FAU, Palm Beach Book Festival to Present‘New York Times’Best-Selling Authors in Boca Raton
Boca Raton, FL – Florida Atlantic University presents the Palm Beach Book Festival, featuring Anne Hull, Brandon Wolf, Lauren Groff, Barry Sonnenfeld and Joyce Carol Oates. The festival will take place on Saturday, March 16, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., in the University Theatre, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton campus.
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 is a nationally-recognized gun safety and LGBTQ civil rights advocate and dynamic public speaker. He 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 and 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 and 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.” Wolf will be discussing his book “A Place for Us.”
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,” “Matrix,” and “The Vaster Wilds,” and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into 36 languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.
Barry Sonnenfeld is an award-winning 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 gone on to direct a number of films including “Addams Family Values,” “Get Shorty,” and the first three “Men in Blacks.” His television credits include “Pushing Daisies,” for which he won an Emmy, and most recently Netflix’s “A Series of Unfortunate Events.”
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 Times best 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. Oates’ featured book is “Zero-Sum.”
Tickets are $15 per session and can be purchased at www.fauevents.com or by calling 561-297-6124. A package ticket is available for $50. Book signings will follow each session and books will be available for purchase throughout the day. Lunch is also available for pre-purchase at www.fauevents.com. Parking is included with cost of admission. FAU student, faculty and staff tickets are free.
