The Nickerson Lecture

As the first in his family to attend and graduate from college, Slocumb majored in music education. He teaches both the violin and the viola, and has performed with the Washington Metropolitan Symphony, the McLean Symphony, the Prince George's Philharmonic, and the Alexandria Symphony. He has served as the concertmaster for the NOVA-Annandale Symphony Orchestra and regularly performs chamber music with members of the Alexandria Chamber Music Society.

In 2005, Brendan was named Teacher of the Year for Robert E. Lee High School; he has been named to Who’s Who of American teachers, and is a Nobel Teacher of distinction. Brendan also serves as an educational consultant for the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

He is the author of The Violin Conspiracy (2022), Symphony of Secrets (2023), and The Dark Maestro (May 2025).

Michael Beschloss serves as the NBC Presidential Historian and contributes to the PBS NewsHour. Among his ten published books are titles such as Presidents of War, Presidential Courage, The Conquerors, Taking Charge, and Reaching for Glory. Additionally, he authored The Crisis Years, Mayday, and Historic Conversations with Jacqueline Kennedy in collaboration with Caroline Kennedy.

In 2005, he received an Emmy for his involvement in creating the Discovery Channel series, Decisions that Shook the World, which he also hosts.

Beschloss is an alum of Phillips Academy (Andover), Williams College, and Harvard Business School. His career includes positions as a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, a senior associate member at St. Antony’s College at Oxford, and a senior fellow of the Annenberg Foundation. He holds six honorary doctorates and is a board member of the White House Historical Association and the National Archives Foundation.

(excerpted from BLLA press release)

Australian-born Geraldine Brooks started as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues.

In 1982 Brooks won the Greg Shackleton Australian News Correspondents scholarship to the journalism master’s program at Columbia University in New York City. She went on to work for The Wall Street Journal. With her husband, Tony Horowitz, she won the Overseas Press Club Award for best coverage of the Gulf War, and . later a citation for excellence for their series, “War and Peace.”  

In 2006 she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. Brooks returned to Harvard as a Visiting Lecturer in 2021.

Brooks was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March. Her novels People of the Book, Caleb’s Crossing, The Secret Chord and Horse all were New York Times bestsellers. Her first novel, Year of Wonders is an an international bestseller, translated into more than 25 languages.. She is also the author of the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire, Foreign Correspondence and The Idea of Home.

Brooks married fellow journalist and author Tony Horwitz in Tourette-sur-Loup France in 1984 and were together until his sudden death in 2019.  They have two sons, Nathaniel and Bizu, She now lives with a dog named Bear and a mare named Valentine by an old mill pond on Martha’s Vineyard and spends as much time as she can in Australia.  In 2016, she was named an Officer in the Order of Australia.

(excerpted from Geraldine Books, official website)

Bob Woodward is an American investigative journalist. He started working for The Washington Post as a reporter in 1971 and now holds the honorific title of associate editor, though the Post no longer employs him.

While a reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, Woodward teamed up with Carl Bernstein, and the two did much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal. These scandals led to numerous government investigations and the eventual resignation of President Richard Nixon. The work of Woodward and Bernstein was called "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time" by longtime journalist and former editor of The New York Times Gene Roberts.

Woodward continued to work for The Washington Post after his reporting on Watergate. He has  authored or co-authored 21 nonfiction books in the past 40 years; all have been national bestsellers and 14 of them have been No. 1 national nonfiction bestsellers, the most of any contemporary author for this genre. Although not a recipient in his own right, Woodward made contributions to two Pulitzer Prizes won by The Washington Post. He has been a recipient of nearly every major American journalism award, including the Heywood Broun Award, the Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Reporting, the Sigma Delta Chi Award (1973), the George Polk Award, the William Allen White Medal, and the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Reporting on the Presidency. In 2012, Colby College presented Woodward with the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism as well as an honorary doctorate

(excerpted from Wikipedia)

A former career covert CIA operations officer, Valerie Plame worked to protect America’s national security. During her career with the CIA, she managed top-secret covert programs designed to keep terrorists and rogue nation states from acquiring nuclear weapons. She was also involved in covert cyber operations and counterterrorism efforts.

