To open this year’s festival, Sullivan County’s own Justine van der Leun joins us to discuss Unreasonable Women, her gripping and deeply reported new book about survivors of abuse who are imprisoned for protecting themselves. Built from seven years of reporting and thousands of accounts from women’s prisons, the book follows three unforgettable women whose lives reveal how violence repeats across time—and how the legal system all too often erases that history, judging a single act without reckoning with the years that led to it. A work of literary reportage with the pace of a crime novel, Unreasonable Women asks urgent questions about what happens when a system refuses to see the full story of a life.
Date
Jun 19, 5:00pm
Featuring
Justine van der Leun
Justine van der Leun is an award-winning journalist and author. Her new book, Unreasonable Women, is published by Ecco in June 2026. She is also the author of We Are Not Such Things, and her work has appeared in The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, Harper’s, The Guardian, VQR, and The New Republic, among other publications. She is the host and co-producer of the investigative podcast Believe Her.
Her work has been recognized with the James Aronson Award, the Sigma Delta Chi Award, the Gracie Award, the iHeartRadio Award, the Mike Berger Award, and the Ambie Award. She has received support from the Pulitzer Center, Type Investigations, the International Women’s Media Foundation, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, and held fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Logan Nonfiction Program, Type Media, and PEN America.
Nina Burleigh
Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, best-selling author, documentary producer, and publisher of a substack on politics called American Freakshow. A contributing editor at The New Republic and frequent contributor to the New York Times and New York Magazine, her journalism has been published widely including in translation in the Norwegian and Italian press. She’s the author of eight books on an array of topics including archaeological forgery, scientists in 18th Century Egypt, James Smithson, Amanda Knox in Italy, and the Trump women, which were reviewed, excerpted or covered in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, New York Magazine, BBC, ABC, MSNBC, and other media outlets. She was born and educated in the Midwest, has been based in Washington, D.C., New York, Norway, Paris and Italy, traveled and reported extensively in the Middle East.
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