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Alphabetical by last name

​​​​AYSHA AKHTAR, MD, MPH, is a neurologist and public health specialist and is on a mission to show that what is good for animals is also good for humans. She is the author of Animals and Public Health: Why Treating Animals Better Is Critical to Human Welfare. Her second book, Our Symphony with Animals: On Health, Empathy, and Our Shared Destinies, will be published on May 7, 2019. Akhtar is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, is Deputy Director of the Army Traumatic Brain Injury Program, and serves as Lieutenant Commander in the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. She has appeared in television shows and been interviewed by national media​.

Our Symphony with Animals
A leader in the fields of animal ethics and neurology, Dr. Aysha Akhtar examines the rich human-animal connection and how interspecies empathy enriches our well-being. Deftly combining medicine, social history and personal experience, Our Symphony with Animals is the first book by a physician to show how deeply the well-being of humans and animals are entwined. Interwoven throughout is Akhtar’s own story of being a young girl who was bullied in school and sexually abused by her uncle. Feeling abandoned by humanity, it was only when she met Sylvester, a dog who had also been abused, that she found strength for both of them. Against the backdrop of her inspiring story, Akhtar asks, what do we gain when we recognize our kinship with animals? She travels around the country to tell the stories of a varied cast of characters―including a former mobster, an industrial chicken farmer, a Marine veteran―and comes face to face with a serial killer. Through storytelling that is entertaining, profound, and touching, Akhtar reveals what happens when we both break and forge bonds with animals. She demonstrates how humans are neurologically designed to empathize with animals, and how violence against them goes against our nature. In equal measure, the love and friendship we give to other species biologically reverberates back to us. Humanity’s compassion for animals is the next step in our species’ moral evolution and a vital component of our own health. Our Symphony with Animals is the definitive account for why our relationships with animals matter.

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GINA BARRECA was hailed as “smart and funny” by People magazine and “Very, very funny. For a woman,” by Dave Barry. She was deemed a “feminist humor maven” by Ms. Magazine. Novelist Wally Lamb said “Barreca’s prose, in equal measures, is hilarious and humane." Her weekly columns from the Hartford Courant are distributed internationally by the Tribune Co., and she’s written for the Independent, the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Cosmopolitan, and Harvard Business Review. Gina, who is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, is author most recently of If You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse? which was an Elle Reader’s Prize selection. Her earlier books include It's Not That I'm Bitter …: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Visible Panty Lines and Conquered the World and the bestselling They Used to Call Me Snow White … But I Drifted. (photo credit: Elena Seiburt)
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“If You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse”
Gina Barreca is fed up with women who lean in, but don't open their mouths. In her latest collection of essays, she turns her attention to subjects like bondage, which she notes now seems to come in fifty shades of grey and has been renamed Spanx. She muses on those lessons learned in kindergarten that every woman must unlearn, like not having to hold the hand of the person you're waking next to (especially if he's a bad boyfriend) or needing to have milk, cookies, and a nap every day at 3:00 PM (which tends to sap one's energy not to mention what it does to one's waistline). She sounds off about all those things a woman hates to hear from a man, like "Calm down" or "Next time, try buying shoes that fit.” “If You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse?” is about getting loud, getting love, getting ahead and getting the first draw (or the last shot). Here are tips, lessons and bold confessions about bad boyfriends at any age, about friends we love and ones we can't stand anymore, about waist size and wasted time, about panic, placebos, placentas, and certain kinds of not-so adorable paternalism attached to certain kinds of politicians. The world is kept lively by loud women talking, and “If You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse?” cheers and challenges those voices to come together and speak up. You think she's kidding? Oh, boy, do you have another thing coming.

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LISA BARRETT, PhD, the author of the book How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, has published over two hundred peer-reviewed, scientific papers appearing in Science, Nature Neuroscience, and other top journals in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, as well as six academic volumes published by Guilford Press. She has also given a popular TED talk. Barrett received a National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award for her revolutionary research on emotion in the brain. Among her many accomplishments, she has testified before Congress, presented her research to the FBI, consulted to the National Cancer Institute, appeared on Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman and Today with Maria Shriver, and been a featured guest on public television and worldwide radio programs. She is also an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada.

