Politics and Prose Presents

Advice from wellness instructors on how to seek and track joy in the New Year and throughout 2026. Focusing on how to specifically use the cold to reach within yourself and discover unimaginable possibilities and daily practice of “joy spotting” the act of naming small, meaningful moments.

Alex Elle is a New York Times Bestselling Author, wellness educator, and Restorative Writing teacher with more than a decade of experience. Her writing journey began as a personal therapeutic practice that evolved into a career centered on healing through journaling, self-study, and mindfulness. Through her books, workshops, courses, and retreats, Alex helps others cultivate self-discovery and expand their capacity for joy, clarity, and meaningful connection. Her work is grounded in the belief that literature and language serve as powerful tools for both personal and collective healing.

Libby DeLana is an award-winning executive creative director, author, and advocate for intentional living. She spent over three decades in the advertising world, co-founding the agency Mechanica after years as design director at MullenLowe, with work recognized by the One Show, Cannes Lions, and Communication Arts.

Over a decade ago, Libby committed to a daily morning walk, now more than 35,000 miles in (the circumference of the earth is 25k), transforming a simple habit into a powerful practice of mindfulness and presence. That journey inspired her book Do Walk and the podcast This Morning WalkTM, which she co-hosts with writer Alex Elle. Her reflections have been featured in Magnolia Journal, The Boston Globe, BBC Radio 4, NPR, The Isolation Journals by Suleika Jaouad, Good Life Project with Jonathan Field, and on We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle.

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When Ebun gives birth to her daughter, Eniiyi, on the day they bury her cousin Monife, there is no denying the startling resemblance between the child and the dead woman. So begins the belief, fostered and fanned by the entire family, that Eniiyi is the actual reincarnation of Monife, fated to follow in her footsteps in all ways, including that tragic end.

There is also the matter of the family curse: " No man will call your house his home. And if they try, they will not have peace..." which has been handed down from generation to generation, breaking hearts and causing three generations of abandoned Falodun women to live under the same roof.

When Eniiyi falls in love with the handsome boy she saves from drowning, she can no longer run from her family's history. As several women in her family have done before, she ill-advisedly seeks answers in older, darker spiritual corners of Lagos, demanding solutions. Is she destined to live out the habitual story of love and heartbreak? Or can she break the pattern once and for all, not only avoiding the spiral that led Monife to her lonely death, but liberating herself from all the family secrets and unspoken traumas that have dogged her steps since before she could remember?

Cursed Daughters is a brilliant cocktail of modernity and superstition, vibrant humor and hard-won wisdom, romantic love and familial obligation. With its unforgettable cast of characters, it asks us what it means to be given a second chance and how to live both wisely and well with what we've been given.

Oyinkan Braithwaite is the author of My Sister, the Serial Killer. She was born in Lagos, Nigeria and raised there and in the UK. She currently lives in London with her family.

Braithwaite is in conversation with Tope Folarin, a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington DC. He serves as Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University. He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards. His debut novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man, was published by Simon & Schuster.

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Highlighting the year’s most significant independent journalism—including reports on ICE surveillance, Meta censorship, and police violence—Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2026 illuminates issues the establishment press have obscured and raises voices corporate media have throttled.

Balancing critical analysis with optimistic vision, the volume’s diverse contributors champion press freedom and critical media literacy as essential tools to empower individuals and unite communities in the battles to hold the powerful accountable and to defend democracy from authoritarian assaults.

Ryan Grim is a longtime D.C. reporter, breaking news from the halls of Congress and leading the Washington bureaus for The Intercept and HuffPost. At HuffPost, he led a team that was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won once. Grim has spent years chronicling the rise of progressives in Congress, and his most recent book is The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution, which followed his best-selling We’ve Got People. He’s also the author of the 2009 book This Is Your Country On Drugs.

Lauren Harper is Freedom of the Press Foundation’s first Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy, a position established to honor and continue the legendary whistleblower’s fight for secrecy reform. She joins FPF after a decade fighting excessive government secrecy with Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, the National Security Archive. There she served as public policy director and helped historians, journalists, and the public win the declassification of historically significant government documents.

John Kiriakou is a journalist, former CIA counterterrorism officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former counterterrorism consultant for ABC News. He was responsible for the capture in Pakistan in 2002 of Abu Zubaydah, then believed to be the third-ranking official in al-Qaeda. In 2007, Kiriakou blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program, telling ABC News that the CIA tortured prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that the policy had been approved by then-President George W. Bush. He became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act — a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of the revelation. Kiriakou is the author of eight books.

