Pulitzer-winning playwright, author and Tony-winning musician Quiara Alegría Hudes offers audiences the opportunity to hear untold stories. Her memoir, My Broken Language, is a lyrical exploration of coming of age against the backdrop of a Philadelphia barrio, with her sprawling Puerto Rican family as a collective muse. Hudes won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for her play Water by the Spoonful. She wrote the script for Tony Award-winning In the Heights, a Broadway play adapted into a major motion picture, in collaboration with Lin Manuel Miranda. The accompanying book, In the Heights: Finding Home, is a New York Times bestseller. Hudes’ screenplay for Netflix, Vivo, is her animation debut. As an essayist, she has written for The Nation, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and more. Her debut novel The White Hot demonstrates her range and command as a writer. She is one of the most innovative artists of this generation, expanding the boundaries of storytelling.

Hudes’ material impact as an activist is as strong as her cultural influence as a writer. Hudes and her cousin founded Emancipated Stories, a nonprofit helping people behind bars share one page of their life story with the world. Hudes’ accolades include the USA Artists Fellowship, the Lucille Lortel Award, the HOLA Award, and more. Her work uplifting marginalized communities, sharing often untold stories, and creating brilliant art captivates audiences worldwide. Hudes has been invited to speak for centers of creative innovation such as Vanderbilt University, Americans for the Arts, Google, and more.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent with The New York Times and a New York Times bestselling author. Working previously at the Wall Street Journal, Cooper was the foreign correspondent, reporter, and editor in the London, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta bureaus. For The New York Times, she covered the White House and was the diplomatic correspondent, reporting from 86 countries. Her autobiography, The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood, is a New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle finalist. Cooper also wrote Madame President: The Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, bringing her unparalleled journalistic skills to this biography of the leader of the women’s movement in Liberia. Cooper’s high-level analysis of today’s most important issues, thoughtful insights, and unwavering pursuit of the truth makes for indelible conversations that will have an enduring impact.

Cooper has received numerous accolades for her work, including the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, an Overseas Press Club Award for International Reporting, and a George Polk Award for Health Reporting for her coverage of the Ebola crisis, as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for International Journalism. She has appeared on Meet the Press, Washington Week, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Morning Joe, and This Week, and her stories appear in The New York Times.

Composer Jeanine Tesori has had an undeniable impact on the culture of musical theatre, opera, and film. Her musicals include Kimberly Akimbo; Soft Power; Fun Home; Shrek The Musical; Caroline, or Change; Thoroughly Modern Millie; and Violet. She is a two-time recipient of the Tony Award for Best Score and a two-time Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and in 2015, she and Lisa Kron became the first all-woman team to win the Tony for Best Score of a Musical for Fun Home. Her operas include A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck; The Lion, The Unicorn and Me; and Blue, which received the MCANA Award for Best New Opera. For her opera, Grounded, she became one of the first two women to be commissioned by The Metropolitan Opera - and the first woman in the 139-year history of the Met to open a season. Tesori also served as Supervising Vocal Producer on Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. Tesori brings a wealth of creative insight and industry expertise to any event.

Tesori is the Founding Artistic Director of New York City Center’s Encores! Off-Center series and a lecturer in music at Yale University. Jeanine has been the recipient of many honors, including the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Olivier Award for Best New Musical, as well as Drama Desk and Obie awards, and was cited by ASCAP as being the first woman composer to have “two new musicals running concurrently on Broadway.” Tesori offers a wealth of inspiration and practical advice, drawing from her experiences in composing, storytelling, and collaboration.

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author of the New York Times bestsellers Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit our Addictions and Salt Sugar Fat, Michael Moss is a leading expert on the food industry, health and wellness, and marketing. Taking audiences on an eye-opening journey deep inside some of the world's biggest and most successful companies, he offers audiences an illuminating and surprising look at the researchers, marketers, strategists, and CEOs who seduce us with their products. Moss brings to vivid life the creative ways food manufacturers use the science of human behavior, biology and marketing to hook us. Using humor, case studies, and insight gleaned from investigative reporting that won him a Pulitzer Prize, he shows how companies get consumers to buy, often at the expense of their health.

