Saturday – March 16, 2024

SCHEDULE and Tickets for events at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca (Dorothy Schmidt Theatre)

11 a.m.
COMING OF AGE IN FLORIDA: Tragedy, Triumph, LGBTQ
Anne Hull & Brandon Wolf in conversation 

ANNE HULL is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Through the Groves: A Memoir (2023.) She is a former national reporter with The Washington Post, a recipient of fellowships at the American Academy in Berlin and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard and has taught journalism as a visiting professor at Princeton. A fifth-generation Floridian, she began her career at the Tampa Bay Times. She lives in Washington, DC.

Brandon Wolf  currently serves as National Press Secretary for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organization. On June 12, life changed for Brandon. He crouched in a bathroom while a gunman opened fire at Orlando’s Pulse Nightclub, killing his best friends, Drew Leinonen & Juan Guerrero, and 47 others.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Brandon co-founded The Dru Project, a nonprofit organization that works to empower youth and provide future leaders in the LGBTQ community funding for higher education. To date, the organization has given over $150,000 in college scholarships to rising leaders. He also became an outspoken activist in the gun violence prevention movement, partnering with March For Our Lives, Everytown, Giffords, and others to demand legislative solutions to the epidemic. In 2019, he became the first survivor of the tragedy at Pulse Nightclub to testify before Congress.

A powerful public speaker, Brandon Wolf is a frequent guest on MSNBC (The Reid Out & American Voices), CNN, and in print publications (CNN.com, USA Today, Newsweek, Teen Vogue, Washington Post, The Advocate, Out Magazine) weaving his story into calls to action. He has been recognized by HuffPost as one of “30 modern-day LGBTQ pioneers

12:15 – 1 pm A FLORIDA FAVORITE – BOOKS OF THE DECADE
Lauren Groff 

Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times-bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies and Matrix, and the short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won the Story Prize and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Groff’s work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she was named one of Granta’s 2017 Best Young American Novelists. Her newest novel is The Vaster Wilds.

Lunch Break and signings 40 minutes 

2 pm  – MEMOIR OF THE DECADE – BARRY SONNENFELD, CALL YOUR MOTHER!
Honoring Barry Sonnenfeld

Barry Sonnenfeld is an American filmmaker and writer who broke into the film industry as the cinematographer on the Coen Brothers’ first three films: Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and Miller’s Crossing.  He also was the director of photography on Throw Mamma from the Train, Big, When Harry Met Sally, and Misery.  

Sonnenfeld made his directorial debut with The Addams Family in 1991 and has since gone on to direct a number of films including Addams Family Values, Get Shorty, RV and the first three Men In Blacks.    

His television credits include Pushing Daisies, for which he won Emmy and DGA Awards, and most recently Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. which won a Peabody and was nominated for Emmy and Directors Guild of America Awards each of its three seasons.

3:30 – LIFETIME HONOREE –
Joyce Carol Oates moderated by Leigh Haber @Leigh Haber Literary (Formerly our Oprah panel)

JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde; and the New York Timesbest seller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. In 2020 she was awarded the Cino Del Duca World Prize for Literature. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.