Schedule of Events:

11:00 am - 12:00 pm: In Conversation with the Former President of Costa Rica: Carlos Alvarado Quesada

The impact of small state diplomacy on climate migration

From May 2018 to May 2022, Carlos Alvarado Quesada served as the 48th President of the Republic of Costa Rica. Under his leadership, Costa Rica contributed to global efforts to combat climate change and defended human rights, democracy, and multilateralism. President Quesada was influential in his commitment to small state solutions to address climate change and the forced migration that results. Now a Professor of Practice of Diplomacy in the Graduate School of Global Affairs at Tufts University, Quesada joins Chicago Humanities to discuss climate migration and the diplomatic opportunities and challenges for small states as negotiators of climate policies with Hari M. Osofsky, dean and Myra and James Bradwell Professor Environmental Law and Culture at Northwestern University.

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11:00 am - 12:00 pm: U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey in Conversation

An exquisite meditation on the geographies we inherit and the metaphors we inhabit

Natasha Trethewey is a tour de force of poetry. She is also a Pulitzer Prize winner, U.S. poet laureate, and best-selling author, not to mention an Evanston resident and a professor of English at Northwestern. Join us as she discusses her newest book, The House of Being. Trethewey offers up a vision of writing as reclamation: of our own lives and the stories of the vanished, forgotten, and erased. She revisits the geography of her childhood, tracing the origins of her writing life in an intimate and searching meditation of her hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi.

In a shotgun house in Gulfport, Mississippi, Natasha Trethewey learned to read and write. But years prior, this same land was a farming settlement where a group of formerly enslaved women, men, and children made a new home. She recalls the markers of history and culture that dotted the horizons of her youth: the Confederate flags proudly flown throughout Mississippi; her gradual understanding of her own identity as the child of a Black mother and a white father; and her grandmother’s collages lining the hallway, offering glimpses of the world as it could be.

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12:00 pm - 1:30 pm: Northwestern Day Member Reception

Don't miss out the Northwestern Day members' lunch-hour reception at the Jean Gimbel Lane Reception Room at the Ryan Center for Music following the free members program with Barry Sonnenfeld - Hollywood director of Men in Black, Get Shorty, and The Addams Family.

This reception is free for all members, however, tickets are required and do not include entry to additional programs throughout the day. To reserve your event tickets, please click here.

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1:00 pm - 2:30 pm: Dr. Maayan Hilel on Cultural Entwinement and Transformation

A research-based history of the interconnected cultures of Jewish-Zionist and Palestinian-Arab societies before 1948

Dr. Maayan Hilel, Assistant Director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish & Israel Studies and Assistant Professor of Instruction in Jewish & Israel Studies, joins Chicago Humanities to discuss the entwined cultures and cultural transformations of Jewish-Zionist and Palestinian-Arab societies before 1948. Through archival research in Hebrew, Arabic, and English on the minutiae of daily life, she explores daily intercommunal encounters and cultural collaboration between ordinary Arabs and Jews.

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2:00 pm - 3:00 pm: Barry Sonnenfeld: Best Possible Place, Worst Possible Time—True Stories From a Career in Hollywood

Laughter-inducing tales from the legendary director of Men in Black, Get Shorty, and The Addams Family

The legendary director of Men in Black, Get Shorty, and The Addams Family dishes out a delectable mix of insights and true tales that escalate from outrageous to unbelievable in his new memoir, Best Possible Place, Worst Possible Time. From battling with studio executives and producers to bad-script-solving on set to coaxing actors into finding the right light and talking faster, Sonnenfeld will provide an entertaining masterclass in how to make commercial art in the face of constant human foible. You’ll never see Hollywood the same way again.

A book signing will follow this program.

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2:00 pm - 3:00 pm: John Green and Rebecca Makkai in Conversation

The two best-selling authors on their work, their lives, and whether writing fiction matters

John Green (The Fault in Our Stars, The Anthropocene Reviewed) and Rebecca Makkai (The Great Believers, I Have Some Questions for You) are two of our most beloved contemporary writers. They’re also long-time admirers of each other’s work. For the first time, the two best-selling authors will come together to discuss their books and their lives. They’ll also share why they chose to write fiction in the first place and the role that novels can—and can’t—play in today’s short-attention-span world.

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2:00 pm - 3:00 pm: Michelangelo Sabatino and Chandra Goldsmith-Gray in Conversation: The Edith Farnsworth House

An icon of modern architecture with a legendary history

The Edith Farnsworth House, one of the most famous residences in modern architectural history, was legendary long before it could be widely accessed. Michelangelo Sabatino brings to life the house’s original design by Mies van der Rohe and discusses periods of neglect, flooding, and new ownership by Lord Peter Palumbo in his latest book, The Edith Farnsworth House: Architecture, Preservation, Culture. Now publicly accessible and celebrating 20 years of being owned and administered by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Sabatino joins Chandra Goldsmith-Gray and Thomas Leslie to discuss this icon of modern architecture, featuring a reading of Edith Farnsworth’s memoir.

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3:30 pm - 4:30 pm: Wendy Pearlman on the New Syrian Diaspora

Rethinking the meaning of home

Since the 2011 uprising evolved into a brutal war, millions of Syrians have been forced to flee their homes. Northwestern Professor of Political Science Wendy Pearlman has spent more than a decade interviewing hundreds of Syrian refugees to explore how people remake and rethink home after displacement. Her new book The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora, shares stories and reflections from Syrians around the world — now in places from Turkey to Norway, Japan, Brazil, and beyond — as they make sense of their own movement and migration. Pearlman sits down with Lina Sergie Attar, founder and CEO of the Illinois-based Karam Foundation, to talk about the book, discuss the shift from Syrian “refugee crisis” to diaspora-making, and challenge our conceptions of the universal question: “What is home?”

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4:30 pm - 5:30 pm: Kaveh Akbar: Seeking Meaning in Faith, Art, and Others

The poet discusses his acclaimed debut novel Martyr!

“Nothing short of miraculous.” That’s how The New York Times describes Kaveh Akbar’s first novel, Martyr! Akbar, an acclaimed poet based at the University of Iowa, will take us into the world of the novel’s protagonist, Cyrus Shams, a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past. Akbar will also share the challenges and opportunities that came with writing his first novel, as well as the community of writers around him—what he calls a “super-team Avengers squad of writers”—who have inspired and supported him throughout his career. Akbar will be joined by moderator John Green, author of the The Fault in Our Stars, who says of Martyr!: “So stunning, so wrenching, and so beautifully written that reading it for the first time, I kept forgetting to breathe.”

A book signing will follow this program.

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4:30 pm - 5:30 pm: Writing on Eggshells: Political Comedy Cracked Up

Second City’s Kelly Leonard chats with four late-night writers

What’s it like to write for the most popular late-night comedy shows in America when the news already feels like a satire of itself? Second City’s Kelly Leonard sits down with Chicago-bred talent who have written for the hottest shows in late night: Ali Barthwell (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver), Peter Grosz (The Colbert Report, Late Night with Seth Meyers), John Lutz (Late Night with Seth Meyers, Saturday Night Live), and Asha Ward (Saturday Night Live). They will discuss the power of creating comedy in a time of social and cultural crisis.

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