WIT: Words, Ideas, and Thinkers Literary Festival

The Authors Guild Foundation’s WIT: Words, Ideas, and Thinkers Literary Festival returns to the Berkshires on September 27 to 29 to explore the theme The Power of Words: Why Writers Matter.

The 2024 Festival brings a lineup of eight conversations between Jennifer Egan & Joseph O’Neill; Emily Wilson & Stephen Greenblatt; Tony Kushner & Rachel Maddow; Ruth Simmons & Sherrilyn Ifill; Cathy Park Hong & Sayed Kashua; Jamaica Kincaid & Sandra Guzmán; Ruth Reichl & Monique Truong; and Marie Arana & Luis Alberto Urrea.

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Full festival schedule

Session 1
Friday, September 27, 1:00 P.M.
Jennifer Egan & Joseph O’Neill
The 2024 WIT Literary Festival opens with a wide-ranging conversation between Jennifer Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad, Manhattan Beach) and Joseph O’Neill (Netherland, Godwin)—two award-winning novelists rightly celebrated as restlessly inventive and deeply compassionate storytellers.

Session 2
Friday, September 27, 3:30 P.M.
Stephen Greenblatt & Emily Wilson
Join literary historian Stephen Greenblatt (The Swerve, Second Chances) and scholar-translator Emily Wilson (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey) for a conversation about renewal in literature and life—the vitality of Shakespeare and Greek classics, and the role that the two of them play in animating and elucidating these works for contemporary readers.

Session 3
Saturday, September 28, 10:00A.M.
Tony Kushner & Rachel Maddow
Join playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and historian/journalist/TV political analyst Rachel Maddow (Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism) for a conversation on the American democratic experiment and their collaboration adapting Maddow’s podcast Ultra for Steven Spielberg.

Session 4
Saturday, September 28, 1:00 P.M.
Sherrilyn Ifill & Ruth Simmons
Join Sherrilyn Ifill and Ruth Simmons—national leaders in the fields of civil rights and higher education—for a conversation on the importance of the law and the classroom in preserving the future of our democracy. They will also discuss Simmons’s new coming-of-age memoir, Up Home, and Ifill’s new role as the inaugural chair of Howard University’s 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy.

Session 5
Saturday, September 28, 3:30 P.M.
Cathy Park Hong & Sayed Kashua
Join Cathy Park Hong and Sayed Kashua for a conversation on the tensions and beauties inherent in overlapping identities and how they grapple with the inadequacies of language—confronting the distance between what has happened and how it is described. Hong’s trenchant, deeply felt book of essays, Minor Feelings, about the experience of being Asian American, earned her a place on the cover of Time Magazine. Kashua, an Arab Israeli novelist and newspaper columnist based in Boston, is best-known internationally as the creator of hit TV series, most recently Madrasa, about a bilingual school in Jerusalem where Palestinians and Israelis try to find a common ground.

Session 6
Sunday, September 29, 9:30 A.M.
Jamaica Kincaid & Sandra Guzmán
“You only start to make a garden—growing things because they’re beautiful and inspire thoughtfulness and reflection—after you have enough to eat,” Jamaica Kincaid has said. Best known for deeply personal works of lyric fiction, Kincaid reflects on the stories of the plants that have made up the colonized world in her new book, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children. Joining Kincaid for a conversation exploring their shared passion for gardening of all sorts is the journalist and editor Sandra Guzmán, whose talents for tending and cultivating are on glorious display in her groundbreaking anthology, The Daughters of Latin America.

Session 7
Sunday, September 29, 11:30 A.M.
Ruth Reichl & Monique Truong
“There is almost no story you can’t tell through food,” Ruth Reichl has written. Joining Reichl, who recently published The Paris Novel and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the James Beard Foundation, for a fresh conversation on the language and literature of food is Monique Truong, whose own appetite for the discussion is perhaps reflected in the delectable titles of her three indelible novels—Bitter in the Mouth, The Book of Salt, and The Sweetest Fruits.

Session 8
Sunday, September 29, 2:00 P.M.
Marie Arana & Luis Alberto Urrea
“My whole career has been devoted to trying to explain the Latin American personality,” Marie Arana has said. In LATINOLAND, she offers readers a sweeping, personal portrait of the largest racial and ethnic minority in the United States. Joining Arana for a discussion of the many “Latinolands” they have lived in, imagined, and reported on is the acclaimed writer Luis Alberto Urrea, who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore themes of love, loss and triumph.
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