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A conversation with Suleika Jaouad and Rachel Cargle

Join us on Zoom for a conversation with author Suleika Jaouad and Rachel Cargle.

This event will be broadcast live on Zoom. Registration and an email address are required to receive the link to participate. 

Order your copy of Suleika Jaouad's Between Two Kingdoms from Elizabeth's Bookshop. 

About the authors:

Suleika Jaouad is an Emmy Award–winning writer, speaker, cancer survivor, and activist. She served on Barack Obama’s President’s Cancer Panel, and her advocacy work, reporting, and speaking has been featured at the United Nations, on Capitol Hill, and on the TED Talk main stage.

Her memoir, Between Two Kingdoms, is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again. A few weeks shy of her 23rd birthday, Suleika Jaouad was given a diagnosis of leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. She spent much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times. She spent 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And once she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.

To reenter the world and reclaim what she'd lost, Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives.

Suleika Jaouad will be joined in conversation by Rachel Cargle, a Black American author, speaker, and activist known for her involvement in anti-racism work. Cargle founded the Foundation, which works to increase access to therapy for Black women and girls. During the Early 21st-century civil rights movement, Cargle's Instagram account grew from 355,000 to 1.7 million followers.