2026: Hometown Girl – Beth Macy’s America

In Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, a deeply reported and moving memoir about her small Ohio hometown, journalist BETH MACY does an uncanny job of telling us the story of her own complicated family and also the story of the country itself and the cultural and economic fractures that are tearing it apart. It is a beautifully written must-read for anyone who wants to know the real struggles of heartland Americans. In conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter ANDREA ELLIOTT, Macy will talk about the poverty that marked her own childhood, her adamant empathy for the outsiders and underdogs, and what gives her hope for the future.