Meet our “Gaming for Girls Write Now” Headliners

Gaming for Girls Write Now featuring Annie Duke is Thursday, November 30th at Pen + Brush. It includes amazing headliners: Annie Duke, Maria Konnikova, Katy Lederer, and Ellen Leikind. Get to know them and make sure to purchase your tickets! Do you have what it takes to beat one of the best? Sit at the high stakes table and play against Annie. It’s a night of cards, culture and cocktails all to champion the next generation of writers and creative media makers.

“I’m really proud to support an organization that supports girls in finding their voice and empowering them through self-expression. Those voices can change minds.”
—ANNIE DUKE
Annie Duke is a World Series of Poker bracelet winner, the winner of the 2004 Tournament of Champions and the only woman to win the NBC National Poker Heads Up Championship. She has authored four books on poker and on February 6, 2018, she will release her first book for general audiences called Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts. As a professional speaker and decision strategist, she merges her poker expertise with her cognitive psychology graduate work at UPenn. She focuses on improving decision making and critical thinking skills, and developing individual and cultural supports to overcome cognitive bias. She is a founder of How I Decide, a non-profit that creates curricula and tools to improve decision making and critical thinking skills for under-served middle schoolers. She also serves on the National Board of After School All Stars, a non-profit that provides three hours of after school programming daily to more than 90,000 inner city youth across the country. In 2016 she was asked to join the Board of Trustees of the prestigious Franklin Institute.
“When I first immigrated to the United States I didn’t speak a word of English. Writing gave me the language I needed to become myself, grow, and learn to be heard. Empowering girls’ voices through writing is one of the single most important things we can do to ensure those voices remain empowered throughout their lives. Now more than ever, the mission of Girls Write Now is essential to creating a better, more vibrant and diverse future.”
—MARIA KONNIKOVA
Maria Konnikova is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, The Confidence Game, winner of the 2016 Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, an Anthony and Agatha Award finalist. She is a contributing writer for The New Yorker and is currently working on a book about poker and the balance of skill and luck in life, The Biggest Bluff, to be published in 2019. Maria is also the host of the podcast The Grift from Panoply Media, a show that explores con artists and the lives they ruin. She graduated from Harvard University and received her PhD in psychology from Columbia University.
“Now more than ever, girls and women are galvanizing the culture with their stories and their truths. What an incredible and important moment to be advocating for girls’ voices and the stories that they need and want to tell.”
—KATY LEDERER

Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collections Winter Sex (Verse), The Heaven-Sent Leaf (BOA Editions), and The bright red horse—and the blue— (Atelos). She is also the author of the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown), which was a New York Times Book Review “Editor’s Choice” and one of Esquire’s eight “Best Books of the Year.” She has been featured in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town,” the New York Times’ DealBook section, and on NPR’s Marketplace and To The Best of Our Knowledge, among other venues.

Educated at the University of California at Berkeley and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her honors and awards include fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a Discover Great New Writers citation from Barnes & Noble. Her poetry, essays, and reviews have been published in a diverse array of magazines including The Paris Review, The Enemy, The American Poetry Review, A Public Space, and Poetry London. She currently serves on the advisory boards of The St. Mark’s Poetry Project, The Bennington Review, and n+1 Magazine. Previously, she has served on the advisory boards of Fence Magazine, The Millay Colony for the Arts, and Triple Canopy Magazine.

“It is exciting to be working with Girls Write Now which gives girls the forum to be powerful and express their creativity and individuality in a way that will impact the world.”