Politics and Prose Presents

Betty Jean, the author's grandmother, had a house along a bayou in Texas, a home paid for and run without a man by her side. This home served as the center of Bonét's family's universe, the one place that was a constant through all of life's changes.

Mama Connie, one of Betty Jean's eleven children, vowed that her life would be different. And in many ways it was: she got married, lived in suburbia, and built a life resembling the American dream. But when it came to raising children of her own, she was more like Betty Jean than she cared to admit. But, like her mother before her, Connie's sweat was the founding salt of her own universe.

Today, Sasha Bonét navigates all aspects of being a mother--escape, promise, burden, assent, and rebellion--not just for the women in her family who came before her, but for Black women with whom society is acquainted, too: figures like Nina Simone, Betty Davis, and Darnella Frazier, who filmed the murder of George Floyd.

Generations of Black women have borne children, borne the burdens of events untold, and borne witness to unspeakable trials. The Waterbearers carries this history, its fierce eloquence capturing a masterpiece of life written by an author who is intimately acquainted with how Black women have passed down knowledge and culture. Sasha Bonét doesn't just present genealogical lineages but illuminates the cultural and societal connections of strong Black women who have built legacies and changed the world, sometimes in the most mundane of moments. The fierce eloquence of this story confirms Sasha Bonét as a voice we all now need to hear.

Sasha Bonét is a writer and cultural critic based in New York City. Her criticism and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Aperture, New York Magazine, Vogue, and BOMB, among other publications. Bonét is a professor of creative writing for Columbia University and Barnard College.

Bonét is in conversation with Glory Edim, a literary taste maker, entrepreneur, and advocate for diverse voices in literature. In 2015, she founded Well-Read Black Girl (WRBG), an online platform and book club dedicated to celebrating the works of Black women authors and creating a supportive online community for readers. Under Edim's leadership, WRBG has grown into a nonprofit organization, hosting events, book festivals, and author conversations that highlight the richness and diversity of Black literature. Her efforts have earned her accolades such as the 2017 Innovator's Award from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and the Madam C.J. Walker Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. As an author herself, Edim has contributed to the literary landscape with her bestselling anthologies Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves, and On Girlhood: 15 Stories from the Well-Read Black Girl Library and her recently published book Gather Me.

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A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why, he realized that to answer her honestly, he had to confront what almost killed him--the weight of being a Black man in America; of bearing witness, as a journalist, to relentless Black death; and of a family history scarred by enslavement, lynching, the Great Migration, the also insidious racism of the North, and gun violence that stole the lives of two great-uncles, a grandfather, a stepbrother, and two cousins.

In this powerful narrative, Lee weaves together three strands: the long and bloody history of African Americans and guns; his work as a chronicler of gun violence, tallying the costs and riches generated by both the legal and illegal gun industries; and his own life story. With unflinching honesty he takes readers on a journey, from almost being caught up in gun violence as a young man, to tracing the legacy of the Middle Passage in Ghana through his ancestors' footsteps, to confronting the challenges of representing his people in an overwhelmingly white and often hostile media world, and most importantly, to celebrating the enduring strength of his family and community.

In A Thousand Ways to Die, Lee answers Nola and all who seek a more just America. He shares the hard truths and complexities of the Black experience, but he also celebrates the beauty and resilience that is Nola's legacy.

Trymaine Lee is a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy award winning journalist and MSNBC contributor. He’s the host of the “Into America” podcast where he covers the intersection of Blackness, power, and politics. A contributing author to the “1619 Project”, he has reported for The New York Times, the Huffington Post, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. A Thousand Ways to Die is his first book.

Lee is in conversation with Yamiche Alcindor, a White House Correspondent for NBC News, covering the second administration of President Trump. She previously served as an NBC Washington Correspondent, covering former President Biden’s administration and former Vice President Harris’ presidential campaign. She was previously the moderator of Washington Week on PBS and the PBS NewsHour White House Correspondent and won a Peabody Award for her coverage of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Yamiche was previously a national political reporter for The New York Times and a national breaking news reporter for USA Today. Yamiche earned a master's degree in broadcast news and documentary filmmaking from New York University and a bachelor's in English, government and African American studies from Georgetown University. A Miami native, Yamiche is married to a fellow journalist and is the daughter of Haitian immigrants.

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Eric Foner has done more to shape the public and professional understanding of American history than any other scholar. The preeminent historian of the Civil War era, Foner's keynote has been American freedom and its changing meanings and boundaries. We see in his award-winning works how freedom has been a birthright for some and a struggle for others, that rights gained can also be lost, that they must always be tended with knowledge and vigilance.

