The Church’s fifth annual Creativity Conference, a full-day celebration of bold thinking in the arts and sciences organized by April Gornik, will bring six visionaries to the Sag Harbor cultural center on Saturday, starting at 9:30 with a complimentary breakfast and continuing with six talks and a closing reception and book signing with the speakers.
Harriette Cole, a lifestyle expert and advice columnist, will kick off the talks at 10 by speaking on “Making Confidence Your Superpower.” In 2016, Cole launched Dreamleapers, an educational platform to help people activate their dreams. The author of seven books, she served as fashion director of Essence magazine, founding editorial director of Uptown magazine, and editor in chief and creative director of Ebony magazine.
She will be followed by Paul Bingham, whose subject will be “Uniquely Human Creativity Is an Evolved Property We Now Understand.” He holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology, and during the first decades of his career he and his research group made important contributions to understanding the molecular biology of complex animals. He eventually transitioned to a consideration of how and why humans became a radically new kind of animal, a subject he will discuss during his lecture.
Up next will be Susan Rubin, a retired high school math teacher with over 30 years of experience in a variety of school settings. During her 20 years at Stuyvesant High School in the city, she offered students an opportunity to earn extra credit for creative math projects, and after retirement she supervised math student-teachers at Columbia University and shared creative projects with the math education students there and at Queens College. Her lecture topic: “Bringing Creativity Into the Math Classroom.”
After a one-hour lunch break — no lunch will be provided — the conference will resume at 2 with a talk by George Makari, a historian, essayist, psychoanalyst, and psychiatrist. His “Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia” was named a best nonfiction book of the year by Bloomberg and an editor’s choice by The New York Times. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Times, and he conducts a podcast with artists and writers on the nature of the imagination. He will discuss “Imagining Strangers: Xenophobia, Then and Now.”
He will be followed by Susan Wheeler, whose topic will be “Noodling and Ambition.” Wheeler has published a novel, “Record Palace,” and six collections of poetry, among them “Assorted Poems” and “Meme,” which was shortlisted for the National Book Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, she is a Princeton University professor emerita.
Tom Junod will wrap up the lectures with “The Secrets of Creativity.” A senior writer at ESPN, where his work has won an Emmy Award and the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting, he was previously a staff writer at GQ and Esquire. His memoir, “In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man,” published in March by Doubleday, was called “one of the great literary tributes to a complex paterfamilias in recent memory” by The Wall Street Journal.
A reception at 5 p.m. will provide an opportunity for attendees to speak with the lecturers and each other. Books will be available for purchase and to be signed by the authors.
Tickets are $115, $95 for members, and special pricing is available for first responders, active military, veterans, and those with special needs. No tickets will be sold for individual talks or portions of the day. Re-entry is permitted.
