Festival of Ideas

The ETSU Festival of Ideas began in 2019 as an initiative to bring thought leaders from the region and beyond to campus. The event allows for the exchange of ideas, information and experiences for the university community. The 2025 Festival of Ideas speakers will feature Anthony Doerr and LeVar Burton.

 

Anthony Doerr is the bestselling author of ETSU’s 2024-25 Campus Read, All the Light We Cannot See.

In All the Light We Cannot See, Doerr brings his keen naturalist’s eye and his empathetic engagement with humanity’s largest questions to the parallel stories of Marie, a blind girl living in occupied France, and Werner, a German orphan whose extraordinary mechanical abilities earn him a place among the Nazi elite.

All the Light We Cannot See spent more than 200 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and also was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Debuting at No. 2 on The New York Times  bestsellers list, his latest, Cloud Cuckoo Land, is a soaring novel about children on the cusp of adulthood in a broken world. Spanning the besieged city of Constantinople in 1453, a public library in modern-day Idaho, and a spaceship bound for a distant exoplanet decades from now, the heroes of Cloud Cuckoo Land  are linked by an ancient text that provides solace and the most profound human connection to characters in peril.

Cloud Cuckoo Land was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2021 and for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2022 and named a top book by many outlets including The New York Times,  Entertainment Weekly,  NPR, and TIME.

Doerr has also published several story collections. His fiction has been translated into over 40 languages, and is anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He was the editor of The Best American Short Stories 2019.  Doerr won the Story Prize, the most prestigious prize in the U.S. for a collection of short stories; and the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the largest prize in the world for a single short story.

---

LeVar Burton is an award-winning actor, host, and literacy advocate.

He launched his acting career while still at the University of Southern California. At 19, he landed the groundbreaking role of Kunta Kinte in the landmark television series “Roots.”

Burton achieved further global acclaim as Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge in the iconic “Star Trek: The Next Generation” television series – a role he reprised in “Star Trek: Picard” in 2023. 

However, it has been his role as host and executive producer of the beloved PBS children’s series “Reading Rainbow,” of which he is most proud. Airing from 1983 to 2009, it was not only one of the longest-running children’s television shows in history but also one of the most acclaimed, earning over 200 awards, including multiple Emmys and a Peabody.

As the honored recipient of six NAACP awards, a Peabody, a Grammy, and 14 Emmys, including a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Inaugural Children’s & Family Emmys, Burton has demonstrated that he can do it all. In 2024, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by the National Endowment of the Humanities at a ceremony in the Oval Office, bestowed by President Biden. Honored for his contributions to literacy in America, Burton continues his focus on the importance of literature and storytelling.