This volume collects fifty-eight of Foner's more recent reviews and commentaries. Together they show the range of his interests and expertise, running from slavery and antislavery through the disunion and remaking of the United States in the nineteenth century, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, and into our own political moment. Each piece shows a master at work, melding historical knowledge and balanced judgment with fine prose.

Eric Foner's indelible works include a best-selling study of Lincoln and slavery, The Fiery Trial, winner of the Pulitzer, Bancroft, and Lincoln prizes, and an influential history of the Reconstruction amendments, The Second Founding. He lives in New York City.

Foner is in conversation with Jamelle Bouie, , a columnist for the New York Times and political analyst for CBS News. He covers campaigns, elections, national affairs, and culture. Previously, Jamelle was chief political correspondent for Slate magazine and a staff writer at The Daily Beast ; he also held fellowships at The American Prospect and The Nation magazine.

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Blue Opening, Chet'la Sebree's brilliant, illuminating poetry collection, grapples with origins--of illness, of language, of the universe--as the speaker contemplates whether she, too, can be a site of origin through motherhood. Navigating chronic health challenges alongside grief and questions about the nature of knowledge and religion, she searches personal history and the cosmos for answers to the unknowable.

With startling clarity and vivid tenderness, Blue Opening calls into question not only where to begin, but how to create, across thirty-two poems that press the fluid boundaries of form through sonnets, prose poems, odes, and two unforgettable poetic sequences. As the speaker traverses loss, possibility, and the choice, or often the lack of choice, in the direction of her future, she determines to press forward even as she is "unsure of what shape this language should take / and hulling, from blue rock, faith."

Chet'la Sebree  is the author of the poetry collections Blue Opening (Tin House),  Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress. Raised in the mid-Atlantic, she earned an MFA in creative writing, with a focus in poetry, from American University. Chet’la’s poetry and prose have appeared in Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, Pleiades, Guernica, Poetry International, and The Yale Review. Currently, Chet’la is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College. Her debut essay collection is forthcoming from The Dial Press in 2026.

Sebree is in conversation with Thea Brown, is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Loner Forensics (Northwestern University Press 2023). Her poems can be found in Action, Spectacle, Bennington Review, River Styx, Oversound, Iowa Review, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore and teaches creative writing at the George Washington University.

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Jeannie Vanasco's mother starts using the silent treatment not long after moving into the renovated apartment within Jeannie's home. The silences begin at any perceived slight. Her shortest period of silence lasts two weeks. Her longest, six months. As Vanasco guides us through her mother's childhood, their shared past, and the devastating silence of their present, she paints a layered, complicated portrait of a mother and daughter looking, failing, and--in big and small ways--succeeding to understand each other. In the margins of her research, at her kitchen table with her partner, in phone calls to friends, and in delightful hey google queries, Vanasco explores the loneliness and isolation of silence as punishment, both in her own life and beyond it, and confronts her greatest fear: that her mother will never speak to her again. 
From the acclaimed author of Things We Didn't Talk About When I was a Girl and The Glass Eye, Jeannie Vanasco's A Silent Treatment is a searingly honest and lasting testament to the power of all things left unsaid.

Jeannie Vanasco is the author of the memoirs Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl and The Glass Eye. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University.

Vanasco is in conversation with Jung Yun, a novelist, an associate professor of English at the George Washington University, and a board member of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Her third novel, All the World Can Hold, will be published in March 2026 by 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster. 

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Over the fifty years that Lorne Michaels has been at the helm of Saturday Night Live, he has become a revered and inimitable presence in the entertainment world. He's a tastemaker, a mogul, a withholding father figure, a genius spotter of talent, a shrewd businessman, a name-dropper, a raconteur, the inspiration for Dr. Evil, the winner of more than a hundred Emmys--and, essentially, a mystery. Generations of writers and performers have spent their lives trying to figure him out, by turns demonizing and lionizing him. He's "Obi-Wan Kenobi" (Tracy Morgan), the "great and powerful Oz" (Kate McKinnon), "some kind of very distant, strange comedy god" (Bob Odenkirk).

Lorne will introduce you to him, in full, for the first time. With unprecedented access to Michaels and the entire SNL apparatus, Susan Morrison takes readers behind the curtain for the lively, up-and-down, definitive story of how Michaels created and maintained the institution that changed comedy forever.

Drawn from hundreds of interviews--with Michaels, his friends, and SNL's iconic stars and writers, from Will Ferrell to Tina Fey to John Mulaney to Chris Rock to Dan Aykroyd-- Lorne is a deeply reported, wildly entertaining account of a man singularly obsessed with the show that would define his life and have a profound impact on American culture.