Mischa Geracoulis is the Outreach & Engagement Officer at Project Censored and the Production Lead at the organization's publishing imprint, The Censored Press; contributor to Project Censored’s "State of the Free Press" yearbook series; a Project Judge; and author of "Media Framing and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage" (Routledge, 2025). Her work focuses on human rights, journalistic ethics, and freedom of the press.

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News, and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books.

Moderating this panel will be Mickey Huff, the third director of Project Censored (founded in 1976) and is the president of the nonprofit Media Freedom Foundation. Huff joined Ithaca College in New York fall of 2024, where he now also serves as the Distinguished Director of the Park Center for Independent Media and Professor of Journalism. Since 2009, he has coedited the annual volume of the Censored book series.

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Shade is a place meanders east-west along Charlottesville's Downtown Mall, seeking "a Black sense of place" at the pace of stressed shade and street trees, the mall's architectural history, and the speaker's ongoing questions and reflections. The collection of poems is a moving invitation to open one's attention by looking up, down, and always within. Through lyric walking poems ("tree walks" and "shade walks") and Bashō-style travelogue, Shade is a place unfolds as much through arboreal life as through one's inner life--sometimes alone, sometimes with others, and always among turning trees.

MaKshya Tolbert practices poetry and placemaking in Virginia, where her grandmother raised her. She is the 2025 Art in Library Spaces Artist-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, and co-stewards Fernland Studios, an open-ended studio insistent on rest, rejuvenation, and reciprocity as a core compositional practice. Tolbert was the 2024 New City Arts Fellowship Guest Curator, and served as 2024-25 Chair of the Charlottesville Tree Commission. She has received fellowship and residency support from the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission, New City Arts, Community of Writers, and Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects. Her recent poetry and prose can be found at Poem-a-Day, Emergence Magazine, West Branch, Poets for Science, and Ran Off With the Star Bassoon. She holds degrees from Stanford University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Gastronomic Sciences. Shade is a place is her first book. In her free time, she is elsewhere--a place Eddie S. Glaude Jr. calls "that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe."

Tolbert is in conversation with Lauren Russell, a poet and writer in hybrid forms. She is the author of A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance (Milkweed Editions, 2024); Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award; and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). An NEA and Cave Canem fellow, Russell has received residencies from Ucross, Yaddo, and MacDowell, among others. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, and elsewhere. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

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Each year, police officers kill over 1,000 people they've sworn to protect and serve. While some cases, like George Floyd's and Sandra Bland's, capture national attention, most victims remain nameless, their stories untold. The Coroner's Silence reveals a disturbing truth about these cases: coroners and other death investigators are often complicit in obscuring the violent circumstances of in-custody deaths.

Through rigorous research--including critical records analysis, public health studies, and interviews with victims' families--this book unmasks the systemic failures within forensic medicine. Terence Keel shows how incomplete autopsy reports, mishandled medical documents, and strategically lost evidence effectively shield law enforcement from accountability.

The Coroner's Silence uncovers how the current system of death investigation operates as a mechanism of institutional safeguarding. By highlighting the structural powerlessness of coroners and their disconnection from the communities most affected by police violence, Keel demonstrates how bureaucratic processes can render human suffering invisible.

True accountability requires more than procedural reform. It demands a fundamental reimagining of how we investigate, document, and understand deaths at the hands of state institutions. The Coroner's Silence is a crucial intervention that challenges us to confront the deeply ingrained mechanisms that perpetuate systemic violence.

Terence Keel is an award-winning scholar, the founding director of the BioCritical Studies Lab, and a professor of human biology, society, and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science and co-editor of  Critical Approaches to Science and Religion. Keel has received fellowships from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.

Keel is in conversation with Dr. Michele Goodwin, the Linda D. & Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy and Faculty Director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. She is a sought after thought leader and public voice on matters of constitutional law, healthcare, bioethics, and civil liberties with her research and scholarship referenced by courts and legislative bodies, and appearing in print, radio, and television news, including at The Atlantic, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Chicago Sun-Times, Vox, Politico, Salon.com, Forbes, The Washington Post, and Mother Jones and appearances on ABC News; CBS News, NBC News; MSNBC, NPR, PBS, and HBO’s Vice News among others. Outside of the classroom, Dr. Goodwin is the Executive Producer of Ms. Studios, host of the popular podcast: On The Issues With Michele Goodwin.

