Ideas We Should Steal Festival | Past Festival Speakers

The Citizen has hosted over 110 speakers on the Ideas We Should Steal stage. Here are some highlights:

Black Thought (2022)

The Roots

Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter is an American rapper, actor and the frontman for the Philadelphia-based hip hop group The Roots, which he co-founded with drummer Questlove (Ahmir Thompson). Regarded as “one of the most skilled, incisive, and prolific rappers of his time,” he is widely lauded for his live performance skills, continuous multisyllabic rhyme schemes, complex lyricism, double entendres, and politically aware lyrics. With the Roots, he fronts the house band for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

Josh Shapiro (2019)

PA Governor

John Oliver (2019)

Last Week Tonight host

HBO’s Emmy winning Last Week Tonight with John Oliver host covers news, politics, and current events. Oliver has won two Peabody Awards and is accredited with the “John Oliver Effect,” a title given to the actions and attention his show brings in the political world.

Jill Abramson (2022)

Senior Lecturer, Harvard University

Jill Abramson spent 17 years in senior editorial positions at The New York Times, where she was the first woman to serve as Washington bureau chief, managing editor and executive editor. Before joining the Times, she was deputy Washington bureau chief and an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Among Abramson’s three books is Strange Justice, which she co-authored with Jane Mayer. She is currently a lecturer in Harvard’s English Department, and formerly taught at Princeton and Yale. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Piper Kerman (2021)

Author and Activist

Piper Kerman is the author of the memoir Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison from Spiegel & Grau. The book has been adapted by Jenji Kohan into an Emmy-winning original series for Netflix, which ran for seven seasons. Piper collaborates with nonprofits, philanthropies, and other organizations working in the public interest and serves on the board of directors of the Women’s Prison Association and the advisory boards of the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship, InsideOUT Writers, Healing Broken Circles and JustLeadershipUSA. Follow her on Twitter @Piper.

Andrew Yang (2022)

Founder, Forward Party

Andrew Yang was a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and a 2021 candidate for mayor of New York City. Named by President Obama as a Presidential Ambassador of Global Entrepreneurship, he is the founder of Humanity Forward and Venture for America. Yang’s New York Times bestselling book The War on Normal People helped introduce the idea of universal basic income into the political mainstream. Yang graduated with degrees in economics and political science from Brown University, and completed Columbia Law School, where he was an editor of the Law Review.

Michael Steele (2022)

Former Chairman, Republican National Committee

Michael Steele became the first African American elected to statewide office as the Lt. Governor of Maryland in 2003. He was also the first Black chairperson of the Republican National Committee, where he led efforts that broke records for fundraising and seat pickup in the U.S. House of Representatives, along with state governorships and legislatures. Today, Steele is a political analyst for MSNBC, the host of the Michael Steele Podcast, and the author of Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda.

Emily Bazelon (2022)

Staff writer, New York Times Magazine

Emily Bazelon is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, the Truman Capote Fellow for Creative Writing and Law at Yale Law School (her alma mater), a co-host of the Slate podcast Political Gabfest — and a Philadelphia native. She is also the author of two national bestsellers: Charged, about the power of prosecutors, and Sticks and Stones, about preventing bullying. Bazelon formerly wrote and edited for Slate.

Ali Velshi (2022)

MSNBC host and business correspondent, NBC News

Ali Velshi brings his sharp analysis and point of view to the weekend morning show, Velshi, airing from 8 to 10am ET on Saturdays and Sundays on MSNBC. Velshi has covered a wide range of domestic, global and economic issues throughout his career, including climate change, the spread and defeat of ISIS, the refugee crisis, the Iran nuclear deal, tensions between Russia and the west, the Greek debt crisis and the global financial crisis.

Jennifer Rubin (2022)

Opinion Columnist, The Washington Post

Jennifer Rubin writes reported opinion for The Washington Post. She covers politics and policy, foreign and domestic, and provides insight into the conservative movement, the Republican and Democratic parties, and threats to Western democracies. Rubin, who is also an MSNBC contributor, came to The Post in 2010 after three years with Commentary magazine. Prior to her career in journalism, Rubin practiced labor law for two decades, an experience that informs and enriches her work.