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
Emotions feel automatic to us; that's why scientists have long assumed that emotions are hardwired in the body or the brain. Today, however, the science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. This paradigm shift has far-reaching implications not only for psychology but also medicine, the legal system, airport security, child-rearing, and even meditation. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose theory of emotion is driving a deeper understanding of the mind and brain, and what it means to be human. Her research overturns the widely held belief that emotions are housed in different parts of the brain and are universally expressed and recognized. Instead, emotion is constructed in the moment by core systems interacting across the whole brain, aided by a lifetime of learning. Are emotions more than automatic reactions? Does rational thought really control emotion? How does emotion affect disease? How can you make your children more emotionally intelligent? How Emotions Are Made reveals the latest research and intriguing practical applications of the new science of emotion, mind, and brain.

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F. DIANE BARTH, LCSW, is a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She has a master’s degree from Columbia University School of Social Work and analytic certification from the Psychoanalytic Institute of the Postgraduate Center. She has been on the faculty and supervisory staff and a training analyst at Postgraduate, NIP and ICP in NYC. Currently, she teaches private study groups and often runs workshops around the country. Barth’s articles have been published in the Clinical Social Work Journal, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalytic Psychology, and other professional journals, and as chapters in several books. She is the author of three books, most recently I Know How You Feel: The Joy and Heartbreak of Friendship in Women's Lives ​(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.) (photo credit:Tricia McCormack Photography)

I Know How You Feel: The Joy and Heartbreak of Friendship in Women’s Lives
“Do I have enough friends?” “Why did my friendship end?” and “What makes a good friendship work?" These are questions that F. Diane Barth, a psychotherapist widely recognized for her expertise in women’s relationships, fields all the time. In I Know How You Feel, she draws out engaging stories from a lively and diverse cast of women, many of whom speak about feelings they haven't shared before. She explores how life changes affect women's friendships in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Interweaving examples from classic women’s literature to chick flicks, she provides grounded advice on how to manage betrayal and rejection, how to deal with a narcissistic or bossy friend, what to do when your best friend and your family don’t get along, how to let go of a friendship that has stopped working, and much more. A timely, empathetic guide for women in their twenties to their sixties and beyond.

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WILLIAM DAMERON is an award-winning blogger and essayist. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Huffington Post, Saranac Review, Hippocampus Magazine, and in the book Fashionably Late: Gay, Bi & Trans Men Who Came Out Later in Life. His New York Times Modern Love essay, “After 264 Haircuts, a Marriage Ends,” was one of the most popular of the year. He is an IT director for a global economics consulting firm, where he educates users on the perils of social engineering in cyber security. William, his husband, and their blended family of five children split their time between Boston and the coast of southern Maine. His book, The Lie: A Memoir of Two Marriages, Catfishing & Coming Out, will be published in July 2019.
 
The Lie: A Memoir of Two Marriages, Catfishing & Coming Out
Do you know me?, the email began, sparking tremors of fear that turned into a full quake of panic when William Dameron discovered that his selfie had been stolen by strangers. On social networks and dating sites, his image and identity—a forty-year-old straight white male—had been used to hook countless women into believing in lies of love and romance. Was it all an ironic cosmic joke? Almost a decade prior, William himself had been living a lie that had lasted for more than twenty years. His secret? He was a gay man, a fact he hid from his wife and two daughters for almost as long as he had hidden it from himself. In this emotional and unflinchingly honest memoir of coming out of the closet late in life, owning up to the past, and facing the future, William Dameron confronts steroid addiction, the shame and homophobia of his childhood, the sledgehammer of secrets that slowly tore his marriage apart, and his love for a gay father of three that would once again challenge the boundaries of trust. At the true heart of The Lie is a universal story about turning self-doubt into self-acceptance and about pain, anger, and the long journey of both seeking and giving forgiveness.

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Michael Fine, MD, has been a family physician and manager in the field of healthcare for forty years. He is devoted to healthcare reform and the care of underserved populations. Dr. Fine served as Director of the Rhode Island Department of Health from 2011–2015. He is currently working to create the Central Falls Neighborhood Health Station, which will serve the entire local population-based primary care and public health collaborations. In addition to still being a practicing physician, he is the recent author of Health Care Revolt, a book that discusses the problems of American healthcare and what it will take to build a health care system for all Americans.
 
