Description:

The emotional questions we face can define our lives. If you’re expecting an interaction to go wrong, that expectation can make it so. That’s spiraling down. But as award-winning Stanford psychologist Greg Walton shows in his new book Ordinary Magic: The Science of How We Can Achieve Big Change with Small Acts, when we see these questions clearly, we can answer them well. Known to social psychologists as wise interventions, these shifts in perspective can help us chart new trajectories for our lives. They help us spiral up.

Walton will be in conversation with Jacqueline Woodson, an American writer of dozens of books for adults, children, and adolescents. She is best known for her National Book Award-winning memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. After serving as the Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, Woodson was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress for 2018–19. She was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2020. Later that same year, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.