imperative.8. Commit: When we live out these habits of heart and mind, we are creating a new culture of commitment—to one another, and to the purposes of our continuing revolution.Democracy works only if enough of us believe democracy works. Live Like a Citizen will give you reason to believe—and the tools to transform belief into everyday action.Eric Liu is the cofounder and CEO of Citizen University and author of numerous acclaimed books on democracy and American identity. His TED Talks on power and democracy have been viewed over ten million times. Liu served as a White House speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and as the President’s deputy domestic policy adviser. He was later appointed by President Barack Obama to the board of the Corporation for National and Community Service. Liu is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct12

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Jason Horowitz — The Italian Job: A Memoir of an American Reporter in Rome - with Maureen Dowd — at Conn Ave

7:00 PM • Monday, October 12, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

From Venetian canals to Vatican conclaves, New York Times correspondent Jason Horowitz takes you on a tour of the real Italy.Italy’s deep history, stunning landscapes and glorious food have uniquely captured our imagination. In The Italian Job, Jason Horowitz, a longtime Rome bureau chief for The New York Times, tells the story of how he too fell under that Tuscan-sun enchantment before ultimately discovering a more fascinating place in the country's long shadows. He shows us an Italy conducting experiments in populist politics, confronting global challenges like immigration, climate change and an aging population.In telling this story, Horowitz introduces us to an extraordinary range of characters. He flies with popes and drinks Spritzes with prime ministers, talks beauty with top fashion designers in Milan, ponders the big questions with cardinals in Rome, and gets his feet wet in the Venice lagoon with engineers trying to save the sinking city. Throughout, Italy’s streets, layered with history, and its cafés, vibrating with conversation, are full of lessons. So is his life at home, where his Italian wife and their two children offer an even more intimate, concentrated and rollicking view of Italian life. As years pass and the world turns upside down, Italy, more than a vacation destination or land of the past, reveals itself as a vivid lens through which to understand our present and future.Jason Horowitz is a senior European correspondent for The New York Times who worked for nearly a decade as the paper’s Rome bureau chief, covering Italy, the Vatican, and the region’s culture and politics. He was part of the team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. He got his start in journalism in Rome, where he met his wife as a young reporter, and for more than a quarter century maintained a connection to Italy, both personally and politically. Prior to joining The New York Times in 2013, Jason was the roving political features and profiles writer at The Washington Post, and he has written for The New Yorker, GQ, Vogue, Observer, and other publications. He has two children.Horowitz will be in conversation with Maureen Dowd.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct11

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Brian D. Goldstein — Max Bond: The Life and Work of the People's Architect - with Steven Nelson — at Conn Ave

5:00 PM • Sunday, October 11, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and ProseFree

The first biography of a preeminent postwar architect who championed the cause of freedom through architecture and transformed Black history and modernismJ. Max Bond Jr. (1935-2009) was a civil rights activist, educator, and architect who shaped such iconic structures as the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, and the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan. Driven by the concerns of the civil rights movement, he insisted on a practice centered on deep social engagement during years when his profession became preoccupied with celebrity and spectacle.Harvard educated and son of an eminent African American family, Bond designed housing, cultural institutions, community centers, and campuses amid an era of sweeping changes in architecture, urbanism, and American culture. He expressed an architectural vision that was democratic and inclusive, international in orientation, and celebratory of cities and their diverse residents. Yet his work has often been overlooked. Award-winning historian Brian Goldstein renders it visible.Beautifully illustrated, Max Bond is the definitive biography of one of the most important architects of our time, whose aspiration toward an architecture by and for the people was as urgent in his day as it remains in our own.Brian D. Goldstein is associate professor of architectural history in the Department of Art and Art History at Swarthmore College. He is the author of The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem (Princeton).Goldstein will be joined in conversation with Steven Nelson, the inaugural Executive Director of the Sam Gilliam Foundation. Professor emeritus of art history and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and former dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, he has published widely on the arts, architecture, and urbanism of Africa and its diasporas and on queer studies. Nelson has presented the Richard D. Cohen Lectures on African and African American Art at Harvard University and has held visiting appointments at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. While at UCLA, he also served as director of the African Studies Center. Both at UCLA and the National Gallery, he advanced diversity, equity, access, and inclusion and contributed to institutional strategic planning. Nelson is a member of Boards of Trustees of the Kress Foundation, the Bard Graduate Center, and Educare DC. He is a member of the Society of Architectural Historian’s 2021 as well as the Association for Art History’s 2022 Class of Fellows. Nelson earned a BA in studio art from Yale University and an AM and a PhD in art history from Harvard University.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.