From our friends at Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures: Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures’ 2025/26 roster of acclaimed authors for our Ten Evenings mainstage series will be announced Monday, May 12 th at 7:30 pm, live from the Carnegie Music Hall by Executive Director Sony Ton-Aime.
Ton-Aime says, “Next year will mark our 35th anniversary, so the Ten Evenings line-up needed to be emblematic of our mission and to capture the true essence of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures’ history.
It was important to me to welcome back some of our past favorite speakers of the last 35 years like Michael Chabon, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Jill Lepore; but also, to introduce some new favorites who will broaden our horizon for the next 35 years like Sunil Amrith, Calvin Duncan, Angela Flournoy, Padma Lakshmi, Beth Macy, Merlin Sheldrake, and Jess Walter. We could not choose a roster of more diverse speakers when it comes to subject matters. They are all leaders in their fields and their interests vary from history to science, prison reform to friendship, and community-building to politics.
This Ten Evenings season is both a celebration and a thank-you note to our patrons for their faithful support throughout the past 35 years.”
Jill Lepore / We the People / September 15, 2025
From the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist historian comes We the People, a stunning new history of the U.S. Constitution, for a troubling new era. In this landmark book, Harvard professor of history and law Jill Lepore challenges both originalism and the Supreme Court’s monopoly on constitutional interpretation.
Elizabeth Gilbert / All the Way to the River / September 29, 2025
In her first nonfiction book in a decade, Elizabeth Gilbert, the #1 bestselling writer shows us how to break free. This new memoir will resonate with anyone who has ever been captive to love – or any other passion, substance or craving – and who yearns, at long last, for liberation.
Jess Walter / So Far Gone / October 27, 2025
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins comes a hilarious, empathetic, and brilliantly provocative adventure through life in modern America, about a reclusive journalist forced back into the world to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren.
Padma Lakshmi / Padma’s All American: A Cookbook / November 10, 2025
From the Top Chef host and award-winning cookbook author, a culinary anthology filled with 100 authentic recipes from ethnic communities across America. Padma’s All American is filled with authentic recipes—along with profiles and stories from the people who prepare the dishes around the country.
Beth Macy / Paper Girl / December 8, 2025
From the author of Dopesick and one of our most acclaimed chroniclers of the forces eroding America’s social fabric, Paper Girl is Beth Macy most personal and powerful work: a reckoning with the changes that have rocked her own beloved small Ohio hometown.
Calvin Duncan & Sophie Cull / The Jailhouse Lawyer / February 9, 2026
A searing and ultimately hopeful account of Calvin Duncan, “the most extraordinary jailhouse lawyer of our time”, and his thirty-year path through Angola after a wrongful murder conviction, his coming-of-age as a legal mind while imprisoned, and his continued advocacy for those on the inside.
Sunil Amrith / The Burning Earth: A History / March 2, 2026
One of The New Yorker’s “Essential Reads” of 2024, The Burning Earth by the MacArthur fellow, Sunil Amrith, is a brilliant, paradigm-shifting global history of how humanity has reshaped the planet, and the planet has shaped human history, over the last 500 years.
Angela Flournoy / The Wilderness / March 23, 2026
An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife—in the much anticipated second book from National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy.
Merlin Sheldrake / Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures / April 14, 2026
The New York Times bestselling Entangled Life is a “brilliant [and]entrancing” journey into the hidden lives of fungi and their astonishing and intimate roles in human life, with the power to heal our bodies, expand our minds, and help us address our most urgent environmental problems.
Michael Chabon / The Night Garden / May 11, 2026
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon returns with an extraordinary novel for our times, a profound and incandescent narrative that explores our thirst for knowledge, the power of unexpected connection, and the lengths we will go to in pursuit of metamorphosis.
Programs are presented at 7:30 pm in Oakland’s historic Carnegie Music Hall. Subscribers will have access to the recorded livestreamed lecture for one week following the event.
For ticket information, visit pittsburghlectures.org