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[VIRTUAL] Dare to Speak: Suzanne Nossel with Joe Crespino

Suzanne Nossel headshot on right; on left: “Suzanne Nossel with Joe Crespino" in text and AJC Decatur Book Festival and PEN America logos

In partnership with Georgia Humanities and the AJC Decatur Book Festival, PEN America is excited to welcome Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, for a virtual event to discuss her new book. Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All is a playbook for navigating and defending free speech today, for paving a pathway that promotes free expression while also cultivating a more inclusive public culture. Centered on practical principles, Nossel’s primer equips readers with the tools needed to speak one’s mind in today’s diverse, digitized, and highly-divided society without resorting to curbs on free expression. The conversation will be moderated by Jimmy Carter Professor of History at Emory University Joe Crespino.

Register in advance for the event on Wednesday, October 14 at 6:30pm ET. Copies of Dare to Speak can be purchased on Bookshop. (10 percent of all sales of the book through this link on Bookshop go to PEN America.)

RSVP HERE


Joseph Crespino headshot

Joseph Crespino is the Jimmy Carter Professor of History at Emory University. He is an expert in the political and cultural history of the 20th-century United States, and of the history of the American South since Reconstruction. His research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Academy of Education. In 2014, he served as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Tubingen, and he has been named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. Crespino has published three books, has co-edited a collection of essays, and has written for academic journals as well as for popular forums such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and The Wall Street Journal. His most recent book, Atticus Finch: The Biography—Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of an American Icon, was published in 2018 by Basic Books.

Suzanne Nossel

Suzanne Nossel is Chief Executive Officer at PEN America and author of Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All. Prior to joining PEN America, she served as the Chief Operating Officer of Human Rights Watch and as Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. She has served in the Obama Administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, leading US engagement in the UN and multilateral institutions on human right issues, and in the Clinton Administration as Deputy to the US Ambassador for UN Management and Reform. Nossel coined the term “Smart Power,” which was the title of a 2004 article she published in Foreign Affairs Magazine and later became the theme of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s tenure in office. She is a featured columnist for Foreign Policy magazine and has published op-eds in The New York Times, Washington Post, and LA Times, as well as scholarly articles in Foreign Affairs, Dissent, and Democracy, among others. Nossel serves on the Board of Directors of the Tides Foundation. She is a former senior fellow at the Century Foundation, the Center for American Progress, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Nossel is a magna cum laude graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

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