September 7, 2021

Anne-Marie Slaughter

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER—CEO of renowned think tank New America and author of Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family—for a discussion of her latest book, Renewal: From Crisis to Transformation in Our Lives, Work, and Politics. She will be joined in conversation by FATEMA SUMAR, Vice President of Compact Operations at the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation and author of the forthcoming memoir, The Development Diplomat: Working Across Borders, Boardrooms, and Bureaucracies to End Poverty.

Details

Like much of the world, America is deeply divided over identity, equality, and history. Renewal is Anne-Marie Slaughter’s candid and deeply personal account of how her own odyssey opened the door to an important new understanding of how we as individuals, organizations, and nations can move backward and forward at the same time, facing the past and embracing a new future.

Weaving together personal stories and reflections with insights from the latest research in the social sciences, Slaughter recounts a difficult time of self‐examination and growth in the wake of a crisis that changed the way she lives, leads, and learns. She connects her experience to our national crisis of identity and values as the country looks into a four-hundred-year-old mirror and tries to confront and accept its full reflection. The promise of the Declaration of Independence has been hollow for so many for so long. That reckoning is the necessary first step toward renewal. The lessons here are not just for America. Slaughter shows how renewal is possible for anyone who is willing to see themselves with new eyes and embrace radical honesty, risk, resilience, interdependence, grace, and vision.

Part personal journey, part manifesto, Renewal offers hope tempered by honesty and is essential reading for citizens, leaders, and the change makers of tomorrow.

About Author(s)

Anne-Marie Slaughter is CEO of New America and the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Her books include Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family and The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

As Vice President of Compact Operations at the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), Fatema Z. Sumar leads efforts to fight poverty by transforming global systems in reaching vulnerable populations. Ms. Sumar previously worked as Vice President of Global Programs at Oxfam America where she oversaw regional development and humanitarian response to fight the injustice of poverty. In Congress, she was a Senior Professional Staff Member on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee focused on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the broader region. Ms. Sumar’s first book The Development Diplomat: Working Across Borders, Boardrooms, and Bureaucracies to End Poverty is coming out this fall.