Capital J Mainstage: Dara Horn and Sarah Hurwitz

Dara Horn is the award-winning author of seven books, including the novels In the Image, The World to Come, All Other Nights, A Guide for the Perplexed, and Eternal Life; the Passover-themed graphic novel One Little Goat; and the essay collection People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present.

One of Granta magazine’s Best Young American Novelists (2007), she is the recipient of three National Jewish Book Awards, among other honors, and she was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the Wingate Prize, the Simpson Family Literary Prize, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Horn received her doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard University, studying Yiddish and Hebrew. She has taught courses in these subjects at Sarah Lawrence College and Yeshiva University, and held the Gerald Weinstock Visiting Professorship in Jewish Studies at Harvard.

Sarah Hurwitz is the author of As A Jew: Reclaiming Our Story From Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try To Erase Us, which is a New York Times bestseller and won the Natan Notable Book Award, and Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life – in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There), which was a finalist for two National Jewish Book Awards and for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

She was a White House speechwriter from 2009 to 2017, starting out as a senior speechwriter for President Barack Obama and then serving as head speechwriter for First Lady Michelle Obama. Prior to working in the White House, Hurwitz was the chief speechwriter for Hillary Clinton on her 2008 presidential campaign. Hurwitz is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and was a 2017 Fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. She has also completed training to be a chaplain, which she does on a volunteer basis at a hospital near her home.