Archive of Speakers
Here you will find an archive of past speakers hosted by The Lewis Frumkes Center for Writing and Culture. Recordings from past events can be found on our YouTube channel.
2023 Speakers

Abraham (Avi) Loeb is the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University and a bestselling author. He earned his PhD in Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at age 24 and led the first international project under the Strategic Defense Initiative. Loeb has written 9 books, including Extraterrestrial and Interstellar, and over 1,000 scientific papers. He directs the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and leads the Galileo Project. Loeb was the longest-serving Chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy and the Founding Director of the Black Hole Initiative. An elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Physical Society, Loeb has held leadership roles on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the National Academies, and the Breakthrough Prize Foundation. TIME magazine named him one of the 25 most influential people in space in 2012, and in 2020 he was recognized among the 14 most inspiring Israelis of the last decade.

New York Times-bestselling author Susan Isaacs’ female protagonists are her calling card. As Rachel Martin put it on NPR’s Weekend Edition, “The women who inhabit Isaacs’ books are smart, sexy, a little snarky, and filled with some serious chutzpah.” Readers will be thrilled by the return of two favorite characters, former FBI agent Corie Geller and her retired cop dad, in BAD, BAD SEYMOUR BROWN (Atlantic Monthly Press; $28 hardcover, 400 pages; ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-5906-9; publication date: May 2, 2023), in which they are tasked to solve one of the NYPD’s coldest homicide cases before the crime’s sole survivor is killed. When Corie Geller asked her parents to move from their apartment into the suburban McMansion she shares with her husband and teenage daughter, she assumed they’d fit right in with the placid life she’d opted for when she left the Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force of the FBI.

Carmela Ciuraru is the author of the critically acclaimed books Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages (a New York Times "Editors' Choice" selection) and Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, both from Harper, and several poetry anthologies. She has been interviewed on The Today Show and by newspapers and radio stations internationally.

Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski (PhD Harvard University, 2019) is a high energy theorist who joined the Perimeter faculty in 2021 after completing a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Princeton Centre for Theoretical Science. Her research prior to joining PI includes discovering infinite dimensional symmetry enhancements of the S-matrix, a new observable memory effect in gravity, and a framework for generalizing these features of infrared physics to other theories. As the founder and principal investigator of our new Celestial Holography Initiative, she is leading a team of amplitudes, mathematical physics, and quantum gravity researchers in a concerted effort to tackle the problem of uniting our understanding of spacetime with quantum theory by encoding our universe as a hologram.

Karen LeFrak launched her career as a composer around the same time she began introducing children to the worlds of music, dance, and dogs in her four highly-acclaimed children’s books published by Bloomsbury, Random House, and Crown Books – Jake the Philharmonic Dog, Jake the Ballet Dog, Best in Show, and Sleepover at the Museum.
Karen’s music has been streamed over 20 million times since her first recording release in March 2021. Her music has been heard live at such leading venues as NYC’s Lincoln Center, the fabled Mariinsky Theatre, Festival Napa Valley, and the White House – at an International Women’s Day Luncheon. Her compositions have been commissioned and performed worldwide, including by the New York Philharmonic; Beijing Music Festival; American Ballet Theatre; the Mariinsky, Joffrey, and San Francisco Ballets; and the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, among many others.
In 2022/23 she celebrates a performance of the multimedia Sleepover at the Museum with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington D.C. and the world premiere of her Summer Piano Concerto and a movement of her guitar concerto with the Miami Symphony Orchestra, among other performances.

Daphne Merkin is a novelist and critic who has made a name for herself with her often-unnerving candor and forthright attitude towards issues of family, religion, money, and sex as well as her ability to straddle the High/Low cultural divide. One of her New Yorker essays, “Trouble in the Tribe”, was chosen for The Best American Essays of 2001, as well as The Best Spiritual Essays. Merkin is the author of Enchantment (1986), which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for best novel on a Jewish theme and was reissued by Picador (2020), with an introduction by Vivien Gornick. She has also published two collections of essays, 2014’s The Fame Lunches, which was named a New York Times Notable Book, and 1997’s Dreaming of Hitler, as well as a memoir about her life-long struggle with depression, This Close to Happy (2017). Her latest book, a novel called 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love, was published in July 2020.

