Have you wondered if your favorite author has given a TED talk (which is a short powerful video presentation on a particular topic)?
Here are a few writers who have woven beautiful words both on the page and on the stage.
Links are provided to their TED talks and to one of their ebooks on Overdrive that can be accessed via the Livingston Public Library
Amy Tan
TED Talk: Where does creativity hide?
Novelist Amy Tan digs deep into the creative process, looking for hints of how hers evolved.
Ebook: The Valley of Amazement
Brene Brown
TED Talk: The Power of Vulnerability
Brené Brown studies human connection — our ability to empathize, belong, love. In a poignant, funny talk, she shares a deep insight from her research, one that sent her on a personal quest to know herself as well as to understand humanity.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
TED Talk: The Danger of a Single Story
Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.
Elif Shafak
TED Talk: The Politics of Fiction
Listening to stories widens the imagination; telling them lets us leap over cultural walls, embrace different experiences, feel what others feel. Elif Shafak builds on this simple idea to argue that fiction can overcome identity politics.
Ebook: 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
Elizabeth Gilbert
TED Talk: Success, Failure and the Drive to Keep Creating
With beautiful insight, Gilbert reflects on why success can be as disorienting as failure and offers a simple — though hard — way to carry on, regardless of outcomes.
Ebook: Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Isabel Allende
Author and activist Isabel Allende discusses women, creativity, the definition of feminism — and, of course, passion — in this talk.
Ebook: A Long Petal of the Sea
Karen Thompson Walker
TED Talk: What Fear Can Teach Us
In telling the story of the shipwrecked whaleship Essex, novelist Karen Thompson Walker shows how fear propels imagination, as it forces us to imagine the possible futures and how to cope with them.
Malcolm Gladwell
TED Talk: Choice, Happiness and Spaghetti Sauce
“Tipping Point” author Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry’s pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce — and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.
Outliers: The Story of Success
Roxane Gay
TED Talk: Confessions of a Bad Feminist
In a thoughtful and provocative talk, she asks us to embrace all flavors of feminism — and make the small choices that, en masse, might lead to actual change.
Tracy Chevalier
TED Talk: Finding the Story Inside the Painting
When Tracy Chevalier looks at paintings, she imagines the stories behind them: How did the painter meet his model? What would explain that look in her eye? Why is that man … blushing? She shares three stories inspired by portraits, including the one that led to her best-selling novel “Girl With a Pearl Earring.”
Ebook: Girl with a Pearl Earring
-Archana, Adult Services & Acquisitions Librarian