Talks & Entertainment

This program does not include a book signing. All books will be pre-signed by the authors.

Kristof and WuDunn, the bestselling authors of Half the Sky and A Path Appears, address the crisis in working-class America while focusing on solutions to mend a half century of governmental failure in Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope.

With stark poignancy and political dispassion, Tightrope draws us deep into an “other America” to tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up in rural Yamhill, Oregon, an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the children on Kristof’s old school bus died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents. And while these particular stories unfolded in one corner of the country, they are representative of many places the authors write about, from the Dakotas and Oklahoma to New York and Virginia, where working-class families are needlessly but profoundly damaged as a result of decades of policy mistakes.

Kristof and WuDunn are the first husband and wife to share a Pulitzer Prize for journalism. An op-ed columnist for The New York Times, Kristof won his second Pulitzer in 2006 for his columns on Darfur. WuDunn previously worked at The Times as a business editor and foreign correspondent.