What’s Next for American Democracy? — William Kristol & María Teresa Kumar moderated by Judy Woodruff — at Conn Ave
About This Event
Join us for a special conversation with three of the nation's most compelling voices on democracy—a leading conservative commentator, a pioneering advocate for voting rights, and one of the most respected leaders in American journalism—as they come together for a candid conversation about American democracy.The stakes for American democracy are high. What can we expect over the next weeks and months? Can our institutions hold? What sort of pro-democracy coalition is required to meet this moment? What are the compromises such a coalition might need to make? What are the sacrifices?There could not be a more important time for this conversation. Kristol, Kumar, and Woodruff all come to this moment along different paths yet share a conviction that democracy is imperiled, must be preserved, and ultimately will require people power, working together in ways large and small.Kristol and Kumar are Senior Fellows, and Woodruff is the Kay Fanning Fellow in Journalism and Democracy, at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, a nonpartisan operating foundation with a mission to advance inclusive democracies worldwide.William Kristol is editor-at-large of The Bulwark, where he’s lead author of the must-read daily newsletter, Morning Shots. Kristol is also founding director of Defending Democracy Together, an educational and advocacy organization dedicated to defending America’s liberal democratic norms, principles, and institutions, and a Charles F. Kettering Foundation senior fellow.Kristol has long been recognized as a leading participant in and analyst of American politics and has helped shape the national debate on issues ranging from American foreign policy to the meaning of American conservatism. He founded The Weekly Standard in 1995 and edited the influential conservative magazine for over two decades. Before that, he served in senior positions in the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations.Prior to coming to Washington, DC, in 1985, Kristol taught politics at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. He received his undergraduate degree and doctorate from Harvard University.María Teresa Kumar is the founding President and Co-Founder of Voto Latino and Voto Latino Foundation, the nation's premier Latino youth advocacy and voter registration organizations, which together have registered nearly 1.8 million voters.An Emmy-nominated MSNOW analyst and Senior Fellow at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, Kumar serves on the boards of Steve Madden, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. She previously served on President Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing and currently serves on the National Task Force on Election Crises. She is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.Her honors include Forbes' 50 Over 50: Impact, TIME's 13 Latinos Reshaping the Country, Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, and recognition as one of Carnegie Corporation's Great Immigrants.Raised in Sonoma, California, Kumar is a first-generation college graduate of UC Davis and holds a master's degree from Harvard's Kennedy School.Moderating the discussion will be Judy Woodruff, senior correspondent and former anchor and managing editor of the PBS NewsHour. A distinguished journalist for more than five decades, Woodruff is nationally recognized for her integrity, reporting, and media leadership. She is the recipient of numerous awards, among them a Peabody Journalistic Integrity Award and an Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award. Woodruff is the Charles F. Kettering’s Katherine W. Fanning Fellow in Journalism and Democracy.In early 2023, Woodruff stepped away from her anchor duties to devote her time to a new reporting project, “Judy Woodruff Presents: America at a Crossroads,” trying to understand our country and its people better and probing why Americans seem so divided. She has also continued to report on challenges facing people with disabilities.The first 100 attendees to visit our registers before the event will receive a complimentary Kettering Foundation tote bag and a copy of Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.This event is free with first come, first served seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
About the Venue
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Claudia Castro Luna — The Flowers Along the Way: A Memoir — at Conn Ave
This event will be in partnership with Salvadoran Cultural Institute.Passionately demonstrating the dormant trauma of political violence and the redemption waiting beyond itFrom El Salvador’s lush countryside to the streets of Oakland, California, a young mother wrestles with the intersecting forces of memory, history, and language in order to chart a new path for herself and her growing family. Fleeing political unrest and civil war violence in El Salvador, fourteen-year-old Claudia Castro Luna arrived in the United States with her family in 1981. Two decades later, holding her two-year-old and pregnant with her second child, she survives a public shooting by hiding behind shrubs in front of her house in Oakland. This event unleashes disorienting and traumatic memories, plunging her into a journey of discovery as she grapples with PTSD, recovers family stories, and begins to make sense of all that was torn asunder within her by the experiences of war and emigration. Beauty, longing, fear, and joy entwine in this powerful story of love, self-determination, and the search for home.CLAUDIA CASTRO LUNA is a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, a former Washington State Poet Laureate, and Seattle’s inaugural Civic Poet. She is the author of the poetry collections Green, the World; Cipota Under the Moon; Killing Marías; One River, A Thousand Voices; and This City, a chapbook. Her nonfiction has appeared in anthologies, journals, and newspapers. Born in El Salvador, Castro Luna lives and dreams in English and Spanish.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
