Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers is the author of many books, among them The Eyes and the Impossible, The Every, The Circle, The Monk of Mokha, Heroes of the Frontier, A Hologram for the King, Zeitoun, What Is the What, and The Museum of Rain.

Eggers is also the founder of McSweeney's, a nonprofit, independent publishing company based in San Francisco that produces books, a humor website. Under their leadership, McSweeney’s has won the National Magazine Award for Fiction three times and has been a finalist nine times.

Along with Nínive Calegari, Eggers co-founded 826 National, a network of youth writing and tutoring centers around the United States. Realizing the need for greater college access for the first-gen and low-income students, Eggers founded ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization designed to connect students with resources, schools and donors to make college possible. Furthering his work in youth advocacy, Eggers co-foundedThe International Congress of Youth Voices in 2018 with Amanda Uhle, an annual gathering of 100 extraordinary young writers and activists. In 2025, they opened The International Library of Youth Writing in San Francisco, the first of its kind in the world.

Eggers is also the co-founder of Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around. Eggers’s novel What Is the What, about the life of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee from the civil war in South Sudan, gave birth to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, run by Mr. Deng. VADF continues to operate secondary schools in South Sudan.

Eggers’s work as a journalist has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Believer, and the New Statesman. He has covered Trump rallies, life in Gaza under occupation, Ukraine during wartime, and the fragile peace in South Sudan.

Eggers is winner of the Newbery Medal, the American Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Education, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the TED Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Born in Boston and raised in Illinois, he has now lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for three decades. He is married to the novelist Vendela Vida, and they have two children.

Dave Eggers shines as an author who distills abstract issues into human stories, rising to the occasion as an activist who tackles those issues head on. Whether it is Hurricane Katrina and over-criminalization (Zeitoun), war in Sudan and Yemen (What is the What, Monk of Mokha), the dangers of surveillance technology (The Circle), or intergenerational stories of family and friendship (Heroes of the Frontier, Contrapposto), Dave’s work encompasses the full breadth of human experience and what we owe each other as people.

For engaging onstage conversations, Dave Eggers speaks to his process as a lifelong writer and the power of storytelling towards efforts of peacemaking and humanitarianism. Eggers especially loves speaking to teen audiences.