tree room author series

A broadly talented poet, author, park ranger and documentarian, Shelton Johnson was recently recognized for his exceptional service as a Yosemite National ranger with the Freeman Tilden Award, the highest given by the National Park Service for excellence in interpretation. He was featured extensively in Ken Burns’ landmark documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, reflecting on his twenty years of experience working in parks nationwide, including Yosemite, Yellowstone, Great Basin, and the National Mall. In his recent novel, Gloryland, Johnson confronts America’s history with racism to follow a sharecropper’s son from South Carolina to a career as a Buffalo Soldier with the U.S. Cavalry of the late 1800s. Deeply concerned with a general lack of racial diversity across the National Park System and with who will advocate for parks as the country’s demographics shift in the coming decades, Johnson has worked to share the previously untold stories of diverse peoples in national parks. His goal through his writing is to foster a spiritual connection between African-Americans and the wilderness landscape.

Jonathan Alter is an award-winning columnist, television analyst and author. He frequently interviews American presidents and other world leaders, regularly breaks news and has authored more than 50 Newsweek cover stories on everything from shrinking confidence in the American news media, to Bill Clinton's first interview after leaving the presidency, to Barack Obama's first magazine cover before he arrived in the U.S. Senate to Alter's personal story of living with cancer. Since 1991, Alter has written a widely acclaimed Newsweek column that examines politics, media and social and global issues. For more than a decade, he has worked as a contributing correspondent to NBC News. His 2006 book, "The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope," was a national bestseller. His highly anticipated new book, “The Promise: President Obama, Year One” is slated for release in May. The 2008 campaign marked the seventh presidential election Alter has covered for Newsweek. Among his exclusives in the 2008 campaign season were that Barack Obama would seek the presidency (October, 2006), that Mike Huckabee would be a factor in the GOP contest (August 2007) and that after a quarrel with President Clinton, Sen. Edward Kennedy was likely to endorse Obama. (January, 2008). Beyond politics and media, he has written extensively over the years about terrorism, anti-Semitism, at-risk children, national service and a wide variety of other issues.

Set over a period of twenty-four hours, Run takes us from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard to a home for retired Catholic priests in downtown Boston. It shows us how worlds of privilege and poverty can coexist only blocks apart from each other, and how family can include people you've never even met. As in her bestselling novel Bel Canto, Ann Patchett illustrates the humanity that connects disparate lives, weaving several stories into one surprising and endlessly moving narrative. Suspenseful and stunningly executed, Run is ultimately a novel about secrets, duty, responsibility, and the lengths we will go to protect our children.

"Ms. Patchett gives her readers much to contemplate when genetics, privilege, opportunity and nurture come into play. And to her credit she is neither vague nor reductive about any of these things; she creates a genuinely rich landscape of human possibility. Run ... shimmers with its author’s rarefied eloquence, and with the deep resonance of her insights." - The New York Times

In his most recent title, The Good Soldiers, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David Finkel vividly chronicles the extraordinary circumstances of modern combat he experienced first hand between January 2007 and June 2008, when he spent fifteen months with a battalion of 800 U.S. Army soldiers as they carried out “the surge” and worked to secure a volatile area of Baghdad. Finkel is currently assigned to the national Washington Post staff as an enterprise reporter, and has previously worked for the Post’s foreign staff division.

Upon its publication in early 2009, Kathryn Stockett’s wildly popular and critically praised debut novel, “The Help,” captured the national imagination. A story about black domestic servants working in white Southern households in the early 1960s, “The Help” has been at the top of the New York Times best-seller list for nearly fifty weeks, where it currently holds the number one spot for hardcover fiction. The book has also generated its share of controversy, with many reviewers asking the questions, Is it appropriate for a white woman from Jackson, Mississippi to write in the voices of black maids? Does Kathryn Stockett succeed at effectively capturing their lives and struggles? The New York Times ultimately calls it "[a] button-pushing…winning novel," while USA Today pronounced the book "thought-provoking...[a] pitch-perfect depiction of a country's gradual path toward integration…One of the best debut novels of the year."