Susan Morrison is the articles editor of The New Yorker. She is the former editor in chief of the New York Observer and an original editor of SPY magazine. She lives in New York City.

Morrison is in conversation with Jonathan Capehart. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Capehart is a co-host of the morning edition of The Weekend on MSNBC. From 2020 until 2025, he was anchor of The Saturday Show and The Sunday Show on MSNBC. Capehart is Associate Editor at the Washington Post, where he is also an opinion writer. He is also an analyst on The PBS News Hour. His memoir “Yet Here I Am: Lessons from A Black Man’s Search for Home,”  published in May 2025, is a New York Times Best Seller.

Capehart was deputy editorial page editor of the New York Daily News (2002-2004) and served on its editorial board (1993-2000). His editorial campaign in 1999 to save the Apollo Theater earned the board the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing.

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Higher education is under assault from all sides. Scandals, protests, and dramatic resignations dominate the news cycle, and the pressure has grown so severe that the average tenure of university presidents has fallen to less than six years. Even so, Peril and Promise insists, American universities provide the solutions to the ignorance and division that plague our society--but only if wise, courageous leaders step up.

Blending insights from social science with many years of experience as a college president at Spelman and Mount Holyoke Colleges, Beverly Daniel Tatum celebrates the power of leadership to make higher education a force for good. Alongside an unflinching look at the financial challenges, political attacks, and social problems that besiege today's college campuses, she offers real-life leadership examples of institutions that have overcome the steepest odds and produced real transformation in ideas, student bodies, and society at large.

At once conversational and contemplative, Peril and Promise reckons with the complexities of higher education in our time, while exhorting future leaders to take up the mantle and chart a path forward for our campuses and country.

Beverly Daniel Tatum, PhD, is president emerita of Spelman College. She served as the ninth president of Spelman from 2002-2015. Her visionary leadership as president was recognized in 2013 with the Carnegie Academic Leadership Award. In 2014 she received the Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology, the highest honor presented by the American Psychological Association. The author of four books, including the New York Times-bestselling Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, she lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Tatum is in conversation with Ayesha Rascoe, the host of Weekend Edition Sunday and the Saturday episodes of Up First. Prior to her role as host, Rascoe was a White House Correspondent. She covered three presidential administrations. As a part of the White House team, she was also a regular on the NPR Politics Podcast. Before joining NPR, Rascoe spent the first decade of her career at Reuters, rising from a news assistant to an energy reporter to eventually covering the White House. While at Reuters, Rascoe covered some of the biggest energy and environmental stories of the past decade, including the 2010 BP oil spill. Rascoe is also the editor of HBCU Made: A Celebration of the Black College Experience, a book of essays about the impact of historically Black colleges and universities. She's a proud graduate of Howard University.

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In 2015, world leaders came together in Paris and signed an agreement to save the planet. Ten years later, we have made little progress on the ground, and the climate crisis is worse than ever. We've mostly figured out what we need to do, but not how to get it done--and time is running out.

In this groundbreaking new book, World Resources Institute President and CEO Ani Dasgupta explores how to orchestrate change at speed and scale. How do we get countries to keep working together on climate action when multilateralism is declining? How do we harness technological innovation to protect nature, rather than destroy it? How do we dismantle entrenched power structures and rapidly transition to a clean, resilient economy?

Based on conversations with more than one hundred leaders around the world, Dasgupta weaves together stories of unusual partnerships, collaborative leadership, and lessons learned from failure. Mining the rich history of the climate movement, The New Global Possible defines the narrow path to a hopeful future--one requiring all of our collective focus and determination--and offers a radical new practice for orchestrating change for good.

Ani Dasgupta is President and CEO of World Resources Institute (WRI), where he spearheads global efforts to drive systemic change across climate, nature, and human development. Dasgupta is a widely recognized leader in climate policy and finance, sustainable cities, and poverty alleviation. His work has been featured in The New York Times, TIME, and many global media outlets. He took the helm at WRI in 2021 after seven years as Global Director of WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. Prior to joining WRI, Dasgupta spent two decades at the World Bank. Dasgupta grew up in Delhi, India. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, and has two children.

Dasgupta is in conversation with Justin Worland. Worland is a senior correspondent at TIME covering energy and climate change. For the past decade, his reporting has explored how climate change and the energy transition are reshaping the world around us. His weekly climate column reaches nearly half a million subscribers. In 2022, Worland was named the inaugural Climate Journalist of the Year by Covering Climate Now for his coverage of complex climate issues. He serves as the journalism fellow at the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute and the Outrider Foundation fellow at TIME. Worland is a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations and a founding board member at the Uproot Project, a non-profit that works to diversify environmental journalism. 

