Three Authors to Visit FCC

Frederick Community College will host well-known authors Keith Boykin (11 a.m.), Sonia Shah (12:30) and John Feinstein (2:00) on campus Tuesday, Oct. 23 during its once-a-semester co-curricular event for students, faculty and staff. All three presentations will be held in the JBK Theater.

Keith Boykin

Keith Boykin is the editor of The Daily Voice online news site, a CNBC contributor, a BET TV host, and a New York Times best-selling author of three books.

Educated at Dartmouth and Harvard, Boykin attended law school with President Barack Obama and served in the White House as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton.

Boykin has been actively involved in progressive causes since he worked on his first congressional campaign while still a student in high school. He is a veteran of six political campaigns, including two presidential campaigns, and he was named one of the top instructors when he taught political science at American University in Washington.

A founder and first board president of the National Black Justice Coalition, Boykin has spoken to audiences, large and small, all across the world. He delivered a landmark speech to 200,000 people at the Millennium March on Washington and he gave a stirring speech about the AIDS epidemic in front of 40,000 people in Chicago's Soldier Field in July 2006.

Boykin's books have been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, including his most recent book, Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies and Denial in Black America. Boykin won the Lambda Literary Award for his second book, Respecting The Soul, while his first book, One More River to Cross, is taught in colleges and universities throughout the country.

His book, For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Still Not Enough: Personal Writings about Confronting Life's Obstacles and Believing in Yourself, will be published in 2012 and available at a book signing immediately following his lecture. It responds to the crisis of youth development and suicide in the black community, specifically among young gay men of color.

Boykin is an associate producer of the 2007 feature film Dirty Laundry and is working on his fourth book. Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Boykin currently lives in New York City.

Sonia Shah

A former writing fellow of the Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation, Sonia Shah has been featured on current affairs shows around the United States, on outlets such as NPR as well as the BBC and Australia's Radio National. A frequent keynote speaker, Shah has lectured at universities and colleges across the country, including Columbia's Earth Institute, MIT, Harvard, Brown, Georgetown and elsewhere. Her writing on science, global health, and politics have appeared in a range of publications from Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Le Monde Diplomatique to Scientific American and Foreign Affairs, and has been supported by The Nation Investigative Fund and the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. Her television appearances include A&E and the BBC, and she's consulted on many documentary film projects, from the ABC to Channel 4 in the UK.

Her latest book, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years (Sarah Crichton Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux, July 2010), described by the New York Times as "tour-de-force history" and by TIME magazine as "rollicking," is based on five years of original reportage in Cameroon, Malawi, Panama and elsewhere. Her 2006 drug industry exposé, The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients (New Press), has been hailed by Publishers Weekly as "a tautly argued study…a trenchant exposé…meticulously researched and packed with documentary evidence," and as "important [and] powerful" by The New England Journal of Medicine. The book, which international bestselling novelist and The Constant Gardener author John Le Carré called "an act of courage," has enjoyed wide international distribution, including French, Japanese, and Italian editions.

Her 2004 book, Crude: The Story of Oil (Seven Stories), was described as "brilliant" and "beautifully written" by The Guardian and "required reading" by The Nation, and has been widely translated, from Japanese, Greek, and Italian to Bahasa Indonesia. Her "raw and powerful" (Amazon.com) 1997 collection, Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire, still in print after more than 10 years, continues to be required reading at colleges and universities across the country.

Shah was born in 1969 in New York City to Indian immigrants. Growing up, she shuttled between the northeastern United States where her parents practiced medicine and Mumbai and Bangalore, India, where her extended working-class family lived, developing a life-long interest in inequality between and within societies. She holds a BA in journalism, philosophy, and neuroscience from Oberlin College, and lives with molecular ecologist Mark Bulmer and their two sons Zakir and Kush.

John Feinstein

John Feinstein is one of the nation’s most successful and prolific sports authors, and an award-winning columnist and regular contributor to both radio and television. His works include the top two best-selling non-fiction sports books in history. In 1995, he published the all-time best seller A Good Walk Spoiled, a year inside life on the PGA Tour as told through 17 PGA players. Just behind that in sales is A Season on the Brink, which chronicled a year in the life of the Indiana basketball team and its enigmatic coach, Bob Knight. The book's chart-topping success was also adapted to film with an ESPN production of a made-for TV movie of the same title.

Feinstein's books take his readers into places they would not normally be allowed to go. A Season on the Brink looked into the Indiana locker room, team practice sessions, Knight's office, on the team bus and airplanes as Feinstein traveled with the team. In intricate detail, Feinstein vividly depicted life inside a championship college basketball team, a style which has become a trademark for nearly all of his books.

Perhaps one of his most poignant books, Caddy for Life, the Bruce Edwards Story was released in 2004. In that book Feinstein writes about the life and final days of Tom Watson's caddy, Bruce Edwards, who had been diagnosed with ALS, also known as the deadly Lou Gehrig's disease. Early on, the book was identified as a great candidate to be adapted to film, and Feinstein’s long-time friend Terry Hanson led that effort on John’s behalf. They engaged the prestigious William Morris Agency and commissioned a screenplay in conjunction with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's production company, Live Planet. The script was optioned by Disney, who considered either ABC or ESPN for air and the body of work presently is still in development.

Feinstein is a 1977 graduate of Duke University and spent 11 years as a sports and political reporter with The Washington Post. He has also contributed to Sports Illustrated, The National Sports Daily, ESPN, CBS Sports and Golf Digest. Presently he appears regularly on-air at The Golf Channel and National Public radio and writes for The Washington Post, Golf Digest and The Sporting News. He resides in Potomac, MD, and Shelter Island, NY.

For more information contact Jeanni Winston-Muir, 301.846.2489 or jwinston-muir@frederick.edu.