Berkley Center

Paul Elie is a senior fellow with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and the director of the American Pilgrimage Project, a university partnership with StoryCorps based in the Berkley Center. His work deals primarily with the ways religious ideas are given expression in literature, the arts, music, and culture in the broadest sense. In the American Pilgrimage Project he examines the ways religious beliefs inform the experiences of the American people at crucial moments in their lives. Elie is also the moderator of Georgetown's Faith and Culture Series, a series of public conversations about the interaction of religion, art, literature, and society. He is the author of two books. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) is a group portrait of four twentieth-century Catholic writers (Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day). Reinventing Bach (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) chronicles the transformation of Bach's music through recording technology in the hands of great musicians (Albert Schweitzer, Pablo Casals, Glenn Gould, Yo-Yo Ma, et al.). Both books were National Book Critics Circle Award finalists, and The Life You Save May Be Your Own received the PEN / Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, a Christopher Award, and two Modern Language Association book prizes.

Ayana Mathis is a novelist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and author of The Unsettled (2023). She teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter College in New York City and is also enrolled in Union Theological Seminary. Mathis is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop (where she later taught) and a recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (2012), her first novel, was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, an NPR Best Book of the Year, and a selection for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club 2.0. She has been recognized with Princeton University's Hodder Fellowship, an American Academy in Berlin fellowship, and McSweeney's inaugural Gabe Hudson Prize. She contributed to the New Yorker's memorial coverage of Nelson Mandela, and her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Financial Times, and the Atlantic.