Thank you for being part of the 2021 Virtual Festival.

This on-demand event concluded on November 20, 2021.

If you’ve registered for the 2021 Sonoma Author’s Festival, you’ll be the first to hear about our 2022 event. Look for updates via email when the time is right.

If you’d like to know more about the 2022 Sonoma Author’s Festival, please share your email in the field below. We’ll make contact with you early in the new year.

 

Best wishes,

David and Ginny Freeman
Sonoma Valley Authors Festival Founders

Name

“My first time at the Sonoma Valley Authors Festival was a fun and stimulating experience. I got to be with authors I admire, listen to inspiring talks, and be in conversation with my handsome friend Jeffrey Brown in front of an attentive audience. Aside from the intellectual feast and lots of laughter, the setting was perfect in spite of the hot weather: good food and wine, nice staff, and a first-class hotel. I hope I get invited again. (If not, I might just crash the party). ”

Isabel Allende

“Positioned at the intersection of wine and literature, the Sonoma Valley Authors Festival offers eye, heart and mind-opening opportunities, all the while striking just the right blend of seriousness and hilarity.”

Billy Collins, Two-time U.S. Poet Laureate

“I loved everything about the festival. The audience was enthusiastic, the talks were fascinating, the hotel was first class, the hosts and volunteers were beyond gracious, and we even had the unique pleasure of viewing stars with a Nobel Laureate astronomer. Wow! And what fun it was hanging with friends Dave Barry, Isabel Allende and Billy Collins. A perfect weekend!”

Amy Tan

“It was thrilling to be in the company of readers, writers, and friends. Sonoma Valley Authors Festival was the burst of literary light and warmth we needed.”

Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a Finalist for the National Book Award

“I loved everything about the Sonoma Valley Authors Festival. The audiences are attentive and enthusiastic; the setting is beautiful; and there was ample time to hear and interact with other authors. Just a wonderful experience.”

Dave Barry

“The Sonoma Valley Authors Festival was a celebration of writers and readers. Whenever we can gather, magical things happen. Thank you all for making this happen!”

Luis J. Rodriguez

“The Sonoma Valley Authors Festival has already become an important spot on the literary and cultural landscape. With a lineup of speakers that any event would envy, with engaged and intelligent audiences and with its spectacular setting, this is an event to say “yes” to.”

David Brooks

2021 Authors & Speakers

Get your online festival pass and get ready to enjoy sessions hosted by these inspiring authors and speakers.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Born in Somalia, Ayaan Hirsi Ali earned international attention as a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, actively opposing forced marriage, honor violence, child marriage and female genital mutilation.

Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende is one of the most widely read authors in the world. She has written 24 books, translated into more than 42 languages, sold more than 75 million copies.

Dr. Euan Ashley

Dr. Euan Ashley is Associate Dean and Professor of Medicine and Genetics at Stanford University in California. Over the last decade his team has focused on the application of the human genome to medicine.

Dave Barry

Dave Barry has been a professional humorist ever since he discovered that professional humor was a lot easier than working.

John Briscoe

John Briscoe is a San Francisco poet, author, lawyer, and restaurateur. He has published poetry, articles on law, literature and history, and several books including Crush: The Triumph of California Wine, The Lost Poems of Cangjie, and Tadich Grill: The Story of San Francisco’s Oldest Restaurant.

Daniel James Brown

Daniel James Brown is author of The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Olympics (2013), that was a #1 New York Times Bestseller list for 137 weeks.

Jeffrey Brown

Jeffrey Brown is Senior Correspondent and Chief Arts Correspondent for PBS NewsHour, public television’s prestigious nightly news program viewed by millions.

Billy Collins

Billy Collins is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal.

Wade Davis

From the waterways of the Amazon to the highlands of Tibet, across the wide plains of Africa and Australia, from the jungles of Polynesia to the ice fields of the Arctic, writer and anthropologist Wade Davis’s travels have spanned the globe as he gathers the valuable age-old wisdom that indigenous cultures offer.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson, MA, DPhil, FRSE, writes and lectures on international history, economic and financial history, and British and American imperialism. He is known for his positive views concerning the British Empire.

