Leadership Ohio is honored to announce Award-Winning Author David Giffels as our featured guest speaker for Graduation 2020. Giffels, the author of Barnstorming Ohio To Understand America, will present this recent work and engage in audience Q &. A.
Giffels is the author of five books, and two-time winner of the Ohioana Book Award. His critically acclaimed memoir, Furnishing Eternity: A Father, a Son, a Coffin, and a Measure of Life, was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "tender, witty and . . . painstakingly and subtly wrought," and picked as a New York Times Book ReviewEditors' Choice. His previous books include The Hard Way on Purpose: Essays and Dispatches from the Rust Belt, also a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and nominee for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and the memoir All the Way Home (William Morrow/HarperCollins).
Leadership Ohio welcomes alumni and guests to our virtual graduation on November 14 via Zoom. Mr. Giffels will begin his book talk at 10:15 a.m. Please reach out to leadershipoh@gmail.com for complementary access/tickets.
Recent praise for Barnstorming Ohio:
"David Giffels is becoming one of the really invaluable American reporters. With a sharp comic eye for mid-American idiosyncrasies that recalls Thurber or Keillor, he also has a political conscience, and consciousness, that allows him to illuminate, with gentle acuity, many vexed corners in our national debate, from pro sports to strip malls. He is one of those rare writers who gives us truth without sentiment or rhetoric, and I never read him without pleasure, and a feeling that I now understand my country better than I did before."―Adam Gopnik, author of A Thousand Small Sanities
"Akron writer David Giffels decides to learn what Ohioans are like today....The people speak, and he listens."―Akron Beacon Journal
"Giffels... writes gracefully at every stop and actively seeks pockets of sunlight amid the gloom....An affectionate, realistic survey of a state coming back from the brink."―Kirkus Reviews