Best-selling author and cultural historian Sarah Lewis will give the next Town Hall of Cleveland lecture on Monday, Feb. 2, at 6 p.m. in the Tinkham Veale University Center. Free tickets are available on the University Center’s website.
Lewis has served on President Barack Obama’s Arts Policy Committee, been selected for Oprah’s “Power List,” served as a faculty member at Yale University, and is currently at Harvard University as a Du Bois Fellow. Her book, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery is a layered, story-driven investigation of how innovation, discovery, and the creative progress are all spurred on by advantages gleaned from the improbable, the unlikely, and even failure. Her second book, focused on Frederick Douglass, photography, and the American Civil War, will be released by Harvard University Press in 2016. Lewis has held positions at both the Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art, and her essays on contemporary art have been published widely in magazines such as the New Yorker, Artforum and Art in America. She gave a TEDtalk titled “Embrace the near win” that has more than 1.3 million views online, spoke at the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2014 and has made appearances on television, including on Charlie Rose and on Late Night with Seth Meyers. For more information on Lewis, visit researchguides.case.
In keeping with Town Hall’s 83-year legacy, each program allows for audience interaction with question-and-answer sessions following each lecture. Town Hall of Cleveland was formed in 1931, making it the nation’s longest, consecutively running speaker series. The series has provided a public lecture forum for world leaders, dignitaries, artists, entertainers and more. Past speakers have included Winston Churchill, Henry Kissinger, Art Buchwald, Henry Fonda, Dan Rather, Barry Goldwater, Alistair Cooke, Gloria Steinem and many more.
For more information, visit case.edu/events/townhall.