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Told from the perspectives of those in and around the pathways of money and power, High Finance is a debut novel that takes us inside one of the most volatile periods in Wall Street's history through the lens of Jed Czincosca, who came to Wall Street from Chicago in 1977 to get rich and rise to the pinnacle of American success.

He did what it takes to make it to the top, letting nothing hold him back. While orchestrating multibillion-dollar deals and becoming spectacularly wealthy, Jed binges on pot and alcohol, trades on inside information, cheats on his wife, and becomes one of Wall Street's key players. At the dawn of the new century, with a monomaniacal obsession Jed borrows to buy as many shares of Lehman Brothers as he can get his hands on, only to be wiped out on that fateful September day when Lehman was fed to the wolves. Forced from his four-bedroom duplex on Park Avenue to a cheap rental in the working-class town of Patchogue, is redemption and resurrection for Jed even possible?

Through a kaleidoscope of voices--his wife, his British secretary, his Marxist brother, the Lehman "informant," an internal auditor dedicated to Jed's destruction, and others--we come to intimately understand Jed and how the unpredictable external forces to which we are all susceptible shape and define us.

The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers was a pivotal moment in the 2008 crash of the financial markets that led to job losses, a housing market crisis, and a global recession whose effects are still being felt to this day. In telling the story of one man at the center of this moment, Ken Miller offers us a new perspective on Wall Street in the twenty-first century.

Ken Miller is President & CEO of Ken Miller Capital, LLC ("KMC"), a closely held merchant banking firm which invests in early-stage companies. He is the former Vice Chairman of Merrill Lynch Capital Markets and Credit Suisse First Boston. Mr. Miller has served as a member of the Board of Directors of Viacom, Inc., Intelsat Corporation, Kinder Care Learning Centers, CNA Surety, and Loews Corporation. He serves on the board of the National Committee on US-China Relations and PEN America and is an active member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Miller is in conversation with Neal Wolin, a Vice Chairman of Brunswick Group, based in Washington, D.C. Neal has spent his entire professional career – in both the private and public sectors – at the intersection of public policy, business, law and communications. Prior to joining Brunswick, he was Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Treasury from May 2009 until September 2013 – the longest serving in U.S. history – and Acting Secretary of the Treasury in January and February 2013. As Deputy Secretary, Neal served as the Treasury Department’s Chief Operating Officer and supervised all Treasury bureaus and domestic and international policy offices as well as its management, legal, public affairs and congressional affairs functions. He was a key architect of the Obama
Administration's financial reform plan and played a critical role on international economic matters, working with finance ministries, central banks and major international financial institutions on economic growth, financial reforms and economic sanctions
issues. Neal currently serves on the boards of the following venture-backed private companies: Self Financial, a fintech company that provides tools that help consumers build credit; Jupiter Intelligence, a climate risk analytics company; and Glow, an insurtech company focused on small business insurance.

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For close to a decade, technology analyst Dan Wang--"a gifted observer of contemporary China" (Ross Douthat)--has been living through the country's astonishing, messy progress. China's towering bridges, gleaming railways, and sprawling factories have improved economic outcomes in record time. But rapid change has also sent ripples of pain throughout the society. This reality--political repression and astonishing growth--is not a paradox, but rather a feature of China's engineering mindset.

In Breakneck, Wang blends political, economic, and philosophical analysis with reportage to reveal a provocative new framework for understanding China--one that helps us see America more clearly, too. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the United States has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad

Blending razor-sharp analysis with immersive storytelling, Wang offers a gripping portrait of a nation in flux. Breakneck traverses metropolises like Shanghai, Chongqing, and Shenzhen, where the engineering state has created not only dazzling infrastructure but also a sense of optimism. The book also exposes the downsides of social engineering, including the surveillance of ethnic minorities, political suppression, and the traumas of the one-child policy and zero-Covid.

In an era of animosity and mistrust, Wang unmasks the shocking similarities between the United States and China. Breakneck reveals how each country points toward a better path for the other: Chinese citizens would be better off if their government could learn to value individual liberties, while Americans would be better off if their government could learn to embrace engineering--and to produce better outcomes for the many, not just the few.

Dan Wang is a research fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford University. He was previously a fellow at the Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center and the technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics. Dan is the author of an annual letter from China and has published essays in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, New York Magazine, and The Atlantic.

Wang is in conversation with Derek Thompson, a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is also the author of the books Hit Makers and On Work: Money, Meaning, Identity and Abundance, which he co-wrote with Ezra Klein. He is the host of the podcast Plain English.

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