Informative, engaging and often hilarious, Moss also offers lessons on the new world of health food, smart marketing strategies regardless of industry, and the state of journalism today. Hailed as "extraordinary" (University of the Sciences), "powerful" (Epicure) and "riveting" (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation), Moss tailors his remarks to every audience, ensuring they leave deeply informed and with actionable takeaways. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Clarence Page is one of the most highly recognized and regarded syndicated columnists in the country. He is a columnist syndicated nationally by Tribune Media Services and a member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board. Page is also a regular contributor of essays to The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and has been a regular on The McLaughlin Group, The Chris Matthews Show, Nightline and Lead Story news panel programs. His book Showing My Color: Impolite Essays on Race and Identity, forever shifted conversations around race, gender, and ethnic identity from the civil rights reforms of the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s. In his speeches, Page decodes top political issues with clarity, balance, and humor.

A go-to voice on American culture and politics thanks to his sharp, thoughtful, and moving analysis, Page has received lifetime achievement awards from the Chicago Headline Club, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, and the National Association of Black Journalists. Page has spoken to the University of Chicago, the National Press Foundation, and the Anti-Defamation League.

Winner of three Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize, James Lapine is a writer, director, and Broadway legend. Known for genre-defining powerhouse collaborations with Stephen Sondheim, he was the writer and director for Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Passion, the multi-media review Sondheim on Sondheim, and co-produced and directed the revelatory HBO documentary Six by Sondheim for which he garnered an Emmy nomination and a Peabody Award. A prolific creator, he wrote and directed the Tony Award-winning Falsettos, the film Custody, and wrote the film adaptation for Into the Woods, as well as numerous Broadway and off-Broadway productions. Lapine is a beloved and eloquent titan of the theater, sharing star-studded stories and creative insights with enraptured audiences.

An instantaneous New York Times bestseller, Lapine’s book Putting it Together: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created Sunday in the Park with George chronicles the nuances of a powerful collaboration and the creative process that produced the Pulitzer Prize-winning Drama. A consummate artist, Lapine was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2011, and in 2015 received the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers awards for a lifetime of exceptional achievement in the theatre. Lapine is a devoted student of humanity, enriching conversations with insatiable curiosity, humor, and poignant observations on art and life.

Bob Woodward gained international attention when he and Carl Bernstein uncovered the Watergate scandal in 1973. Since then, he’s worked to shine a light on the inner-workings of secret government. Woodward’s factual, non-partisan revelations to readers and speech audiences provide a view of Washington they’ll never get elsewhere. Woodward has written about the last ten U.S. presidents and chronicled how the power of the presidency has evolved. He is author of 23 bestselling books – 17 went to #1 – more than any contemporary nonfiction writer.

In his speeches, Woodward looks at the expanding powers of the presidency and the important lessons that can be learned from the presidents he’s covered. He can also assess the role of the media and how well it is (or isn’t) doing its job. Audiences will be awe-struck by insights from this living journalistic legend. Currently associate editor for The Washington Post where he’s worked since 1971, Bob Woodward has won nearly every American journalism award including two Pulitzers.

Jonathan Eig is the author of King: A Life, which won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for biography. The New York Times called King “the definitive biography” of Martin Luther King Jr. and a book worthy of its subject. Jonathan is the author of six books, four of them New York Times bestsellers.

Jonathan's previous book, Ali: A Life, won the 2018 PEN/ESPN Award. Joyce Carol Oates called it an “epic of a biography” that “reads like a novel. Esquire magazine named Ali one of the 25 greatest biographies of all time. The book also inspired a Ken Burns documentary on Ali, for which Jonathan served as consulting producer.

Jonathan's first book, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, reached No. 10 on the New York Times bestseller list and won the Casey Award. His books have been listed among the best of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, and have been translated into more than twenty languages.

