On October 11, 2023, Encounter Books celebrated twenty five years of publishing great books in defense of the Western tradition with a with a black tie gala at The National Building Museum in Washington, DC.
To mark the occasion, Encounter honored Joshua T. Katz with The Jeane Kirkpatrick Prize for Academic Freedom and Victor Davis Hanson with The Encounter Prize for Advancing American Ideals.
Watch the event in its entirety below:
Honorees:
Joshua T. Katz is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on higher education, language and culture, the classical tradition, and the humanities broadly conceived. Educated at Yale, Oxford, and Harvard, he was Cotsen Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics at Princeton before joining AEI. The recipient of numerous awards for his scholarship and teaching, he is an outspoken advocate for free speech, academic freedom, and such disfavored ideas as truth, rigor, and merit. In 2022–23, he was a Visiting Critic at The New Criterion, the partner enterprise of Encounter Books.
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he focuses on classics and military history. He is the author of hundreds of articles, book reviews, and newspaper editorials on Greek, agrarian, and military history, and essays on contemporary culture. He has written or edited more than twenty-five books, the latest of which is The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America (2021).
Featured Speakers:
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author of many books and a regular contributor to several journals, including American Greatness, The Epoch Times, and The Spectator World.
Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. He is the founder and editor of National Affairs, a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. He is the author of several books on political theory and public policy, most recently A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.
Rebekah Mercer graduated from Stanford University with a dual B.S. in Biology and Mathematics and with an M.S. in Operations Research and Engineering Economic Systems. After graduation, she returned to New York City and worked for a hedge fund before retiring to raise her four children. She is president of the Mercer Family Foundation and the chairman of the board of directors of the Government Accountability Institute. She also serves on the board of The Heritage Foundation, and Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Richard W. Graber is President and Chief Executive Officer of The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation, he served as the Senior Vice President for Global Government Relations for Honeywell International. He served as the United States Ambassador to the Czech Republic from 2006 to 2009.
Since its founding in 1998, Encounter Books has served as a vital counterweight to a publishing establishment that is beholden to progressive pieties on vital issues ranging from the economy and national security to individual liberty and the rule of law. In its lifetime, Encounter has not only published scores of titles that reaffirm the vital tenets of Western civilization, it has also demonstrated the continuing importance of books in America’s public discourse.
It has been a privilege to have had a hand in preserving and cultivating the intellectual and moral resources that undergird our civilization. As a not-for-profit publisher in a competitive media marketplace, Encounter Books relies on the support of our loyal community of friends to advance our publishing program. We hope you will consider a tax-deductible donation to help sustain this important work. We are deeply grateful for your support.
Encounter for Culture and Education Inc., 900 Broadway, New York, NY 10003, is a nonprofit organization described in Sections 501 (c)(3) and 509(a)(2) of the Internal Revenue Code, which solicits and accepts contributions from a wide range of sources, including public charities and private foundations, corporations, and the general public. Contributions to Encounter Books are tax deductible according to the provisions of the Internal Revenue Code. All gifts in excess of $75 will be acknowledged with a written disclosure statement describing the “quid pro quo” deductibility under section 6115 of the Internal Revenue Code. EIN: 39-1688129.