Berkley Center

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an award-winning author and speaker, whose work has been translated into over 30 languages. She has penned three novels: Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Americanah (2013), as well as a short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck (2009). Best known for Americanah, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, Adichie was a 2008 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellowship. She speaks around the world and has delivered two TED talks: The Danger of A Single Story (2009) and We Should All Be Feminists (2012), which has since been published as a book. Her most recent work was published in early March 2017, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions.

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.