Roberto Tejada & Christina Wiginton — Art & Water: Volume 2 - with Kaira M. Cabañas — at Conn Ave
Essays, personal meditations, and images that explore water in all its renewing, destructive, corrosive, and connecting powerWater and its transmutations link the contributions in Art & Water, the second volume in the series Art & from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. The series situates the study of art at the intersection of various disciplines—here, they include modernist literature, poetry, film, and both natural and built environments. Essayists use water to address hydrolatry practices in India; ritual objects and practices of enslaved Afro-Surinamers; traces of millstones in the architecture of Seville; and visualizations of sea-level change in the nineteenth-century United States. Their research places art within broader conversations in the humanities considering a water-oriented rather than terrestrial historical framework.The book is enlivened by first-person narratives that examine deeply embedded meanings of water. Continuing the series’ tradition of exciting book design, an enclosed poster from Brazilian multimedia artist Aline Motta addresses ancestry, memory, and belonging across the Black Atlantic while compellingly conjuring water’s capacity to transform, bring together, and renew. Water as a connective theme offers a fitting lens to advance understandings of how art, as both material object and practice, remains entangled with the natural, supernatural, and scientific—and, like water, remains inseparable from our daily lives.Distributed for the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual ArtsRoberto Tejada is an award-winning poet and the author of art histories that include Along the Diagonal: Art / Essays / América (2026), National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (2009) and Celia Alvarez Muñoz (2009), as well as the poetry collections Carbonate of Copper (2025), Why the Assembly Disbanded (2022) and Exposition Park (2010). A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Tejada serves as the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston, where he teaches creative writing and art history.Christina Wiginton is an art book publishing specialist focused on color-critical print production for visually ambitious museum publications and nonfiction books. She has worked extensively in illustrated book development, first at the Smithsonian Institution and now at the National Gallery of Art.Tejada and Wiginton will be in conversation with Kaira M. Cabañas, the award-winning author of several volumes, including Immanent Vitalities: Meaning and Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Art (2021), which received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award. Her previous work, Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art (2018), was recognized as a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. Since 2023, she has served as Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Publications at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.This event is free with first come, first serve seating. To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
Brian Jay Jones — The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building - with David O. Stewart — at Conn Ave
An in-depth exploration of history of the US Capitol building and the incredible personalities who built it, full of dramatic stories, surprising facts, and offering a powerful testament to what the Capitol has meant to generations of Americans, and how it’s endured.The Capitol is a unique biography of a place, encompassing architecture, history, politics, popular culture, and race in a fascinating exploration of our Capitol's secret history; a history rife with political intrigue, assassination attempts, thwarted bombings, and gunmen on the run. Never mind ghostly cat prints, mysteriously bloodstained steps, and charming “fairy doors” that have delighted visitors for hundreds of years. Spanning across three centuries of American history, it focuses on iconic and easily recognizable names and personalities from the past—from George Washington to Davy Crockett to Ronald Reagan—as well as countless colorful characters readers may not have heard of before, with a focus on restoring the stories of enslaved people and recognizing their contributions. The story of the Capitol is the story of America itself, and, for the first time, that story will be told in this sweeping, aspirational biography of the building at the very heart of the American experiment.Brian Jay Jones is the critically acclaimed, bestselling biographer of some of the world’s most iconic creative geniuses. Born in the Midwest and raised in the Southwest, Brian has a degree in English from the University of New Mexico. He spent more than two decades as a public policy analyst and speechwriter for thought leaders and elected officials at all levels of government, including nearly ten years in the US Senate. He presently lives in New Mexico.Jones will be in conversation with David O. Stewart, who has published eleven award-winning and best-selling books of history and historical novels. In 2023, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Washington Independent Review of Books. His most recent fictional series, the Overstreet Saga, is inspired by family stories his mother told. He lives in Maryland with the light of his life, Nancy Floreen; they have three children and six grandchildren.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.