I’m talking about global powerhouses Samantha Power, Anne Firth Murray, Riane Eisler, and Annie Leibovitz! I’ve just seen or am about to hear them all speak LIVE! I just love perusing my local arts and lecture series, library and organization events. You never know who’s about to drop in on your hometown and drop a little knowledge, too! And what a great way to meet like-minded people.

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Samantha Power: Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Harvard professor, genocide expert, author and foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama! Born in Ireland, this Diva of Intellect pushed through the mostly male ranks of her fields and came out on top!

I was blown away by her talk last night in Berkeley about her new book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, the story of one of the best diplomats the UN has ever known and his untimely demise in an attack in Iraq. This comes on the heels of her much lauded, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, which won the Pulitzer among many other awards.

Samantha Power is young, attractive, a genius, brilliant, passionate about foreign policy, and a very important part of Barack Obama’s advisory team. Wow! But whether you are Republican, Democrat, or totally uninterested in US politics, the works of this Genius Diva shed new light on the world, diplomacy and what really happens in those places we hear about on the news. So for a true window onto the international scene from a super insider, pick up these books ASAP! I did. 

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Anne Firth Murray: Founder of the Global Fund for Women, a powerful nonprofit dedicated to women’s human rights through empowering grantmaking. This New Zealand-born Philanthropic Diva visits us tonight at a Spark Speaker Series event. Her new book, From Outrage to Courage: Women Taking Action for Health and Justice, outlines the realities of being born female in poverty. She says it’s dangerous to your health! Injustice, violence and more make being female around the globe a difficult proposition. But this is a story about hope, too, and change…

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Riane Eisler: author, social scientist extraordinaire, Ground-Breaking Diva. Born in Vienna and fled the Nazis with her family at a young age, her story quickly became one of triumph! When feminists, women’s studies majors and other eye-opened women gush about their first entree into this subject, they will most likely site Riane Eisler’s internationally best-selling book, The Chalice and the Blade. It was among the first works of its kind, laying the groundwork for everything from feminism to The Da Vinci Code!

Her newest book, The Real Wealth of Nations, takes a wildly fresh view of economics in terms of the valuation of women’s work both in the house as well as on a meta-level by looking at the way our society dis-prioritizes caregiving, teaching and more. Did you know that if you included unpaid women’s household work, it would make up 70% of Switzerland’s GDP? It’s truly fascinating stuff.

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Annie Leibovitz: iconic photographer. Who am I gonna meet on Friday? None other than this Photographic Diva! Her exhibit opens in San Francisco at the stunning Legion of Honor on March 1 (just in time for Women’s Day!), organized by the Brooklyn Museum. The retrospective is based on her latest book, A Photographer’s Life: 1990 – 2005, and features family and friends as well as world leaders and landscapes, all hand-crafted with the artist’s discerning and often unflinching eye.

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Are you inspired yet? I AM!! :) :)