What is the meaning and experience of freedom and why is persuasion a key toward enacting change and progress? Join authors Maggie Nelson and Anand Giridharadas as they discuss these questions and more as part of a conversation presented by The Cooper Union and PEN Out Loud in conjunction with the publication of their respective books, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint and The Persuaders: At The Front Lines Of The Fight For Hearts, Minds, And Democracy. The Strand will sell books at the event.

Register

Visitors must show security proof of vaccination or a negative PCR test by a third party (not home test) within three days of their visit to campus or a negative rapid test result taken by a third party (not home test) on the day of the visit to campus.

Maggie Nelson is the author of several books of prose and poetry including The New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner, The Argonauts (2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, and Bluets. Her work focuses on feminism, queerness, aesthetic theory, philosophy, and more. Nelson, who is a professor of English at the University of Southern California, has received fellowships from MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. She was named a Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.

Anand Giridharadas is the author of The New York Times bestseller The Persuaders, the international bestseller Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling, and is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC. A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, he has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time. He has received the Radcliffe Fellowship, the Porchlight Business Book of the Year Award, Harvard University’s Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.