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      PEM Reads

      Starry and Restless

      Sunday, June 7, 2026 from 2—3:30 pm

      Cover of Starry and Restless by Julia Cooke

      Know before you go

      In-person event
      Location: Morse Auditorium
      Included with admission
      Pre-registration encouraged

      Within the past generation, journalism has been upended by the Internet and social media — and it’s still undergoing extraordinary transformation. Join author Julia Cooke for a discussion about Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World, a triple-biography that illuminates an earlier moment of journalistic transformation.

      Martha Gellhorn, Emily “Mickey” Hahn and Rebecca West were three trailblazing reporters who transformed journalism while reinventing the possibilities for women of their times. In Starry and Restless, Cooke takes readers on these writers’ adventures and challenges throughout the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, from Omaha Beach on D-Day to Japanese-occupied Shanghai through Cuba, the Congo and the Nuremberg Trials.

      In their lifetimes, these three writers were “the targets of near-continuous criticism, scrutiny, gossip, and, occasionally, praise.” Now, their legacies are illuminated by their own writing and letters in this extraordinary, globe-trotting triple portrait.

      PEM Curator Trevor Smith will moderate a discussion with the author. 

      About our collaborator

      Julia Cooke
      Julia Cooke

      Julia Cooke is the author of the books Come Fly the World, a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist and a Malala Yousafzai’s Literati book club pick, and The Other Side of Paradise. Her essays have appeared in A Public Space, Salon, The Threepenny Review, Smithsonian, Tin House and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her reporting has been published in Condé Nast Traveler, The New York Times, Playboy and other publications. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, and lives in Woodstock, Vermont.

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