Courtesy of NYU Center on International Cooperation.
Considering the Future: A Conversation with Stephen Heintz and Kim Stanley Robinson, Moderated by Ayad Akhtar
From left to right: Ayad Akhtar, Stephen Heintz, and Kim Stanley Robinson.
Considering the Future: Blending Fiction and Reality, a conversation with Stephen Heintz and Kim Stanley Robinson and moderated by Ayad Akhtar, brought together two unique perspectives: a writer who envisions the future and a practitioner dedicated to addressing the pressing social challenges of today. In this dialogue, they explore the interplay between fiction and reality, pragmatism and visionary utopianism.
The event was co-sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Philanthropy New York, NYU’s Center on International Cooperation (CIC), and NYU SPS Heyman Center.
Stephen Heintz
President and CEO, Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Stephen B. Heintz is president and CEO of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a private family foundation with an endowment of approximately $1.2 billion that advances social change for a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world. He is the author of A Logic for the Future: International Relations in the Age of Turbulence.
Previously, he co-founded and served as president of Dēmos, a think tank dedicated to developing a more inclusive democracy, and served as executive vice president and chief operating officer for the EastWest Institute during the 1990s. In 2002, he led the RBF’s joint initiative with the UN Association of the USA to open a Track II dialogue that helped lay the groundwork for the Iran nuclear deal. The Iran Project, which he co-founded, keeps alive the possibility of a peaceful relationship with Iran despite the U.S. withdrawal from this historic agreement.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Author
Kim Stanley Robinson is an American novelist, widely recognized as one of the foremost living writers of science fiction and increasingly, climate fiction. His work has been described as humanist or literary science fiction and his use of scientific accuracy and non-fiction descriptions places him in the hard sci-fi genre.
Robinson has published more than 20 novels including his much honored Mars trilogy and The Ministry for the Future. Robinson studied under Ursula K Le Guin and earned a Ph.D. in literature from UCSD with a dissertation on the works of Philip K. Dick.
Ayad Akhtar
Novelist & Playwright
Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Akhtar is the author of Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown & Co.), which The Washington Post called “a tour de force” and The New York Times called “a beautiful novel…that had echoes of The Great Gatsby and that circles, with pointed intellect, the possibilities and limitations of American life.” His first novel, American Dervish (Little, Brown & Co.), was published in over 20 languages.
As a playwright, he has written Junk, Disgraced, The Who & The What, and The Invisible Hand.