Plame has served on numerous nonprofit boards, including The Ploughshares Fund, Global Zero, and the Penn State School of International Affairs. She is also a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and host of the popular espionage conference “Spies, Lies & Nukes.” She has written for many national publications, including Foreign Policy, Time, Newsweek, CNN, The Daily Beast, and The Huffington Post.

Valerie is the author of The New York Times best-selling memoir Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, which was released as a major motion picture of the same name starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts. Along with Sarah Lovett, she published the well-received fictional spy thrillers Blowback and Burned.

(excerpted from Valerie Plame, official website)

Robert Morse Edsel has written five non-fiction books: Rescuing Da Vinci; The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History; Saving Italy; Remember Us; and The Greatest Treasure Hunt in History. A film based on his book, The Monuments Men, directed by and starring George Clooney, was released in February 2014. Edsel is the co-producer of the documentary film, The Rape of Europa (2007). He is also founder and chairman of the Monuments Men and Women Foundation for the Preservation of Art, which received the 2007 National Humanities Medal under President George W. Bush. The foundation has donated four albums of photographic evidence of the Third Reich's theft of art treasures to the United States National Archives.

(excerpted from Wikipedia)

Denise Kiernan is an author, journalist, producer, and host of “CRAFT: Authors in Conversation.” Her book The Last Castle was an instant New York Times bestseller in both hardcover and paperback and was also a Wall Street Journal bestseller. She is also the author of The Girls of Atomic City, which is a New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and NPR bestsellerand has been published in multiple languages.She lives in North Carolina.

(from Denise Kiernan, official website)

Byron Pitts is a multiple Emmy Award–winning journalist with over thirty years of experience. He joined ABC News in April 2013 as anchor and Chief National Correspondent. Prior to joining ABC News, he spent 15 years at CBS News where he served as Chief National Correspondent and won an Emmy for his coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Pitts was named the National Association of Black Journalists Journalist of the Year in 2002. His 2009 memoir, Step Out on Nothing: How Faith and Family Helped Me Conquer Life’s Challenges chronicles his journey overcoming illiteracy and a stutter to become a journalist. Pitts is a native of Baltimore, Maryland, and currently lives in New York City.

(excerpted from Simon & Schuster)

Emmy Award-winning journalist, documentarian, and author Laura Ling has held management positions at Hearst Television’s Streaming Video Services and Discovery Digital Networks. In 2009 while reporting on the trafficking of women, Ling was arrested and held captive in North Korea. She recounts her experience in a memoir written with her sister Lisa, Somewhere Inside: One Sister’s Captivity in North Korea and the Other’s Fight to Bring Her Home.

Ling has received an Emmy Award and the Edward R. Murrow Award for her work as a correspondent for SoCal Connected and a Gracie Award. Her work has appeared on ABC's Nightline, NBC, and PBS, and she has written editorials for the Los Angeles Times and CNN.com.

(excerpted from The Harry Walker Agency)

William Kamkwamba is a Malawian inventor and author who worked on projects to improve the lives of his family and the residents of Masitala, the rural village in Malawi where he grew up. As a teenager, he made a windmill out of scrap materials that provided electricity to his family’s house. He wrote a memoir about that accomplishment titled The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2009). Kamkwamba also helped build windmills to provide clean water for drinking and for running an irrigation system for crops.

(excerpted from Encyclopedia Britannica)

Doris Helen Kearns is an American biographer, historian, former sports journalist, and political commentator. She has written biographies of numerous U.S. presidents. Goodwin's book No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995. Goodwin produced the American television miniseries Washington, and she was also executive producer of Abraham Lincoln, a 2022 docudrama on the History Channel. This latter series was based on Goodwin's Leadership in Turbulent Times.

(excerpted from Wikipedia)