STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK

PHOTO BY HAYDEN GILMOUR

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin will be among the authors headlining the 2025 Sun Valley Writer’s Conference.

She will unveil a rich love story—that of her own emotional journey with her husband, RFK speechwriter Richard Goodwin, in the last years of his life--at the 31st Sun Valley Writers Conference. The conference runs Saturday through Monday, July 19-July 21, at Sun Valley Resort.

Other presenters include Erling Kagge, who will take the audience on a breathtaking adventure story about the shimmering beauty and fragility of the North Pole; Jamaican-born poet Safiya Sinclair, who will transport listeners into her childhood growing up with a strict Rastafarian father, and Max Boot, who will discuss the affable, if often opaque, President Ronald Reagan.

Tickets for the 2025 conference will go on sale at 10 a.m. Mountain Time Tuesday, Feb. 25, on the SVWC website at https://svwc.com/.

The theme of this year’s Conference is “Words & Wonder.”

“It is our hopeful goal that, for a few magical days every summer, each of us will be filled with a state of wonder, through the medium of words—those singular elements of human genius, poetry, art, learning, and emotion,” said John Burnham Schwartz, the conference’s literary director. “We traverse on a path to deeper knowledge of self and society, hoping we might come always through the wondrous doorways of the unexpected, the unfamiliar, and the inexplicable, towards beauty, empathy, and understanding.”

In that vein, the Writer’s Conference will host a special performance by the Chicago-based Improvised Shakespeare Company, which creates an improvised Shakespearean masterpiece on the spot based on a suggestion from an audience member.

Others taking the stage include “An American Werewolf in London” actor Griffin Dunne, who’s written a new memoir; Irish fiction writer Colum McCann; “The God of the Woods” author Liz Moore, American chef and food writer Ruth Reichl and Vietnamese American poet and novelist Ocean Vuong.

Others on the list so far include Meena Ahamed, Jonathan Blitzer, Oren Cass, Sloane Crosley, Andre Dubus III, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Carl Hiaasen, Dan Jones, Claire Keegan, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, Todd Purdum, Sonia Purnell, Paola Ramos, Theodore Schwartz,  Admiral James Stavridis, Wright Thompson and Yael van der Wouden. 

This year, as in year’s past, there will be two types of passes—A Full Conference Pass for $1,100 and a Next Generation Pass which costs $550 for those 35 and under.

Thanks to generous donations, the Writer’s Conference will also offer free Pavilion Lawn Talks, free livestreaming, a free Community Speaker Series in partnership with The Community Library and single event tickets to Pavilion Talks.

Back this year for the second time will be a Live Watch Party at The Argyros, which gave attendees a chance to duck out of the heat—and rain, on one occasion--to watch presentations livestreamed. The Writer’s Conference also will offer scholarships to Wood River Valley students and teachers, take authors into local schools and continue a fellowship program for aspiring young writers around the country.

From what started as a dream around a kitchen table, the Sun Valley Writer’s Conference has turned into one of today’s premier literary conferences. Past presenters have included such Pulitzer Prize winners as Colson Whitehead and Anthony Doerr, Congressman John Lewis, U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, Supreme Court Justices Sandra O’Connor and Stephen Breyer and preeminent historical author David McCullough.