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Eric Liu
Keynote Speaker
(Friday Morning)
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Eric Liu is a dynamic leader, educator, and author who helps people in diverse audiences find their most authentic and powerful voice.
Liu is the founder of the Guiding Lights Project, which showcases the strategies and stories of great mentors, teachers, and coaches from many professions and cultures. At the core of the project is Liu’s new book Guiding Lights: The People Who Lead Us Toward Our Purpose in Life. Hailed by Caroline Kennedy as "inspiring and luminous," Guiding Lights has been named the Official Book of National Mentoring Month.
Liu came to this work out of a lifelong interest in how people pass on values, ideas, and stories – in politics and business, public life, and the private sector. Liu served as a speechwriter for President Clinton and later as the president’s deputy domestic policy adviser. After his White House service, Liu was an executive at the pioneering digital media firm RealNetworks. Upon his departure from the corporate world, he set out on a life-changing journey that yielded Guiding Lights.
Liu lectures and leads workshops for educational, corporate and other organizations across the country. Hailed by the New York Times and the Washington Post as a leading voice of his generation, by GQ magazine as a “pundit we like,” and by A. Magazine: Inside Asian America as “one of the 25 most influential Asian Americans in the country,” Eric Liu is a leader who provokes reflection, inspires action, and empowers others to find their purpose.
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Luis Rodriguez
Banquet Speaker
(Friday Dinner)
Ticketed Event ($)
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Luis Rodriguez is convinced that a writer can change the world. Indeed it is through education and the power of words that Rodriguez saw his own way out of poverty and despair in the barrio of East L.A. and successfully broke free from the years of violence and desperation he spent as an active gang member. Achieving success as an award-winning Chicano poet, he was sure the streets would haunt him no more — until his young son joined a gang himself. Rodriguez fought for his child by telling his own story in the bestseller Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., a vivid memoir that explores the motivation of gang life and cautions against the death and destruction that inevitably claim its participants. Always Running earned a Carl Sandburg Literary Award and was designated a New York Times Notable Book; it has also been named by the American Libraries Association as one of the nation’s 100 most censored books.
An accomplished poet, Luis Rodriguez is the author of several collections of poetry, his latest being My Nature is Hunger: New and Selected Poems 1989-2004 (Curbstone Press). His poetry has won a Poetry Center Book Award and a PEN/Josephine Miles Literary Award among others. His books for children, America Is Her Name and It Doesn't Have To Be This Way: A Barrio Story, published in both English and Spanish, have won several awards including a Patterson Young Adult Book Award and a Parent’s Choice Book Award. Luis Rodriguez is also author of Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times and a short story collection, The Republic of East LA : Stories. His first novel, Music of the Mill (Rayo Books/HarperCollins), was published in May 2005.
Luis Rodriguez’s honors include a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Lannan Fellowship for Poetry, a Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature, a California Arts Council fellowship and several Illinois Arts Council fellowships. He was one of 50 leaders worldwide selected as “Unsung Heroes of Compassion,” presented by the Dalai Lama.
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