Posts by Live Talks LA

COLSON WHITEHEAD is the New York Times bestselling author of nine books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Underground Railroad, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. He is also a recipient of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships. In 2020, he won his second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Nickel Boys.

Charlie Kaufman is the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of films including Anomalisa; Synechdoche, New York; Adaptation; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; and Being John Malkovich. He won an Oscar for his work on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and has been nominated three additional times. He is also a three-time BAFTA winner for screenwriting, and he has been nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, among many other film honors. “Antkind” is his bold and boundlessly original debut novel.

Over the past 35 years, Robbie Conal has made more than 100 street posters — from oil portraits — satirizing politicians and bureaucrats. He has also taken on censorship, war, social injustice, and environmental issues. Conal recently began applying his wit on celebratory portraits of his personal heroes Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Greta Thunberg, Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, and Maya Angelou. “Robbie Conal: Streetwise 35 Years of Politically Charged Guerrilla Art” features every image in Robbie Conal’s storied poster campaigns — gnarled, gut retching, and emotionally laden —  and is the definitive history of  “America’s foremost street artist” (Washington Post) with a foreword by Shepard Fairey.

We welcome Michael Lewis back to our stage.  His bestsellers include The Fifth Risk, The Undoing Project, Flash Boys, The Big Short, The Blind Side, Liar’s Poker, Moneyball,  Boomerang, The New New Thing and Panic, among others.  What are the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works? If there are dangerous fools in this book, there are also heroes, unsung, of course. They are the linchpins of the system―those public servants whose knowledge, dedication, and proactivity keep the machinery running. Michael Lewis finds them, and he asks them what keeps them up at night.

Stacey Abrams is the New York Times bestselling author of Lead from the Outside, a serial entrepreneur, nonprofit CEO, and political leader. After serving eleven years in the Georgia House of Representatives, seven as minority leader, Abrams became the 2018 Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, where she won more votes than any other Democrat in the state’s history. She has founded multiple organizations devoted to voting rights, training and hiring young people of color, and tackling social issues at both the state and national levels; and she is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a 2012 recipient of the John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award.