Big Books & Bold Ideas Creators & Guests

Kerri Miller is the host of MPR News with Kerri Miller and Talking Volumes. She was the political reporter for KARE 11 television in Minneapolis-St. Paul before coming to MPR in 2004.

Dr. Kavita Patel is a primary care physician, policy advisor, and author. She is a Senior Policy Advisor at Stanford University. She is also an advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center at the Brookings Institute.Patel is a former Nonresident Fellow and Managing Director of Clinical Transformation at the Center for Health Policy at at the Brookings Institution. She also served in the Obama Administration as director of policy for the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement in the White House.In addition to research articles for medical journals, Patel has written for MSNBC, The Hill, and The Washington Post.

Carina Chocano is a journalist and writer. Currently, she is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.Chocano has been a staff film and TV critic at the Los Angeles Times, a TV and book critic at Entertainment Weekly, and a staff writer at Salon. Chocano's writing has appeared in Vogue, Elle, and Rolling Stone. Her first book, "You Play The Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, and Other Mixed Messages," was published in 2017.

Anatoly Liberman is a linguist, medievalist, etymologist, poet, translator of poetry (mainly from and into Russian), and literary critic.Currently, Liberman is a professor in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic and Dutch at the University of Minnesota. He has published works on Germanic historical phonetics, English etymology, mythology/folklore, the history of philology, and poetic translation. He publishes a blog, "The Oxford Etymologist."

Lois Beckett is a journalist. Currently, she is the Senior reporter on gun policy and politics at The Guardian US.Previously, Beckett reported for Pro Publica, and before that for the Nieman Journalism Lab and for SF Weekly's Village Voice.Beckett received her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University, where she worked at The Harvard Crimson newspaper.

Abrahm Lustgarten is a reporter who focuses on the intersection of business, climate, and energy. He is currently working as senior environmental repoarter for ProPublica, and in partnership with the New York Times Magazine.Previously, Lustgarten was a staff writer for Fortune magazine, and an adjunct professor at the University of Oregon. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, Esquire, Salon, and Scientific American.Lustgarten's first book, "China’s Great Train: Beijing’s Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet," was published in 2008. His second book, "Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster," was published in 2012.Lustgarten received a B.S. in Anthropology from Cornell University, and an M.A. in Journalism from Columbia University.

Lesley Nneka Arimah is an author.Arimah's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, , McSweeney’s, GRANTA, and other publications. She has received the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa, the 2017 O. Henry Prize, the 2017 Kirkus Prize, and the 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing.Arimah is a 2019 United States Artists Fellow in Writing.

President of Social Security Works

Emily Tamkin is a freelance writer and reporter. Previously, Tamkin wrote for The Washington Post's WorldViews section. She has been a foreign affairs reporter at BuzzFeed News and Foreign Policy. Her writing has appeared in The Economist, Politico, and Slate. She has conducted independent research on Soviet dissidence in Moscow, Tbilisi, and, as a Fulbright grantee, in Bremen, Germany.Tamkin's first book, "The Influence of Soros: Politics, Power, and the Struggle for Open Society" was published in 2020.Tamkin received her B.A. in Russian literature from Columbia University, and her M.Phil. in Russian and East European studies from the University of Oxford.

Kevin Powers is a fiction writer and poet.

Dr. Michele Harper is an emergency room physician and author of The Beauty in Breaking.

Dessa (real name Margret Wander) is a rapper, singer, and essayist.Dessa has performed around the world as a member of the Doomtree hip-hop crew and as a solo artist.Dessa's work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Minnesota Monthly, and several literary journals. She has published two short collections of poetry and essays.

Uri Friedman is a journalist. Currently, he is Managing Editor at the Atlantic Council and a contributing writer at The Atlantic magazine.Previously, Friedman was a senior staff writer at The Atlantic covering national security and global affairs and the editor of The Atlantic’s Global section. Before that, he served as the deputy managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

Saeed Jones is a poet and achieves the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry.

Karen Louise Erdrich is an author of novels, short stories, and poetry. She is also the owner of Birchbark Books, which focuses on Native American literature.Erdich's stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker. Her first book, "Love Medicine," was published in 1984. She has published a 18 novels, several of which have won awards and/or become best-sellers. She has also published seven collections of short stories, and three collections of poems.Erdich received her B.A. in English from Dartmouth College and her M.A. in Writing from Johns Hopkins University.

Robin DiAngelo is an academic, lecturer, and author working in the fields of critical discourse analysis and whiteness studies.

Kelly Lytle Hernández is a Professor of History at the University of California Los Angeles and the author of the book City of Inmates.

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is a scholar, writer, teacher and activist, her latest research traces the rise of fitness culture since the 1950s, she is also co-founder of HealthClass2.0, an experiential health education program and co-host of the Past Present Podcast.

Stacey L. Smith is an Assistant Professor of History at Oregon State University.