Conference Keynote
Emi Nietfeld
Emi will join us on Wednesday, October 29th at our closing luncheon to share her testimony and discuss the role of resilience in her upbringing:
“The True Meaning of Resilience”
Emi Nietfeld rejects the easy label of an “overcomer.”
Even though she kept her dreams alive against the odds and attended a top college, she knows it wasn’t solely due to resilience: success required luck, privilege, and support. In this passionate talk, Emi asks her audiences to throw away the American fantasy that poverty, illness, or any other adversity can be conquered through sheer grit and bootstrapping ingenuity. Drawing on the research about what truly inspires resilience, Emi urges us to shift our focus from encouraging “resilience” and instead address the underlying social problems and provide individuals the support they need to persevere.
Emi Nietfeld is the award-winning author of Acceptance (Penguin Press ‘22), a memoir of her journey through foster care and homelessness, interrogating the true meanings of resilience, ambition, and success.
After graduating from Harvard in 2015, she worked as a software engineer, an experience she wrote about in her viral New York Times essay, “After Working At Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again.”
A recipient of the prestigious Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Reporting Fellowship, Emi writes about inequality and families for The New York Times, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, and other publications.
Her work is taught in high school classrooms, MFA workshops, and doctoral psychology programs. Hailing from Minnesota, Emi now lives in New York City with her family.
“Nietfeld’s gifts for capturing the fury of living at the mercy of bad circumstances, for critiquing the hero’s journey even while she tells it, make Acceptance a remarkable memoir.”
New York Times Book Review