Authors & Moderators 2024
Elizabeth Beller
Elizabeth Beller is a writer and journalist specializing in culture, art, and travel with more than fifteen years of experience as a book and story editor. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Vogue, and Travel + Leisure, among other outlets. Before turning to writing and editing, she spent two years as a script reader for Miramax, followed by twelve years in the art world at Sotheby’s Auction House. She splits her time between New York and New Orleans with her husband, writer Thomas Beller, and their two children.
Clara Bingham
Clara Bingham is an award-winning journalist and the author of Witness to the Revolution, Women on the Hill, and the cowriter of Class Action. A former Washington, DC, correspondent for Newsweek, her writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Lois Cahall
Ms. Cahall is the Founder of the Cape Cod Book Festival. She began her writing career as a columnist for Cape Cod newspapers and other local periodicals before spending over a decade writing for women’s, men’s, and food magazines under the Hearst & Conde Nast banners.
Ms. Cahall’s is a #1 best-selling novelist whose forthcoming novel is entitled The Many Lives & Loves of Hazel Lavery (Jan. 2025).
In 2015 she founded the Palm Beach Book Festival bringing in New York Times best-selling and celebrity authors. James Patterson is the Festival’s Honorary Chairman. Ms. Cahall is the previous Creative Director of Development for James Patterson Entertainment (JPE).
Alisyn Camerota
Alisyn Camerota is a journalist, author, anchor and correspondent for CNN. In her three decades in journalism, Camerota has covered stories nationally and internationally, earning two Emmy Awards for her breaking news coverage of the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the on-air arrest of Roger Stone. She has also received the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award for her breaking news coverage of Hurricane Maria’s impact on Puerto Rico and a duPont-Columbia Award for her coverage of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder.
Alisyn attended American University on a Presidential scholarship, graduating cum laude in Broadcast Journalism. Alisyn’s debut novel, Amanda Wakes Up, was selected by National Public Radio as one of the best books of 2017, and by Oprah Magazine as “a must read.” Her memoir, Combat Love, is now available.
Garrett Graff
Garrett M. Graff has spent two decades covering politics, technology, and national security—helping to explain where we’ve been and where we’re headed. Today, he’s a columnist for the Washington Post, where he writes on leadership, serves as the director of cyber initiatives at the Aspen Institute, and hosts the award-winning history podcast, Long Shadow.
The former editor of POLITICO Magazine and a longtime contributor to WIRED and CNN, he’s written for publications like Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Foreign Affairs, and authored nine books—including the #1 national bestseller The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11, and the New York Times bestseller Watergate: A New History, which was a finalist in 2023 for the Pulitzer Prize in History. His most recent books include UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here—and Out Thereand When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day.
Leigh Haber
For the last ten years, Leigh Haber ran Oprah’s Book Club and oversaw all books coverage for her print and digital platforms. Earlier this year, she launched an independent business—Leigh Haber Literary—under which she writes, edits, and consults for entities such as The New York Times, Zibby Media, Girls Write Now, and Equality Now. She was recently named to the board of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.
Over the course of her career, Haber ran publicity departments for publishers such as Harcourt Brace and Avon Books, and later became a top editor for companies such as Scribner and Hyperion. She has worked with a stellar group of authors ranging from Al Gore to Steve Martin to Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor, to name a few.
Sebastian Junger
Sebastian Junger is the New York Times bestselling author of Tribe, War, Freedom, A Death in Belmont, Fire, and The Perfect Storm, and codirector of the documentary film Restrepo, which was nominated for an Academy Award. He is also the winner of a Peabody Award and the National Magazine Award for Reporting.
Don Lemon
Don Lemon is the host of The Don Lemon Show, streaming live daily on YouTube and everywhere podcasts are available. With three decades of award-winning journalism and storytelling behind him, Lemon has taken his signature style and outspoken truth-telling to a new platform, welcoming a variety of guests and newsmakers to his show, with topics spanning everything from social issues and race to pop-culture and current events.
Lemon has spent his entire career as a journalist and is the former anchor of the long-running CNN primetime program, Don Lemon Tonight as well as CNN This Morning. He has won a variety of distinguished awards for his work which has spanned nearly three decades, including an Edward R. Murrow award, multiple Emmys and a Peabody award, among others. In addition to CNN, Lemon has served as an anchor and correspondent at the NBC and MSNBC television networks, as well as at local stations in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Louis.
