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4 COGNOTES

DECEMBER 2016 PREVIEW

Award-winning Actor, Author Neil Patrick Harris to Speak at Closing Session

Neil Patrick Harris
Closing Session
Monday 1/23, 2:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Don’t miss this magic! Adding young readers’ author to his list of accomplishments – actor, producer, director, host, author, and magician – Neil Patrick Harris joins us to close out the Midwinter Meeting & Exhibits. Harris is a five-time Emmy Award winner and winner of the 2014 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for his performance in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” A celebrated awards host, he hosted the 87th Annual Academy Awards in 2015. His first book was published in 2014 – Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography – a structurally innovative memoir that is “a revolutionary, Joycean experiment in light celebrity narrative, actor/personality/carbon-based-life-form.”

The Magic Misfits (Fall 2017, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers) is Harris’s middle-grade debut. Well known for his creative genius on the screen, stage, and page, with this latest endeavor he combines his passion as a magic enthusiast with his more recent experiences as a parent to craft a series that will inspire and entertain kids. “Books are awesome. Reading and books have become a mainstay in my family, and they have gotten me thinking in a new way about the power of storytelling,” he commented. “Playing with elements of magic, adventure, and friendship, The Magic Misfits is the kind of series that would have thrilled me as a kid, and I hope it does just that for today’s young readers.”

Harris served as President of the Academy of Magical Arts from 2011 – 2014, won the Tannen’s Magic Louis Award in 2006, and hosted the 2008 World Magic Awards. He directed the highly acclaimed intimate illusion show “Nothing to Hide,” featuring two award-winning magicians, in Los Angeles and New York. He most recently served as host and Executive Producer of NBC’s live variety series “Best Time Ever” with Neil Patrick Harris and will next be seen starring as Count Olaf in the Netflix’s original series “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.”

His appearance is sponsored by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

Urban Visionary Ryan Gravel to Deliver 2017 Arthur Curley Memorial Lecture

Ryan Gravel
Arthur Curley Memorial Lecture
Saturday 1/21, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m.

Ryan Gravel, urban visionary, planner, designer, and author of Where We Want to Live: Reclaiming Infrastructure for a New Generation of Cities, will bring his message to the 2017 Midwinter Meeting as the Arthur Curley Memorial Lecturer on Saturday, January 21, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. Gravel is the award-winning creator of the Atlanta Beltline, a 22-mile transit greenway that will ultimately connect 40 diverse Atlanta neighborhoods to city schools, shopping districts, and public parks. He presents an exciting pitch for how to make cities the kinds of places where we truly want to live, and argues that we can take the future into our own hands and improve our way of life by remodeling cities with better infrastructure to reconnect both neighborhoods and people.

Through his work on site design, infrastructure, concept development, and public policy as the founding principal at Sixpitch, Gravel also investigates the cultural side of infrastructure, and in Where We Want to Live, describes what these projects mean and why they matter. A compelling case for our capacity to address challenges that result from sprawl, traffic, divided neighborhoods, inequality, and both rapid growth and declining economies is made by the Atlanta Beltline, which has seen record-breaking use of its first section of mainline trail and $2.4 billion of private sector redevelopment since 2005.

Gravel’s work has been covered in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Monocle, CityLab, CNN International, USA Today, Esquire Magazine, and others. Among his numerous awards and honors, he has been listed among the 100 Most Influential Georgians by Georgia Trend Magazine, the GOOD 100 by GOOD Magazine, “Visionary Bureaucrat” by Streetsblog, and “Top 25 Newsmakers” of 2011 by Engineering News-Record. He received an “Emerging Voices” citation from the AIA-Atlanta, 2011 and was identified in 2006 by Esquire Magazine as one of the “Best & Brightest.” His TEDx presentation provides a global overview of his work.

Gravel’s appearance is sponsored by Macmillan.

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Pulitzer Prize-winning Historian Annette Gordon-Reed to Speak Sunday

Annette Gordon-Reed
Auditorium Speaker
Sunday 1/22, 10:00 – 11:00 a.m.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and law professor Annette Gordon-Reed, author of several books including The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family and most recently “Most Blessed of Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (with Peter S. Onuf ), is the Auditorium Speaker on Sunday, January 22, 10:00 – 11:00 a.m. Her persistent investigation into the life of an iconic American president has dramatically changed the course of Jeffersonian scholarship, and in disentangling the complicated history of two distinct founding families’ interracial bloodlines, she offers an authentic portrayal of our colonial past.

Gordon-Reed was fascinated from childhood by the Jefferson family, and began a comprehensive re-examination of the evidence about the rumored committed relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. She has continued her inquiry into colonial interracial relations through several books since her first one, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. She is currently the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, a professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Her honors include a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, and the Woman of Power & Influence Award from the National Organization for Women in New York City. Gordon-Reed was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and is a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Gordon-Reed’s appearance is sponsored by W.W. Norton

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