In the minds of many, Detroit is undergoing a renaissance thanks to gentrifying urbanites who've been drawn to the city with the promise of cheap housing and thriving culture. But what happens when gentrification attempts to come to one of the most depopulated neighborhoods in the country--a place where every other property in the neighborhood was a vacant lot and every third house stood empty? To find out, Sharon Cornelissen moved to the Brightmoor neighborhood of Detroit for three years and became the owner of a $7,000 house.

The Last House on the Block takes us to Brightmoor to meet Cornelissen's fellow residents. She introduces us to the long-time residents of the neighborhood who reveal their struggles to keep a home while keeping violence, tall grass, and yes--gentrification--at bay. We also meet the eclectic white newcomers of Brightmoor and learn about their real estate bargains, urban farms, and how they became the unlikely defenders of urban desolation. Where oldtimers take pride in neatly mowed lawns and hope for a return to residential density, newcomers love the open space and aim to buy more empty lots to raise chickens and goats. It is a story of gentrification, but not at all in the usual sense: it is a case of failed gentrification. We often think about gentrification as an unstoppable force--once the first white newcomers with yoga mats enter an often brown or Black community, the coffee shops and restaurants follow. But in Brightmoor, the dreams of white newcomers met the harsh reality of decade-long decline. Nearly a decade after Cornelissen's fieldwork began, Brightmoor is even emptier than it was when she started.

Today, depopulation remains more common than gentrification in poor communities. Cornelissen's story offers deep insights into what it is like to live in a declining neighborhood, and through the example of Brightmoor, Cornelissen reveals why depopulation continues and helps us imagine a more inclusive and equitable city turnaround.

Sharon Cornelissen is a sociologist and national housing expert. As director of housing at the Consumer Federation of America, she leads research and advocacy to help end our housing crisis. She received her doctorate in sociology from Princeton University and previously worked at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Originally from the Netherlands, she now lives in Washington DC.

Cornelissen is in conversation with Janneke Ratcliffe, vice president for the Housing and Communities Division at the Urban Institute. Over a career that spans industry, the nonprofit sector, academic research, and the federal government, her work focuses on increasing access to financial systems that foster economic security and prosperity. Ratcliffe came to Urban from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where she served as assistant director, leading its Office of Financial Education. Ratcliffe serves on the National Advisory Council of the National Housing Council (for a three-year term beginning 2024) and on the Consumer Affairs Advisory Council of the Mortgage Bankers Association, Fannie Mae’s Affordable Housing Advisory Council for 2024–25, and the National Community Stabilization Trust Board of Managers. Ratcliffe is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studied economics and French.

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In 2020, the United States Congress, in an unprecedented and bipartisan piece of legislation, created the Naming Commission. It was tasked with a monumental mission: rename nine of the U.S. military's most prominent army bases--all of which were named for Confederate leaders who waged war against America in the name of maintaining a slave republic.

Over the course of twenty months, that commission completed their mission, carefully combing through years of American history, and hearing from tens of thousands of Americans from all walks of life. It ultimately chose ten Americans whose individual heroics reflect the collective best of all that America is and could be. With their firsthand knowledge of the selection process, vice-chair Ty Seidule and lead historian Connor Williams recount the lives of each of these American heroes, from former President Dwight D. Eisenhower to Civil War Dr. Mary Walker to Cold War General Richard Cavazos. The individual histories nestled within each chapter prove why these men and women are true representatives of our country and how, by looking to them, America can aspire towards a better future.

A collection of stirring tales of heroism, A Promise Delivered is the powerful account of how ten worthy Americans and one bipartisan Commission joined the ongoing fight to reclaim our nation's history.

Brigadier General Ty Seidule, U.S. Army (Retired), is Professor Emeritus of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point and served in the army for more than 35 years. He is the author of Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of Lost Cause and served as Vice Chair for the Naming Commission tasked by Congress to rename Department of Defense assets that honor Confederates. He teaches at Hamilton College.

Connor Williams was Lead Historian for the United States Congress' Naming Commission. He has taught for Yale University, Middlebury College, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and has worked as a public historian and consultant on several other major renaming and reconciliation projects.

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Should my drapes have a pinch pleat or a rod pocket? What rug material will stand up best to my pets and children? How tall should my side tables be? Where should I put the TV?! There are so many decisions that go into designing a home--and the choices can be overwhelming. Sometimes, you just want to be told what to do. Designer Annie Elliott is here to do just that: offer simple, direct answers to your every design quandary.

