SAL2 Public Writing Series

On February 26, 2026, panelists and participants discussed opportunities, challenges, and strategies related to public-facing scholarship. 

Panelists included:

Beverly Gage, John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History, specializes in 20th-century U.S. history. She is the author of the Pulitzer-prize winning book, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. Her new book, This Land is Your Land: A Road Trip through U.S. History, will be published by Simon & Schuster in April 2026. She also writes for numerous journals and magazines, including The New Yorker, New York Times, and Washington Post.  

C. Brandon Ogbunu is an Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and a Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He has written on varied topics including Afrofuturism, race science, epidemiology, bioethics, and artificial intelligence. A recipient of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communication, he is an ideas contributor for Wired and the author of a column ("Selective Pressure") at Undark.  In addition, he has written for various other publications at the interface between science, technology, and culture, such as The Atlantic, Andscape, Scientific American, Quanta Magazine, and the Boston Review. He is the author of the forthcoming ‘Liberation Biology’, under contract with Basic Books.

The discussion was be moderated by Alan Mikhail, Chace Family Professor of History, whose public scholarship includes the award-winning God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World and the forthcoming Newcomers: The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Literary Hub, and Time.

On October 23, 2025, Emily Bazelon, NYT Magazine staff writer and Yale Law School Fellow, led participants through the process of writing and pitching an op-ed from start to finish. Participants dissected the form and talked about pitches, timing, and all the other steps.

Emily Bazelon is staff writer at the New York Times Magazine and contributes to Times editorials. She is also the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School, where she teaches courses and workshops on writing for a wide audience.

On April 14, 2025, Meghan O’Rourke, Editor of The Yale Review and Professor in the Practice at Yale, discussed what editors are looking for and addressed common misconceptions that scholars may have when writing for magazines and op-eds.

Presenter: Meghan O'Rourke is a writer, poet, and editor.  She was formerly an editor at The New Yorker, the culture editor of Slate, co-editor in chief of Double X, and the poetry editor of The Paris Review. She is the author of the New York Times Bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022), which was nominated for a National Book Award; the bestselling memoir The Long Goodbye (2011); and three poetry collections, the most recent of which was named a top poetry book of 2017 by The New York Times. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and more. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Nonfiction Award, the May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, and two Pushcart Prizes.
 

On February 24, 2025, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sarah Stillman discussed storytelling strategies for scholars who want to share the human story behind their research in order to engage a public audience. 

Presenter: Sarah Stillman, Lecturer in English at Yale, is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, where she covers criminal justice, immigration, climate change, and more. She is a MacArthur Fellow, and runs the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale, producing collaborative investigative stories aimed at social change. She won a 2024 Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of injustices resulting from the felony-murder rule. She has also received two National Magazine Awards for public interest and the Hillman Prize for magazine journalism. She is a contributor to the best-selling anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. 

The first workshop of the series, Author Agency and Literary Agents: The Art of the Book Proposal, held on November 14, 2024, explored when to consider working with an agent, what to expect from literary agencies, and the financial and content-related concerns scholars should consider when seeking an agent to represent their manuscripts or proposals.

Presenter: Thomas LeBien, Founding Partner of Moon & Company, is a thirty-year veteran of publishing with experience at top-tier university presses and commercial presses. He was an Executive Editor at Harvard University Press; a Vice President, Senior Editor at Simon and Schuster; Publisher of the Hill and Wang Scientific American/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux imprints at Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Editor at Princeton University Press; and Editor at Oxford University Press. He has been the editor or publisher of multiple New York Times bestselling books and award-winning authors and has provided guidance on all aspects of the idea-driven process of publishing and communication tailored to increase the visibility, reach, and influence of the writer’s areas of interest.