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Dec 18, 2008

"Strong lives are motivated by dynamic purposes." -- Kenneth Hildebrand

An Author Turned Visionary Humanitarian

After the runaway success of his Pulitzer-nominated memoir, literary wunderkind Dave Eggers could have settled into a comfortable career cranking out similar material. Instead he took a more dynamic path. He founded the small indie publishing empire McSweeney's, which produces the Believer magazine, and started two nonprofit enterprises with a humanitarian bent: 826 Valencia, a writing and tutoring laboratory for young people ages 6 to 18, now located in seven cities, and Voice of Witness, a series of books that use oral history to tell the stories of the abused, oppressed, and impoverished. Eggers himself provided the template with "What Is the What", his gripping fictionalization of Sudanese "lost boy" Valentino Achak Deng's story. Eggers answers a few questions in this Utne Reader interview after being chosen as one of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World".