See No Stranger: A Radical Vision for Mending our World

• 2021
• Free
• Health, Psychology & Spirituality

This is the book we have been waiting for. It calls us up and calls us into the hard and necessary work to heal our wounds and reimagine the world. —Van Jones

The Festival’s opening event, free to all, is a clarion call to heal America and our own hearts. The United States, lauded in its national anthem as “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” continues to be plagued by endless gun violence, police murders of unarmed Black people, threats to democracy, and hatred of “the other”… with an alarming increase in targeted anti-Asian attacks in the past year, too. Ever since her Sikh family friend was shot after 9/11, attorney and activist Valarie Kaur, the daughter of Sikh farmers in Central California, has achieved crucial policy change on multiple fronts, including hate crimes, racial profiling, immigration detention, and solitary confinement. Now she targets hatred itself. Her TED Talk on that topic has garnered more than three million views.

You can see Valarie live, and ask your questions, as she’s interviewed by Mother Jones race and justice reporter Jamilah King about Kaur’s book See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, that expands on that blockbuster TED talk. The book has been praised by visionaries across the progressive spectrum, from Eve Ensler to Reza Aslan. The New Jim Crow author Michelle Alexander called it “inspirational, radical…  a reliable moral compass.” What is this “revolutionary love”? It’s far “more than a rush of feeling,” Kaur says. “Love is fierce labor.” Discover just what this kind of love is and how you too can “be the change you want to see,” as Gandhi, and now this powerful woman, call us to do.

You can submit questions when you register, and we’ll also take questions live during the event.

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This event is also part of the Festival’s Women Lit series