AG Literary Events
Thursday, September 25, 2025
5:00 pm Eastern
Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, Massachusetts
Opening night of the WIT Festival features a timely conversation between M. Gessen and Michael S. Roth, two of our sharpest, most outspoken thinkers on the threats facing American democracy—and the best ways to resist them.
As an award-winning historian and columnist for The New York Times, Gessen has been writing about authoritarianism in Russia and the U.S. for decades. “I think resistance can take the shape of insisting on making a choice,” they have written. “Imagining other, better choices will give us the best chance possible of coming out of the darkness better than we were when we went in. Bad ideas must be countered with good ones.”
Roth, the long-serving President of Wesleyan University, received the 2025 PEN / Courage Award for standing up to government assaults on higher education. “It’s time we wake up,” Roth said in his acceptance speech. “Let us find courage in one another’s good company to fight back.” His commitment to preserving the purpose of education—giving everyone the opportunity to find large and human significance in their lives and work—extends beyond the campus to the public square. “Practicing education is like practicing democracy—both are collaborative and experimental,” he has written. “And both are now very much endangered.”
What is at stake when our freedoms of inquiry and expression come under attack? Gessen and Roth will explore this question with moderator Alia Malek, a journalist who in her writing on Syria has explored what it means to live under one of the most brutal and repressive regimes for decades.
WIT Literary Festival livestreams are produced by CTSB with promotional support from The Nation. The livestream of M. Gessen and Michael S. Roth is co-sponsored by Jewish Currents.
M. Gessen won a George Polk Award in 2024 for their columns in The New York Times. Before joining The New York Times, they were a staff writer at The New Yorker, specializing in European / Russian life and politics, human rights, and gender studies. Their many award-winning works of non-fiction include Surviving Autocracy (2020), for which they won the National Book Award; The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017); Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Autonomous Region (2016); The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy (2015); Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot (2014); The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012); and Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace (2004). They are the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Nieman Fellowship, the John Chancellor Award, the Hitchens Prize, and the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Commentary. After more than twenty years as a journalist and editor in Moscow, Gessen has been living in New York since 2013. They are a Professor at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.
Michael S. Roth became the 16th president of Wesleyan University, his alma mater, in 2007, after having served as Hartley Burr Alexander Professor of Humanities at Scripps College, Associate Director of the Getty Research Institute, and President of the California College of the Arts. At Wesleyan, Roth has undertaken a number of initiatives that have made a Wesleyan education more affordable and more accessible. An author and curator (he produced the exhibition “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture” at the Library of Congress in 1998), he has published and edited several books and essays centered on how people make sense of the past, including the essay collection Memory, Trauma, and History (2011). Since returning to Wesleyan, he has published three books bearing on liberal education: The Student, A Short History (2023); Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness (2019); and Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (2014). He regularly publishes essays, book reviews, and commentaries in the national media and scholarly journals, and he continues to teach undergraduate courses at Wesleyan. In 2025, he received the PEN/Benenson Courage Award.
Alia Malek is the author of two books: The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria (2017) and A Country Called Amreeka: U.S. History Retold Through Arab American Lives (2009). She is the editor of Europa: An Illustrated Introduction to Europe for Migrants and Refugees (2016) and Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post 9/11 Injustices (2011). Born in Baltimore to Syrian immigrant parents, she began her legal career as a trial attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. She has worked in the legal field in the U.S., Lebanon, and the West Bank. In 2011, she moved to Damascus and wrote anonymously for several outlets from inside the country as it began to disintegrate. Her reporting from Syria earned her the Marie Colvin Award. She has been a senior writer at Al Jazeera America, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute and been honored with the Hiett Prize in the Humanities. She currently serves as the Director of the International Reporting Program at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism. For the New York Times Magazine, she has written about Syrians in Turkey caught in permanent crisis; an Italian rapper who bought a boat to rescue refugees at sea; and Syrians in Germany using the courts there to hold their torturers to account. In 2024, she curated and edited a volume of McSweeney’s Quarterly dedicated to new fiction from Syrian writers.
Join us this September in the beautiful Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts for the WIT Literary Festival—a celebration of writers, their work, and the vital role they play in society. By bringing writers and readers together for an unforgettable weekend of timely conversations, the WIT Literary Festival reflects the belief that a rich culture of free expression is essential to a thriving democracy.
Who are we? What do we believe? In what kind of country do we want to live?
Guided by this year’s theme, The Power of Words: Authors & Activism, the WIT Literary Festival welcomes audiences to explore these abiding questions with a distinguished group of speakers renowned for their artistic virtuosity, intellectual passion, moral seriousness, restless faith, and civic engagement.
Learn more about WIT 2025 here.
