LOCAL>> Suleika Jaouad

Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted is a searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission and, ultimately, a road trip of healing and self-discovery.

Suleika Jaouad is an Emmy Award-winning writer, speaker, cancer survivor and activist. Born in New York City to a Tunisian father and a Swiss mother, Suleika’s career aspirations as a foreign correspondent were cut short when, at age 22, she was diagnosed with leukemia. She began writing the acclaimed New York Times column and video series “Life, Interrupted” from the front lines of her hospital bed, and has since become a fierce advocate for those living with illness and chronic pain.

Suleika served on Barack Obama’s Presidential Cancer Panel, and her advocacy work, reporting and speaking engagements have brought her everywhere from the main stage of TED, the United Nations and Capitol Hill to a maximum security prison and a two-room schoolhouse in rural Montana. When she’s not on the road with her 1972 Volkswagen camper van and rescue dog Oscar, she lives in Brooklyn..

Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, as well as the short story collection, Pilgrims — a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the 1999 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. A Pushcart Prize winner and National Magazine Award-nominated journalist, she works as writer-at-large for GQ. Her journalism has been published in Harper’s Bazaar, Spin, and The New York Times Magazine, and her stories have appeared in Esquire, Story, and the Paris Review.