iRead Non-Fiction

Kennedy Odede is one of Africa’s best-known community organizers and social entrepreneurs, and among the first from Kibera, a Kenyan slum, to get a degree from an elite American university, Wesleyan University. Jessica Posner is a nationally recognized, award-winning social entrepreneur and activist and is the cofounder, with Kennedy, and chief operating officer of Shining Hope for Communities, which provides a school for girls in Kibera, as well as clean water, health care, and more for over seventy-thousand people.

Playwright, director, and former bicycle messenger Travis Hugh Culley, author of the acclaimed memoir The Immortal Class, reads from and discusses his powerful new book A Comedy & A Tragedy: A Memoir of Learning How to Read and Write, in which he recounts his difficult journey to literacy.

Jena Lee Nardella, accompanied by Dan Haseltine, the lead singer of the Grammy Award-winning band Jars of Clay, discusses her memoir One Thousand Wells: How an Audacious Goal Taught Me to Love the World Instead of Save It, in which she shares how her passion for saving the world grew into a humbler long-term calling of loving the world in all its brokenness.

Scott Ian discuss his new book I’m the Man: The Story of That Guy from Anthrax, his fast-paced, humorous, and revealing memoir of the band that proved to the masses that brutality and fun didn’t have to be mutually exclusive. I’m the Man is a blistering hard rock memoir, one that is astonishing in its candor and deftly told by the man who’s kept the institution of Anthrax alive for more than thirty years.