Frederic Tuten, grew up in the Bronx. He has written about art, literature and film in ArtForum, The New York Times, Vogue; was an actor in an Alain Resnais movie; taught with Paul Bowles in Morocco; co-wrote the cult-classic Possession, and along the way, earned three Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry award, a PhD in American literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and founded the Creative Writing department at City College.He is the author of five novels (The Adventures of Mao on the Long March; Tintin in the New World; Tallien: A Brief Romance; Van Gogh’s Bad Café; The Green Hour), a memoir (My Young Life), two books of short stories; Self Portraits: Fictions and The Bar at Twilight; and on On a Terrace in Tangier, a book of drawings and stories.

Iris Smyles, is an American novelist, essayist, and columnist. Smyles is the author of the novels Iris Has Free Time (which Forbes called “an instant classic… a smart, funny, wise, and sometimes heartbreaking book about a slowly fizzling love affair with youth,”), Dating Tips for the Unemployed (a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor), and, most recently, Droll Tales. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vogue, Paris Review Daily, BOMB, The Baffler, and Best American Travel Writing among other publications, and she has written columns for Splice Today and The East Hampton Star.

Dr. Richard J. Frances is a New York-based psychiatrist specialising in addiction/substance abuse, anxiety disorders, mood disorders and psychopharmacology. Previously a clinical professor of Psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine and an adjunct professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, Dr. Frances received his medical degree from the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and has been in practice for over 50 years. He is the founding president of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry. Dr. Frances also holds the position of Emeritus President and Medical Director of Silver Hill Hospital.
2021 Speakers

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and most recently, The Last Hundred Years Trilogy: Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age. She is also the author of several works of nonfiction and books for young adults. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has also received the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. She lives in Northern California.
To watch Jane's program, please click here.

Ann Patchett is the author of eight novels, three books of nonfiction, and two children’s books. She is the winner of the PEN/Faulkner, the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the U.K., and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages. She was named byTime magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She is the co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee.

Patrick Ryan is the author of two collections of stories, Send Me and The Dream Life of Astronauts. He is the editor of One Story magazine.
To watch Ann and Patrick's program, please click here.

Maaza Mengiste is the author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and a recipient of the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award in Literature, as well as a LA Times Books Prize finalist. It was named a Best Book of 2019 by New York Times, NPR, Time, Elle, and other publications. Beneath the Lion's Gaze, her debut, was selected by the Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books.
To watch Maaza's program, please click here.

Barbara Taylor Bradford, O.B.E., one of the world’s most popular and prolific authors, has written 38 best-selling novels. Her first, A Woman of Substance, has sold over 33 million copies worldwide, and is on the ten-book list of the biggest-selling novels of all time. It is still selling today, and was a huge success as a TV mini-series.
Mrs. Bradford has written 7 novels which form The Emma Harte Saga and has just finished and delivered the prequel to A Woman of Substance, called A Man of Honour, featuring Blackie O’Neill, before he meets Emma. It will be published in the UK and US in November 2021. Her most recent release is Into the Lion’s Den, the second book in the House of Falconer series.
In 2004 Queen Elizabeth awarded Mrs. Bradford the O.B.E. for her literary achievements.
To watch this program, please click here.

Howard Gardner is the Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has studied and written extensively about intelligence, creativity, leadership, and professional ethics, and is the senior director of Project Zero and co-founder of the Good Project. Among his current research undertakings is a national investigation of liberal arts and sciences in the United States in the 21st century. His intellectual memoir, A Synthesizing Mind, was published September 2020.
To watch Howard's program, please click here.