Author Event: You've Changed - Benoit Denizet-Lewis and Jabari Asim

Benoit Denizet-Lewis In Conversation with Jabari Asim discussing his newest book You've Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation

“A blazingly smart, thoughtful, funny, and moving book about the endless hope—and the occasional limits—of human transformation.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and All the Way to the River

From New York Times bestselling author Benoit Denizet-Lewis comes a timely, provocative, and deeply moving exploration of personal transformation in a period of roiling uncertainty. You’ve Changed investigates how we remake ourselves—and how identity, belief, and belonging shift in a world that won’t stop doing the same. We live in an age obsessed with reinvention. On Instagram, in recovery meetings, through name-change petitions, lifestyle pivots, deconversion blogs, and political conversion manifestos, we’re surrounded by stories of radical personal change. But what does it really mean to shed an old skin—and why do some transformations inspire us while others raise our hackles?

Benoit Denizet-Lewis is an associate professor at Emerson College and a longtime contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He has written three previous books, including America Anonymous and the New York Times bestseller Travels With Casey. A New America Fellow and NEH Public Scholar, he divides his time between Boston and Prague.

Author and cultural critic Jabari Asim was born and raised in St. Louis. He earned a BA at Northwestern University. His writing engages themes of racism, social justice, and current events. “By the time of Mike Brown’s death at the hands of a police officer, I had already begun scribbling lines and addressing the idea of ‘The Talk’ that many African American parents give to their sons when they reach adolescence,” Asim said in a 2014 statement on the Emerson College website, on the publication of his poem “The Talk” in the Washington Post. “I consider the poem in the tradition of Langston Hughes’s ‘Mother to Son,’ and Dudley Randall’s ‘Ballad of Birmingham.

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