Alex Filippenko

Alex Filippenko is a renowned astrophysicist and professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley. He was the only person to have been a member of the two teams that revealed the accelerating expansion of the Universe and the implied existence of dark energy.

Craig Frazier

Craig Frazier has been an illustrating designer since 1978. He maintains studios in Mill Valley, California and Sea Ranch. His work is recognized internationally for its wit, optimism and simplicity.

Tom Ikeda

Tom Ikeda is the founding Executive Director of Densho, a grassroots organization dedicated to preserving, educating, and sharing the story of World War II-era incarceration of Japanese Americans in order to deepen understandings of American history and inspire action for equity.

Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson has established himself as the biographer of creativity, innovation, and genius. Einstein was the genius of the revolution in physics, and Steve Jobs was the genius of the revolution in digital technology.

Steven E. Koonin

Dr. Koonin served as Undersecretary for Science in the US Department of Energy under President Obama from 2009 to 2011, where his portfolio included the climate research program and energy technology strategy.

Min Jin Lee

Min Jin Lee is a writer whose award-winning fiction explores the intersection of race, ethnicity, immigration, class, religion, gender, and identity of a diasporic people.

H.R. McMaster

H.R. McMaster retired with thirty-four years of experience as an officer in the U.S. Army commanding troops in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, and during Desert Storm, followed by a position as National Security Advisor in the White House, and professorships at Stanford University and the Hoover Institution, H.R.

Dr. Joyce Mikal-Flynn

Dr. Mikal-Flynn has worked in the area of trauma and post-trauma recovery for over twenty years. Drawing on her own miraculous recovery from an accident that left her clinically dead for twenty-two minutes, her new book, Anatomy of a Survivor: Building Resilience, Grit, and Growth After Trauma, reveals all she has learned from working with hundreds of patients as well as her own journey back to wellness.

Nicole Perlroth

Nicole Perlroth covers cybersecurity and digital espionage for The New York Times. She has covered Russian hacks of nuclear plants, airports, and elections, North Korea’s cyberattacks against movie studios, banks and hospitals, Iranian attacks on oil companies, banks and the Trump campaign and hundreds of Chinese cyberattacks, including a months-long hack of The Times.

Dr. Ramon Resa

Dr. Ramon Resa’s memoir Out of the Fields: My Journey from Farmworker Boy to Pediatrician shares how Ramon found the courage to pursue his vision of becoming a doctor, a healer who could save others from much of the misery that he had experienced.

Tom Rinaldi

Winner of 16 Sports Emmy Awards and seven Edward R. Murrow Awards, journalist Tom Rinaldi, joined FOX Sports in January of 2021, contributing across the network’s world-class portfolio of live events.

Luis J. Rodriguez

Luis J. Rodriguez believes a writer can change the world. His new book, From Our Land to Our Land; Imaginings and Musings of a Native Xicanx Writer, is a collection of 12 essays that focus on overarching themes of race, culture, and the tenuous construction of identity.

Dan Russell, PhD

Daniel M. Russell’s book, The Joy of Search: A Google Insider’s Guide to Going Beyond the Basics, explains how to frame search queries so they will yield information and describes the best ways to use such resources as Google Earth, Google Scholar, Wikipedia, and Wikimedia. It was published by MIT Press in September 2019.

Julia Flynn Siler

Julia Flynn Siler’s latest book, The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Against Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown, was named an “Editors’ Choice” title by the New York Times.

James Strock

Strock writes the ‘Next Nationalism’ on Substack and hosts the ‘Serve to Lead’ podcast. He is a bestselling author of four books on service, politics and leadership, including Theodore Roosevelt on Leadership: Executive Lessons from the Bully Pulpit and Disrupt Politics: Reset Washington.

Amy Tan

Born in the U.S. to immigrant parents from China, Amy Tan rejected her mother’s expectations that she become a doctor and concert pianist. She chose to write fiction instead.

Bari Weiss

Bari Weiss is a journalist and the author of “How to Fight Anti-Semitism,” which won a 2019 National Jewish Book Award. From 2017 to 2020 Weiss was an opinion writer and editor at The New York Times.