August 2, 2025 - Changing the Rules: The Role of Advocacy

Описание: Changing the Rules: The Role of Advocacy with Jaz Brisack, Rebecca Grant, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Wally Lamb, and moderated by Barbara Phillips.

This will be a conversation about imagining and then creating the world we want to live in. We’re talking about reproductive justice; a healthy, safe, restored and resplendent life on earth; challenging economic injustice and the danger to democracy; and systemic criminal injustice. We are talking about advocacy for a new world.

Jaz Brisack offers an inside look at today’s resurgent labor movement in Get on the Job and Organize. From Starbucks to Tesla, Brisack chronicles workers’ bold campaigns to unionize in the face of powerful corporate resistance. Brisack draws from firsthand experience as a Rhodes Scholar-turned-barista who helped launch Starbucks Workers United.

Rebecca Grant is a Portland-based journalist covering reproductive rights, health, and justice. A Cornell graduate and former Peace Corps volunteer, Grant is the author of ACCESS: Inside the Abortion Underground and the Sixty-Year Battle for Reproductive Freedom, a journey into the underground activist networks that have been working to protect women’s autonomy over their bodies amidst legal, political, religious, and cultural oppression.

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, policy expert, and climate thought leader. Johnson is the co-founder of Urban Ocean Lab, co-editor of the bestselling anthology All We Can Save, co-creator of the acclaimed podcast How to Save a Planet, and co-author of the Blue New Deal. Her latest book, What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures is a hopeful exploration of what’s possible when we meet the climate crisis with creativity, justice, and collective action.

Wally Lamb is the author of six New York Times bestselling novels including I Know This Much Is True, She’s Come Undone, and his latest novel, The River is Waiting, which follows a young father grappling with unbearable tragedy as he searches for hope, redemption, and the possibility of forgiveness. Lamb also edited Couldn’t Keep It to Myself and I’ll Fly Away, volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Connecticut, where he was a volunteer facilitator for twenty years.

Our moderator Barbara Phillips is a social justice feminist and adjunct professor at the University of Mississippi Law School, where she teaches “The Role of Lawyers in Our Democracy.” A former litigator, community organizer, and Ford Foundation program officer, she writes on democracy, civil rights, and political participation. She serves on the MV Book Festival Advisory Board.