2023 Keynote Speakers

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of “Democracy Now!,” a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,400 public television and radio stations worldwide.

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard honored Goodman with the 2014 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence Lifetime Achievement Award. She is also the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” She is the first co-recipient of the Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award, named for the great muckraking journalist I.F. Stone, and was later selected for induction into the Park Center’s I.F. Stone Hall of Fame. The Independent of London called Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! “an inspiration.”

Goodman has co-authored six New York Times bestsellers. Her latest, “Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America,” looks back over the past two decades of “Democracy Now!” and the powerful movements and charismatic leaders who are re-shaping our world. Before that, “The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope,” and “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” both written with Denis Moynihan, give voice to the many ordinary people standing up to corporate and government power. She co-authored her first three bestsellers with her brother, journalist David Goodman: “Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times” (2008), “Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back” (2006) and “The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them” (2004). She co-writes a weekly column with Denis Moynihan (also produced as an audio podcast) syndicated by King Features, for which she was recognized in 2007 with the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Reporting.

Goodman has received the Society for Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence; American Women in Radio and Television Gracie Award; the Paley Center for Media’s She’s Made It Award; and the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Her reporting on East Timor and Nigeria has won numerous awards, including the George Polk Award, Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. Time Magazine named “Democracy Now!” its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s Meet the Press. PULSE named Goodman one of the 20 Top Global Media Figures of 2009.

She has also received awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Project Censored. Goodman received the first ever Communication for Peace Award from the World Association for Christian Communication. She was also honored by the National Council of Teachers of English with the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language.

Erik Conway is historian of science and technology living in Altadena, California. he completed a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1998, with a dissertation on the development of aircraft landing aids. He is the historian of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a unit of Caltech. 

His most recent books are The Big Myth: How Business taught Americans to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, with Naomi Oreskes, due from Bloomsbury and A History of Near-Earth Objects Research, with Donald K. Yeomans and Meg Rosenburg, published in July 2022. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship with Naomi Oreskes, and served as the inaugural Fellow for the joint Caltech/Huntington Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology. He has one more book manuscript trapped in the publication chain: Electrical Conquest, edited with W. Bernard Carlson.  

Trita Parsi is the 2010 recipient of the $200,000 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. He is an award-winning author with a focus on US foreign policy in the Middle East. His first book, “Treacherous Alliance – The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the US” (Yale University Press, 2007) won the Grawemeyer award and Council of Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Award in 2008 (Silver medallion). He was named by the Washingtonian Magazine as one of the 25 most influential voices on foreign policy in Washington DC in both 2021, 2022, and 2023, and preeminent public intellectual Noam Chomsky calls Parsi “one of the most distinguished scholars on Iran.”

 His second book, “A Single Roll of the Dice – Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran” (Yale University Press, 2012) was selected as The Best Book on The Middle East in 2012 by Foreign Affairs. His latest book – “Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy” (Yale University Press, 2017) - reveals the behind the scenes story to the historic nuclear deal with Iran.