The Birth of the Pill, Jonathan’s fourth book, will be staged next year as a theatrical production by TimeLine Theatre in Chicago.

Jonathan began his writing career at age 16, working for his hometown newspaper, The Rockland County (N.Y.) Journal News, studied journalism at Northwestern University, and went on to work as a reporter for The New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Dallas Morning News, Chicago Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal.

He's appeared on the Today Show, NPR's Fresh Air, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. But his greatest claim to fame, according to his parents, is that his name once appeared in a Jeopardy question (which was solved correctly for $200).

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, composer, and lyricist Michael R. Jackson is the creator of A Strange Loop, which the New York Times has called a “bravura meta-musical.” The piece – which took Jackson eighteen years to create – won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2020. A Strange Loop went on to receive eleven Tony Award nominations and was called a “gutsy, jubilantly anguished musical with infectious melodies” by The New York Times. The musical received a New York Drama Critics Circle Award and won two Tony Awards – for Best New Musical and Best Book. In The New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham wrote, "To watch this show is to enter, by some urgent, bawdy magic, an ecstatic and infinitely more colorful version of the famous surreal lithograph by M. C. Escher: the hand that lifts from the page, becoming almost real, then draws another hand, which returns the favor." In engaging moderated conversations, the much-lauded creator shares the importance of making an impact in your own time, and leaves audiences feeling inspired and connected through shared empathy.

Jackson has been named one of TIME Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” (2022) and has received numerous awards including a New Professional Theatre Festival Award, a Jonathan Larson Grant, a Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, an ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Award, a Whiting Award, the Hellen Merrill Award for Playwriting, the Windham-Campbell Prize, among many others. He has appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, CBS Sunday Morning, and Late Night with Seth Meyers, to name a few. The Pulitzer Prize-winner also wrote the book, music, and lyrics for White Girl in Danger, which will premiere in New York City in 2023. Jackson has been sought after for candid and compelling conversations about art and authenticity by audiences worldwide.

Few journalists in America’s history have had the impact on their era and their craft as Carl Bernstein. For forty years, from All the President’s Men to A Woman-In-Charge: The Life of Hillary Clinton, Bernstein’s books, reporting, and commentary have revealed the inner-workings of government, politics, and the hidden stories of Washington and its leaders.

In the early 1970s, Bernstein and Bob Woodward broke the Watergate story for The Washington Post, leading to the resignation of President Richard Nixon and setting the standard for modern investigative reporting, for which they and The Post were awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Since then, Bernstein has continued to build on the theme he and Woodward first explored in the Nixon years – the use and abuse of power: political, media, financial, cultural and spiritual power. Renowned as a prose stylist, he has also written a classic biography of Pope John Paul II, served as the founding editor of the first major political website, and been a rock critic.

Daniel Yergin is a highly respected authority on energy, international politics, and economics. He is Vice Chairman of IHS Markit and chairman of CERAWeek, which CNBC has described as “the Super Bowl of world energy”.

Time Magazine said, “If there is one man whose opinion matters more than any other on global energy markets, it’s Daniel Yergin.” Fortune said that he is “one of the planet’s foremost thinkers about energy and its implications.” The New York Times described Daniel Yergin as “America’s most influential energy pundit.”

Dr. Yergin is the author of several books including “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power” (Simon & Schuster, January 1991),” for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book is “The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations (Penguin Press, September 2020).”

In 2014, the U.S. Department of Energy presented Dr. Yergin with the first “James R. Schlesinger Medal for Energy Security.” He is a recipient of the United States Energy Award for “lifelong achievements in energy and the promotion of international understanding.”

Dr. Yergin is a director of the Council on Foreign Relations and a trustee of the Brookings Institution. He is a member of the National Petroleum Council and a director of the United States Energy Association. He is a member of the advisory boards of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative and of the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy.

Dubbed "the funniest man in America" by the New York Times, nationally-syndicated columnist Dave Barry has been splitting sides for over a decade with his humorous observations on everything from issues such as the international economy, the future of democracy and society to exploding bathroom fixtures.