A Conversation with Tara Westover

Join us for a conversation with Tara Westover, author and Shorenstein Center A.M. Rosenthal Writer-in-Residence, and Shorenstein Center Director and former editor in chief of TIME Magazine, Nancy Gibbs. You can find more information about the event, and the live stream here.

Tara Westover is the author of Educated, and current A.M. Rosenthal Writer-in-Residence at the Shorenstein Center. She received her BA from Brigham Young University in 2008 and was subsequently awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned an MPhil from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2009, and in 2010 was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She then returned to the University of Cambridge, where she was awarded a PhD in history in 2014. Her first book, Educated (2018), is a memoir of Westover’s life growing up with her survivalist family in rural Idaho and her journey to education. It debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and has remained on the list for more than a year. It was a finalist for several national awards, including the L.A. Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and President Obama and Bill Gates both recommended Educated on their annual reading lists. The American Booksellers Association voted Educated the Nonfiction Book of the Year, and Time Magazine named Westover one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2019.

Nancy Gibbs is the director of the Shorenstein Center and the visiting Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice of Press, Politics and Public Policy. Until September 2017, she was Editor in Chief of TIME, directing news and feature coverage across all platforms for more than 65 million readers worldwide, as well as Editorial Director of the Time Inc. News Group. Gibbs was named TIME’s 17th editor in September 2013, the first woman to hold the position, and remains an Editor at Large. Under her leadership, TIME’s digital audience grew from 25 to 55 million, video streams passed 1 billion a year, and TIME won a primetime Emmy award for its two-part “A Year in Space” documentary, produced with PBS. During her three decades at TIME, she covered four presidential campaigns and is the author of more cover stories than any writer in TIME’s near-100 year history, including the black-bordered “September 11” special issue, which won the National Magazine Award in 2002.