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.

Colum McCann is an award-winning novelist and distinguished lecturer of creative writing with the Master of Fine Arts program at Hunter College in New York. Born in Dublin, Ireland, McCann is the author of six novels, including TransAtlantic (2013) and Let the Great World Spin (2009), which won the 2009 U.S. National Book Award. His writing has been published in more than 35 languages and has appeared in publications such as the New Yorker, Esquire, the Atlantic, and the New York Times. In addition to his literary works, McCann is the co-founder of Narrative 4, a non-profit organization that works to break down barriers through storytelling and empathy.