Writers for Democratic Action and Democracy Book Club presents…

Michael Tomasky, Jacki Lyden, and Jo-Ann Mort

An Evening with Michael Tomasky, Jacki Lyden, and Jo-Ann Mort: Can the Republican Majority Govern (hint: no). So what happens next?

Can the US avoid fiscal and political catastrophe in the weeks ahead, when the debt ceiling and budget must be approved? As Republicans replace policy with disruption, there's little incentive for bipartisan outcomes by a certain number of GOP extremists. New Republic publisher Michael Tomasky, author of "The Middle Out,"  outlines several problematic scenarios we could face, and ways the White House might outmaneuver them.

Michael Tomasky is editor of The New Republic and of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He is also a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, having written more than 50 pieces for the Review over the last two decades. He's the author of five books, most recently The Middle Out: The Rise of Progressive Economics and a Return to Shared Prosperity (Doubleday, 2022), and six if you count his short 2014 e-book Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Beatles and America, Then and Now. He co-hosts, with Felicia Wong of the Roosevelt Institute, the podcast How to Save a Country. He plays a little guitar on the side, has a weirdly deep knowledge of 20th-century pop culture that stops cold in about 1990, and lives in suburban Maryland with his wife and daughter.

Jacki Lyden is a nonfiction author and former longtime NPR host and correspondent. Between 1979 and 2015, she was an award-winning Middle East and foreign correspondent, a host of shows like Weekend All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition, and a familiar NPR voice. On 9/11/01 she was NPR’s first reporter on air in New York. She has interviewed hundreds of writers and poets around the world and teaches first-person narrative workshops in the US and Ireland. She is the author of Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, about growing up with her mentally ill mother, which the New York Times hailed as a “memoir classic.” It was published in 11 foreign languages and adapted for film with Meryl Streep. Lyden is a Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism, and in 2021, was named Patient Advocate of the Year by the American Psychiatric Association. She is a former Benton Fellow at the University of Chicago in Middle East Studies. Past awards include The Gracie Award from American Women in Radio and TV for Best Foreign Documentary (Israel and Palestine) and also, with NPR teams, the DuPont-Columbia, the Polk, and the George Foster Peabody Awards for coverage of the First Gulf War, Afghanistan and the Second Gulf War. In 2017, she founded “Love Comes in at the Eye,” in Connemara, Ireland and the “Colton House Writers Retreat” in Flagstaff, Arizona. Lyden’s articles have appeared in numerous venues, including The Atlantic and the Washington Post. In addition to Writers for Democratic Action, she is a board member of the Cheuse International Writing Center at George Mason University. She is a graduate of Valparaiso, University. In 2001, with novelist and WDA founding member Paul Auster, she hosted “I Thought My Father Was God: True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project” about the stories of ordinary Americans. She is a Wisconsin native and Wisconsin Chair of Writers for Democratic Action. She lives in Wisconsin and also in the Washington, DC area with her husband, the Washington Post Pulitzer-prize winning photographer Bill O’Leary.

Jo-Ann Mort is a journalist and poet who returned to writing poetry after a nearly two- decade hiatus. Her poetry has appeared recently in Plume, The Women’s Review of Books, Stand (UK), Atlanta Review (where she was awarded two international publication awards), Upstreet, and elsewhere. An essay, Poetry as Secular Prayer, was recently in the Arrowsmith Journal. Jo-Ann lives in Brooklyn, NY.

WDA presents The Democracy Book Club: An Evening with Michael Tomasky, Jacki Lyden, and Jo-Ann Mort: Can the Republican Majority Govern?