Roy Wood Jr. (2020)

Comedian

Roy Wood Jr.’s comedy has entertained millions across stage, television and radio. In addition to stand-up comedy, producing and acting, Roy is currently a correspondent on Comedy Central’s Emmy and NAACP Award-winning The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. During his tenure, he has used The Daily Show’s brand of satire to shed light on serious issues including gun violence, police reform, LGBTQ+ discrimination, ICE deportations and PTSD in the Black community.

Michael Rubin (2021)

Kynetic majority owner/CEO & Reform Alliance co-founder

Michael Rubin started GSI Commerce, which he sold to eBay for $2.4 billion in 2011. He subsequently co-founded Kynetic, a holding company for e-commerce retailers Fanatics, Rue La La and ShopRunner. In 2019, inspired by his friend Meek Mill’s experience in the criminal justice system, Rubin and Mill founded REFORM Alliance, to dramatically reduce the number of unfairly-incarcerated people in America.

Stew (2021)

Singer-songwriter and playwright

These days, Stew, a Tony and two-time Obie award-winning playwright and performer, critically acclaimed singer-songwriter and veteran of multiple dive-bar stages, is focusing on creating song-driven films, alternative TV and teaching. He is currently composing songs for Spike Lee’s upcoming (and yet-to-be-titled) full-length movie musical, and he teaches at Harvard, Sarah Lawrence and The New School, where his classes are hothouses of multi-disciplinary, self-challenging experimentation that encourage celebratory transformation via myth-making. Follow him on Twitter @StewTNP.

Will Guidara (2022)

Restaurateur, author, and co-host of The Big Brunch

Will Guidara is the former owner of Make it Nice, a hospitality group of both fine dining and fast casual restaurants, including the acclaimed Eleven Madison Park, NoMad, Davies and Brook, and Made Nice. A co-founder of The Welcome Conference and the Independent Restaurant Coalition, Guidara authored Unreasonable Hospitality and is one of three judges — others are Dan Levy and chef Sohla El-Waylly — on The Big Brunch on HBO Max.

Cheryl Dorsey (2020)

Retired LAPD Sgt.

Acclaimed author of autobiography Black and Blue: The Creation of a Social Advocate, Cheryl Dorsey is a Los Angeles native who joined the LAPD in 1980. During her twenty year career, she worked exclusively in patrol and specialized units in all four Bureaus within the City of Los Angeles and was assigned to the infamous gang unit Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (C.R.A.S.H.).

Michael Eric Dyson (2020)

Professor & author

Dr. Michael Eric Dyson is a professor, a New York Times contributing opinion writer, and a contributing editor of The New Republic, and of ESPN’s The Undefeated website. He has written more than 20 books, including Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America, expected to be released this December. Former president Barack Obama noted: “Everybody who speaks after Michael Eric Dyson pales in comparison.”

Marc Howard (2022)

Founding Director, Prisons and Justice Initiative, Georgetown University

Marc Howard is the founding director of the Prisons and Justice Initiative at Georgetown University, where he is also a lauded professor of Government and Law. Howard is also the founder and president of the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice, a nonprofit organization that aims to change public attitudes about criminal legal reform. A leading voice and advocate for restoring humanity to the American criminal punishment system, Howard has authored many scholarly articles and three books, including Unusually Cruel: Prisons, Punishment, and the Real American Exceptionalism. His Georgetown course Making an Exoneree re-investigates likely wrongful convictions and has contributed to exonerations and releases of four people.

Aqeela Sherrills (2021)

Director, Newark Community Street Teams

Aqeela Sherrills is a spirit-centered organizer and activist who has worked for three decades to promote community ownership of public safety and facilitate healing from violence in marginalized communities. A nationally recognized expert in victim service and community-based public safety, Sherrills has created and led multi-million-dollar nonprofit organizations focused on reducing violence and fostering safety in urban communities, and advised hundreds of organizations. Follow him Twitter @aqeela28.