Thomas Friedman to Keynote Conference at BEA!

I Love This Time Of Year……The announcements of authors, guests of honor, creators, comedians, etc are starting to come out on a regular basis now and to that point, we have another big announcement for BookExpo. Thomas Friedman will serve as our conference keynote speaker on Friday morning.

We created the conference keynote platform last year to highlight the outstanding international conference sessions that take place at BookExpo every year - nearly 160 sessions in all. Our hope was to call attention to the BooKExpo conference by featuring more business focused authors on the Friday morning platform, the first of them of course being Dr. Allan Greenspan and now the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and National Book Award recipient Thomas Friedman.

Mr. Friedeman’s new book, Green Is the New Red, White and Blue will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on August 19, 2008. In his appearance at BEA, Mr. Friedman will thoroughly discuss and introduce his new book which his publisher describes as a “manifesto for our climate-challenged future”. In his new book, Friedman proposes that an ambitious national strategy – which he calls “Geo-Greenism” – is not only what we need to save the planet from overheating; it is what we need to make America healthier, richer, more innovative, more productive, and more secure.

The timing of this is perfect as we here at BEA headquarters had been brainstorming how to give our conference a green bend to it, and then Friedman came up as a possibility. It couldn't have worked out better and thanks of course go to our friend Jeff Seroy at FSG - whom I'm also working with for a really cool panel at New York ComicCon that I'll tell you more about as soon as I can.

But I digress, Friedman is the man of the hour and I am thrilled to have him keynote BEA's exceptional conference, the message not only dovetails nicely with our own programming, but it promises to be a definitive ‘call to arms’ for how we manage our environment in the future.

I'm ashamed to say it, but I just plagiarised that last sentence from myself - I stole it from the press release going out to the trades tomorrow afternoon......

Also, the event is free and open to all convention attendees, Friday, May 30th at 11am - See you then!

-L