Health Care Revolt: How to Organize, Build a Health Care System,
and Resuscitate Democracy―All at the Same Time
Today’s deliberations about a revamped health care system are stuck—in need of fresh analysis and a new vision. Health Care Revolt sets out to provide just that and at a most propitious time in US history. Dr. Michael Fine’s manifesto frames the questions more expansively than others before him and offers an impassioned road map for a nation confused about which health care direction to travel. The crux of Dr. Fine’s argument is that the US has put the fate of its health care in the so-called marketplace, where the few profit from the public’s ill health and accelerate the erosion of democracy in the process. Health Care Revolt looks around the world for examples of health care systems that are effective and affordable, pictures such a system for the US, and creates a practical playbook for a revolution to protect health and strengthen democracy.

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PETER D. KRAMER is the author of seven books, including Ordinarily Well, Against Depression, Should You Leave?, the novel Spectacular Happiness, and the international bestseller Listening to Prozac. His work in progress is a novel built around a psychotherapist’s encounter with an erratic, egotistical political leader. Dr. Kramer hosted the nationally syndicated public radio program The Infinite Mind and has appeared on the major broadcast news and talk shows, including Today, Good Morning America, Oprah, Charlie Rose, and Fresh Air. His essays, op-eds, and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Slate, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. A long-time resident of Providence, Kramer is Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University.

Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants
In Ordinarily Well, the celebrated psychiatrist and author Peter D. Kramer addresses the growing mistrust of antidepressants among the medical establishment and the broader public by taking the long view. He charts the history of the drugs’ development and the research that tests their worth, from the Swiss psychiatrist Roland Kuhn’s pioneering midcentury discovery of imipramine’s antidepressant properties to recent controversial studies suggesting that medications like Prozac and Paxil may be no better than placebos in alleviating symptoms. He unpacks the complex “inside baseball” of psychiatry―statistics―and reveals the fascinating ways that clinical studies and their results can be combined, manipulated, and skewed toward a desired conclusion. All the while, Kramer never loses sight of the patients themselves. He writes with deep empathy about his own clinical encounters over the decades as he weighed treatments, analyzed trial results, and considered the idiosyncrasies each case presented. As Kramer sees it, we must respect human complexity and the value of psychotherapy without denying the truth―that depression is a serious and destructive illness that demands the most effective treatment available.

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RICK MASSIMO grew up in Providence and is the author of I Got a Song: A History of the Newport Folk Festival (Wesleyan University Press 2017) and A Walking Tour of the Georgetown Set (Lyons Press 2016). He wrote for the Providence Journal for nine years; he and his wife live in Washington, DC.
 
I Got a Song: A History of the Newport Folk Festival
The first-ever book exclusively devoted to the history of the Newport Folk Festival, I Got a Song documents the trajectory of an American musical institution that began more than a half-century ago and continues to influence our understanding of folk music today. Rick Massimo’s research is complemented by extensive interviews with the people who were there and who made it all happen: the festival's producers, some of its biggest stars, and people who huddled in the fields to witness moments—like Bob Dylan’s famous electric performance in 1965—that live on in musical history. As folk has evolved over the decades, absorbing influences from rock, traditional music, and the singer-songwriters of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Newport Folk Festival has once again become a gathering point for young performers and fans. I Got a Song tells the stories, small and large, of several generations of American folk music enthusiasts. 

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KEYNOTE
MIKE STANTON is the author of The Prince of Providence, a New York Times bestseller, and Unbeaten, a Rocky Marciano biography named one of the best books of 2018 by the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and Library Journal. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and associate journalism professor at the University of Connecticut.

Unbeaten: Rocky Marciano’s Fight for Perfection in a Crooked World
The son of poor Italian immigrants, with short arms and stubby legs, Rocky Marciano accomplished a feat that eluded legendary heavyweight champions like Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey, Muhammad Ali, and Mike Tyson: he never lost a professional fight. His record was a perfect 49–0. Unbeaten is the story of this remarkable champion who overcame injury, doubt, and the schemes of corrupt promoters to win the title in a bloody and epic battle with Jersey Joe Walcott in 1952. Rocky packed a devastating punch with an innocent nickname, “Suzie Q,” against which there was no defense. As the champ, he came to know presidents and movie stars–and the organized crime figures who dominated the sport, much to his growing disgust. He may have “stood out in boxing like a rose in a garbage dump,” as one sportswriter said, but he also fought his own private demons. In the hands of the award-winning journalist and biographer Mike Stanton, Unbeaten is more than just a boxing story. It’s a classic American tale of immigrant dreams, exceptional talent wedded to exceptional ambitions, compromises in the service of a greater good, astounding success, disillusionment, and a quest to discover what it all meant. Like Suzie Q, it will knock you off your feet.

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