As she says in her introduction: "While there exist dozens--nay, hundreds!--of gorgeous coffee table books, there is no book that gives it to you straight. No book that provides only the most important things you need to know as you feather your nest. (By which I mean, those things that result in the biggest and most costly mistakes if you get them wrong, and the most tasteful interiors if you get them right.)" That is, until now.

In her twenty-plus years running an interior design business in Washington, DC, Annie has collected dozens of best practices when it comes to decorating, and now she's compiled them all into the perfect pocket manual. With chapters on everything from window treatments to accessories, plus a "cheat sheet" of helpful dimensions, readers will be armed with all of the expert intel they need to turn their house into a stylish, functional home.

Annie Elliott has run an interior design firm in Washington, D.C., for more than twenty years. She studied English and art history at the University of Pennsylvania and earned an MA in art history from Williams College. After a career in museum administration, Annie founded bossy color, which later became Annie Elliott Design. Annie’s work and insights have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and many other print and online publications, and she regularly appears on NBC4 to discuss design matters of great importance. Annie lives in D.C. with her family.

Elliott is in conversation with Jason Reynolds, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books for children and young adults. A 2024 MacArthur Fellow, Jason is best known for his novels All American Boys (co-written with Brendan Kiely), the Track series, and Long Way Down, which received Newbery, Printz, and Coretta Scott King Honors. Among his many accolades, Jason was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress for 2020-2022. He is on faculty at Lesley University, for the Writing for Young People MFA Program and lives in Washington, DC. You can find his ramblings at JasonWritesBooks.com.

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One hundred years after the shipwreck of the Valbanera, known to history as the "poor man's Titanic," Mara Denis gets an assignment to report on the Canary Islands, where, she has been told, her ancestors lived before they moved to Cuba. Unexpectedly, she discovers that the grandmother her mother cherished was listed among the dead of the Valbanera, years before Mara's mother was even born. This fateful twist changes everything Mara thought she knew about her family and herself, and sends her on a quest to find the truth about her family. If her great grandmother is a ghost, who is she and where did she come from? 

In spare, beautiful writing and in a dual narrative, the author transports the reader to the Canary Islands and Cuba in the early part of the twentieth century and New York and Key West in the present. This epic tale of a young woman's intense passion for her beloved as well as the redeeming power of family secrets at last uncovered will leave readers wanting more when they reach the last page.

Born in Havana, Mirta Ojito is a journalist, professor, and author who has worked at the Miami Herald, El Nuevo Herald, and the New York Times. The recipient of an Emmy for the documentary Harvest of Misery as well as a shared Pulitzer for national reporting in 2001 for a series of articles about race in America for the New York Times, Ojito was an assistant professor of journalism at Columbia University for almost nine years. She is the author of two award-winning nonfiction books: Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus and Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town. Currently, Ojito is a senior director on the NBC News Standards team working at Telemundo Network. Deeper than the Ocean is her debut novel.

Ojito is joined in conversation with Julia Sweig, the author of the award-winning 2021 New York Times bestseller, Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight.  She is the host and executive producer of the podcast In Plain Sight: Lady Bird Johnson, adapted for documentary film and broadcast on Hulu, garnering several awards and multiple Emmy nominations. She is currently writing a biography of the pioneering AIDS activist and scientist, Dr. Mathilde Krim. She is also the author of books on Cuba, Latin America, and American foreign policy. Her short and long form writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, and Foreign Affairs, among other outlets. Her book Inside the Cuban Revolution won the American Historical Association’s award for best book by an independent scholar. Sweig holds a doctorate and master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins University

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America’s bestselling biographer reveals the origins of the most revolutionary sentence in the Declaration of Independence, the one that defines who we are as Americans—and explains how it should shape our politics today.

To celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, Walter Isaacson takes readers on a fascinating deep dive into the creation of one of history’s most powerful sentences: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Drafted by Thomas Jefferson and edited by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, this line lays the foundation for the American Dream and defines the common ground we share as a nation.

Isaacson unpacks its genius, word by word, illuminating the then-radical concepts behind it. Readers will gain a fresh appreciation for how it was drafted to inspire unity, equality, and the enduring promise of America. With clarity and insight, he reveals not just the power of these words but describes how, in these polarized times, we can use them to restore an appreciation for our common values.

Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Elon Musk, Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane and was CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu.

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