Lemon has covered countless global breaking news stories from the anchor desk, as well as on location, including the war in Ukraine (for which he received a Peabody award in 2022), the death of Osama Bin Laden, the inaugurations of the 44th and 45th Presidents of the United States, the school shootings in Uvalde, Texas and Newtown, Connecticut, and the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, George Floyd and Tyre Nichols. He joined CNN as a correspondent in 2006.
Lemon has been honored with countless awards not only for his journalism, but also for the impact his work and influence have made on society. He was voted one of the 150 most influential African Americans by Ebony magazine in 2009. In 2014, The Advocate included him as one of the publication’s 50 Most Influential LGBTQ People in Media.
Lemon is also a best-selling author. In 2011, he broke barriers by revealing that he was gay in his auto-biographical book Transparent. A decade later, in 2021, his book This is the Fire: What I Say to My Friends About Racism, debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. It was inspired by what he saw, learned and felt about the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.
Lemon graduated from Brooklyn College with a BA in broadcast journalism. He lives in New York City with his husband and their three dogs.
Liz McNeil
Liz McNeil is an editor-at-large at People, where she has worked for the last thirty years. She was the executive producer of the Discovery+ documentary Rebuilding Hope: The Children of 9/11 and the writer and executive producer of People’s podcast Cover-Up. She lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
Jacquelyn Mitchard
Jacquelyn Mitchard is the New York Times bestselling author of 24 books for adults, teenagers and children, among them The Deep End of the Ocean, the inaugural selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club. Her books have sold more than 3 million copies and have been translated into 34 languages. Mitchard’s essays and short stories have been widely anthologized and incorporated into high school and college curricula worldwide. She was editor of Merit Press, a YA imprint under the aegis of Simon and Schuster. Her first novel was adapted for a film produced by Michelle Pfeiffer. Her newest novel, The Birdwatcher, will be out in 2025 from HarperCollins. A Chicago native, she lives on Cape Cod with her family.
Imani Perry
Imani Perry is the Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Perry is the author of 8 books, including the New York Times Bestseller South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation which received the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was named one of President Obama’s favorite books of 2022. Perry’s other award-winning titles include: May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, and Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry. Perry has written for numerous publications including: The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s and Harper’s Bazaar. She is a 2023 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. She has also received Guggenheim and Pew Fellowships. Born in Birmingham Alabama, Perry is the mother of two sons and currently lives between Cambridge Massachusetts and Philadelphia.
Barry Sonnenfeld
Best Possible Place, Worst Possible Time delivers a cavalcade of sometimes baffling, often enlightening, and always funny stories about Sonnenfeld’s many films and television shows. From battling with studio executives and producers to bad-script-solving on set to coaxing actors into finding the right light and talking faster, Sonnenfeld provides an entertaining master class in how to make commercial art in the face of constant human foible. Over four decades in Hollywood, the mega-franchises include The Addams Family and Men in Black; the critical favorites, Get Shorty and Pushing Daisies; the icons, Will Smith, John Travolta, and Michael Jackson; and the projects that got away, Forrest Gump, Ali, and anything starring Jim Carrey.
RoseMarie Terenzio
RoseMarie Terenzio is the New York Times bestselling author of Fairy Tale Interrupted and the former executive assistant to John F. Kennedy Jr. She served as JFK Jr.’s chief of staff at George magazine and oversaw his public relations and philanthropic causes until his death in 1999. Terenzio is the executive producer of Paramount Network’s I Am JFK, Jr. She is from New York City, where she lives and works as a strategic communications professional.
Jeffrey Toobin
Jeffrey Toobin is one of the most recognized and admired legal journalists in the country. On television, in best-selling books, and in magazines and podcasts, he has covered all of the most dramatic legal controversies of the past three decades. His tenth book, The Pardon: Nixon, Ford, and the Politics of Presidential Mercy, will be published by Simon & Schuster in February 2025.
In 2024, NBC Universal released “Homegrown: OKC,” a podcast based on his book, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism. Also in 2024, Toobin became an instructor at Harvard Law School in the Trial Advocacy Workshop.
Toobin’s work has also been the basis for major television events. His book, The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson, was the basis for the acclaimed ten-part limited series, “American Crime Story,” starring John Travolta and Cuba Gooding, Jr., on the FX Network, in 2016.
At CNN and previously at ABC News, where he won an Emmy Award, as well as a staff writer for The New Yorker, Toobin has been a leading figure in coverage of the Supreme Court.
