Journalist and author of the million-copy best-seller Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and the New York Times best-seller Bait & Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream.

Journalist, historian, and social critic, Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of 14 books. In 2001, Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America became a New York Times bestseller, and has since sold over 1 million copies. Nickel and Dimed, a trenchant examination of working-class poverty that chronicles Ehrenreich’s own attempt to live on minimum wage, is now required reading at more than 600 colleges and universities, from the University of the Ozarks to Yale University to Western Wyoming Community College. It has been adopted for the stage by Joan Holden and performed in major cities across the United States. In 2005, Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch, also a New York Times bestseller, exposed the ever more prevalent phenomenon of white-collar unemployment.

A frequent contributor to Harper’s and The Nation, Ehrenreich has been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine. Her articles, reviews, essays and humor have appeared in a range of national publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Ms., Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Nation, and newspapers throughout the world. In 2004, she received the Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Prize for Creative Citizenship, given annually to an American who challenges the status quo “through distinctive, courageous, imaginative, socially responsible work of significance.”

In addition to her work on economic themes, Ehrenreich is a historian and author of Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, which the New York Review of Books described as ‘brilliant’ and Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Metropolitan Books 2007).

NICKEL AND DIMED: On (Not) Getting By in America

In early 1998 Barbara Ehrenreich, arguably our sharpest and most original social critic, posed the following questions to an editor at Harper’s Magazine: How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled? And how, in particular, were the 12 million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour? Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages; in 1998, Ehrenreich joined them. What ensued is an unprecedented and illuminating work of immersion journalism, captured in its provocative entirety in NICKEL AND DIMED: On (Not) Getting By in America, which became a New York Times bestseller. To answer her own questions, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted the highest-paying jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels, discovering quickly that no job is truly ‘unskilled,’ that even the lowliest occupations take an enormous mental and physical toll, and that one job is not enough—not, that is, if you intend to live indoors. “With all the real life assets I’ve built up in middle age—bank account, IRA, health insurance, multi-room home—waiting indulgently in the background, there was no way I was going to ‘experience poverty’ or find out how it ‘really feels’ to be a long-term low-wage worker,” Ehrenreich cautions. “My aim here was much more straightforward and objective—just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day.” What she discovered was that, in fact, she could not. Ehrenreich’s hair-raising and darkly funny odyssey through the underside of the working world brilliantly limns low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety and surprising generosity. A rare view of “prosperity” from the bottom puts a human face to the lives sustaining our economy.

BAIT & SWITCH: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

In Bait and Switch, Barbara Ehrenreich takes on the problems of the college-educated worker facing lay-offs, outsourcings, and downsizings. Going undercover as a white collar job seeker with a plausible résumé, she attempts to land a middle-class job—undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then trawling a series of EST-like boot camps, job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search ministries. She gets an image makeover, works to project a winning attitude, yet is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and—again and again—rejected.

Bait and Switch highlights the people who’ve done everything right—gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive résumés—yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Today’s ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding their “surplus” employees—plunging them, for months or years at a stretch, into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment, where job searching becomes a full-time job in itself. As Ehrenreich discovers, there are few social supports for these newly disposable workers—and little security even for those who have jobs.

Deborah Tannen is the author of You Just Don’t Understand, which was on The New York Times bestseller list for nearly 4 years, including 8 months at number 1, and has been translated into 26 languages. In her new book, You’re Wearing That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversations, she takes on what is potentially the most fraught and passionate connection of women’s lives: the mother-daughter relationship. With groundbreaking insights, pitch-perfect dialogues, and deeply moving memories of her own mother, Tannen untangles the knots daughters and mothers can get tied up in. Once again, she breaks down barriers while opening new lines of communication for our culture.

Included in her wide range of influential books are The Argument Culture, Talking from 9 to 5, and That’s Not What I Meant!, each of which offer in-depth and entertaining analysis of how we speak to each other across cultures, sexes, and environments.

A linguistics professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., she is a frequent guest on such radio and television shows as Nightline, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 20/20, Oprah, The Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN, The Diane Rehm Show, and NPR shows such as “Morning Edition, All Things Considered.” She has written for most major magazines and newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Time, Newsweek, and The Harvard Business Review.

Tannen has published 19 books and over 100 articles, and has recorded 2 series of audiotape lectures as part of the Recorded Books’ Modern Scholar series. She has been McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University, and has received 5 honorary doctorates.

Topics Include:

• – Can We Talk? He Said, She Said and How Genders Interpret Communication
• – Women, Men, Mothers and Daughters: The Universal Truth about Communication
• – I Love Her, but She’s Driving Me Crazy: Figuring Out the Language Between Mothers and Daughters
• – That’s Not What I Meant! Talking Across Cultures and Genders
• – Talking 9 to 5: He Said, She Said in the Workplace and How it Affects Communication and Productivity

Salome Thomas-EL was born and raised in the inner city of Philadelphia and has been a teacher in the Philadelphia School District since 1987. He received national acclaim as a teacher and chess coach at Vaux Middle School, where his students have gone on to win world recognition as 8-time national chess champions. Armed with only a chess board and a profound belief in their potential, Thomas-EL’s faith and commitment has motivated hundreds of children in Philadelphia to attend magnet high schools and major colleges and universities.

Thomas-EL, a doctoral candidate, has studied in Cambridge and London, England. He received the Marcus A. Foster Award as an outstanding School District Administrator in Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania’s distinguished Martin Luther King Award. Thomas-EL frequently appears on C-SPAN, CNN and National Public Radio.

He is the former Principal of John F. Reynolds Elementary School and the author of the best-selling book, I Choose to Stay. The movie rights for the book were recently purchased by The Walt Disney Company. His second book, The Immortality of Influence (foreword written by actor Will Smith) was released in May 2006 and stresses the importance of leadership, parenting, mentoring, and service to others.

Currently, Thomas-EL is principal at Russell Byers Public Charter School and coordinates after-school chess programs in the school district. He continues his life-inspiring chess and tutoring programs at Vaux and Reynolds. Reflecting on how it feels to see a young person he has mentored walk down the aisle toward a real future instead of to an early grave, Thomas-EL has said, “I’ve been to too many funerals; I need to go to more graduations.”