WIT 2025: Words, Ideas,
and Thinkers Literary Festival

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. Roth, the long-serving President of Wesleyan University, received the 2025 PEN / Courage Award for standing up to government assaults on higher education. 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.

What role does the CIA play in U.S. foreign policy and in keeping Americans safe at home and abroad? Acclaimed journalist Tim Weiner, whose Legacy of Ashes is the definitive account of the CIA’s first sixty years, now publishes The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century, its highly anticipated sequel. Featuring unprecedented access to officers past and present, The Mission arrives at a moment of great peril—for the CIA and the nation itself. Joining Weiner for a conversation on the current state of intelligence gathering, its effect on national security, and our shifting role on the world’s stage, is James Lawler, a former CIA operative turned spy novelist. disregards it, then it is useless.

Every play opens a new door.
Two of the best plays on Broadway this year were Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Purpose and Sanaz Toossi’s English. Both Jacobs-Jenkins and Toossi have been praised for creating perceptive and absorbing works that hold past, present, and future feelings in the same space. Join these two Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights for a wide-ranging conversation on what drew them to theater writing in the first place, the connection between performance and history, how they approach universal themes like representation and displacement, and their close collaborations with ensemble casts.

What is the connection between the health of our communities and the health of our democracy? Join environmental justice activist Catherine Coleman Flowers and public health advocate Peter Hotez for an illuminating conversation on their tireless work to overcome deep-rooted social iniquities and an increasingly dangerous anti-science movement that compromises the well-being of the most vulnerable Americans. Flowers and Hotez will discuss how they are reckoning with the effects of the climate crisis, as well as the devastating Hookworm study that first brought them together and exposed the widespread neglect of rural communities with limited access to clean water, air, sanitation and soil.

 With efforts to roll back protections for LGBTQ people on the rise, join bestselling novelist Torrey Peters and trailblazing ACLU attorney Chase Strangio for a conversation about the power of storytelling, in both literature and legal advocacy, to envision and enact a society that is more just and inclusive. Strangio, who became the first openly transgender person to argue before the Supreme Court in 2024’s US v. Skrmetti, has suggested that the law itself cannot “be the savior or transformative tool for building the world that we want.  I think that the role of lawyers like myself is to hold back the government, to hold back the harms of the government. To create cracks in the system and breathing room for the real movements to have more space—movements and people that are transformative and visionary in ways that I will never be.”

Join poet and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib and scholar Imani Perry for a revelatory conversation through music as they invite the audience to listen along to a selection of songs reflecting the pulsing, resilient consciousness of their own art-making and its most personal inspirations. “Music grows with the tide of social and political upheaval, resistance, and expansion,” Perry writes. “The music, in some sense, takes on both the possibility and terrible choreography that are part of the American project.”