For a Change: Announcing the 25-26 WPI Author Series

The Gordon Library is excited to announce our 25-26 series of conversations with WPI authors, launching in B Term with two events!  Our theme this year is For a Change, featuring books that challenge us to change our beliefs and our choices. 

Details on locations and programs will be announced for each event and also added here throughout the spring:

• On November 6 at 3:00 pm, the series will open in the Gordon Library Conference Room and on zoom, with a conversation about Cornel West Matters: Politics, Violence, Racism, and Religion in America (2024, WPI Press), between author and WPI Professor Mahamadou Lamine Sagna (SSPS), and WPI Press Editor in Chief and Head, SSPS, Prof. Rob Krueger.  Updated to reflect Cornel West’s independent candidacy in the 2024 US presidential campaign, this second edition explores West’s role as a philosopher, activist, and prominent intellectual with a singular dialectical and sometimes contradictory voice, echoing the title of West’s most influential books, Race Matters (1993) and Democracy Matters (2004).   A zoom link will also be made available here.  Please note that the Gordon Library’s elevator remains out of service; visitors who wish to avoid using the stairs are welcome to join via zoom. More event information here.
   
• On November 20, from 3:30-5pm in Lower Perrault / Fuller, Professor John Sanbonmatsu (HUA), will lead an exploration and conversation about his 2025 book The Omnivore’s Deception: What we get wrong about meat, animals, and ourselves (NYU Press). In this widely reviewed and warmly praised book Prof. Sanbonmatsu proposes a new perspective on our relationship with animals, the food we eat, and with each other.  One reviewer (Jeffrey Moussaief Masson) writes, "You cannot read this book without changing your life. It is a work not only of immense moral significance, but a masterpiece." Prof. Sanbonmatsu will be joined in conversation by Prof. Joel Brattin and Prof. Scott Barton. Copies of The Omnivore’s Deception will be available for sale for half an hour before the event begins (3-3:30pm).  More event information here.

Additional events are planned for the remainder of the 2025-2026 academic year, with dates, times and places to be announced here. Future authors and events will include: 

• Those Who Travail & are Heavy Laden:  Memoir of a Labor Lawyer (WPI Press, 2025), William B. Gould IV.  This WPI Press author, William B. Gould IV, Charles A. Beardsley Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Stanford Law School and formerly Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board under President Bill Clinton, is a prolific scholar of labor and discrimination law and an influential voice in worker-management relations for more than fifty years. He is the recipient of five honorary doctorates for his significant contributions to the fields of labor law and labor relations.  In this remarkable memoir, Gould ties his career in labor law and civil rights to his heritage, his upbringing, and his inspirations. Those Who Travail & are Heavy Laden also carries on the tradition of his great grandfather, the first William B. Gould, whose Civil War diary telling of his daring escape from slavery and service in the Union Navy he and his father William B. Gould III ’25 discovered and published as Diary of a Contraband.
   
• Decentering Science and Technology for Development (WPI Press, 2026), Laureen Elgert, Rob Krueger, Elizabeth Long Lingo, Mimi Sheller, Yunus Telliel.
   
• Olive Higgins Prouty Poetry Celebration. In collaboration with Prof. Jim Cocola, the Gordon Library is planning our second annual Olive Higgins Prouty Poetry Celebration at WPI. This year’s program is being developed in partnership with the Worcester County Poetry Association and the Clemente Program in the Humanities.  Featured poet to be announced.
   

Please mark your calendars now for our first events, and join us in explorations and conversations that celebrate and share the powerful role of books in making change.