Author Thomas Chatterton Williams will present the keynote address “How to Engage in Important Debates” on Wednesday, Sept. 28, at 10:30 a.m. at Hope College in the Concert Hall of the Jack H. Miller Center for Musical Arts.

The public is invited.  Admission is free.

The presentation will also be livestreamed at hope.edu/live and via the Hope College YouTube channel.

Williams is the author of “Losing My Cool” and “Self-Portrait in Black and White.” He is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, a columnist at Harper’s, a 2019 New America Fellow and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Le Monde and many other places, and has been collected in “The Best American Essays” and “The Best American Travel Writing.” He has received support from Yaddo, MacDowell and The American Academy in Berlin, where he is a member of the Board of Trustees. His next book, “Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness,” will be published by Knopf.  He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Georgetown University, and a Master of Arts degree in cultural reporting and criticism from New York University.

Williams’s visit is being sponsored by the Hope College Student Congress in collaboration with the college’s Provost’s Office and other campus partners.  His public address on Sept. 28 is the keynote presentation for the student-organized 2022 Critical Issues Symposium, the other activities of which are limited to the campus community.  The symposium is designed to simulate serious, collaborative thinking about current issues, and the general theme for this year’s event is “Public Discourse,” with a focus on how to have constructive conversations.

Audience members who need assistance to fully enjoy any event at Hope are encouraged to contact the college’s Events and Conferences Office by emailing events@hope.edu or calling 616-395-7222 on weekdays between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Updates related to events are posted when available in the individual listings at hope.edu/calendar