Park City Institute to Welcome Author and TED Speaker Lidia Yuknavitch

Weaving stories about the ways in which being a misfit can be an unexpected gift, author Lidia Yuknavich will appear on the Eccles Center Main Stage, presented by the Park City Institute, Saturday March 4, 2017. The author of nine books, her next novel, The Book of Joan, will be published by Harper on April 18th.

"Lidia Yuknavich is an engaging speaker with an even more compelling story," says PCI Executive Director Teri Orr. "Her TED Talk last year, which addressed the beauty of the misfit in all of us, received a standing ovation, and has since reached well over 1 million views."

A writer, mother and teacher, whose favorite students are, of course, misftis, Yuknavich has found a way to turn the many hardships of her life into a thread shared with others. "Stories are what keep us humanly connected," says Lidia Yuknavich. "We all have love and family and things we care about that we can tell stories about."

Yuknavich has spent her life as an outsider. Growing up in an unstable, abusive home she found some salvation in swimming until her competitive career ended due to a combination of drug and alcohol abuse and bad luck. Lidia was set to compete for a spot on the US Olympic Swim team just as the boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow was announced. She endured two failed marriages, a stint or two in jail and rehab, flunking out of college and losing a child. She received her big break as a writer at the age of 30, and focused her TED Talk on the way her life experience as an outsider left her unable to recognize her rightful place on the inside, when success knocked at her door.

Her talent for exploring the meaning of otherness, in a variety of genres and moods, has led her to a truth that is undeniable: The thing that you may think separates you from success, is the thing that may ultimately create it.

Her national bestselling novel The Small Backs of Children was the winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award's Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader's Choice Award. The Misfit's Manifesto, a fall 2017 book inspired by her TED Talk, "The Beauty of Being A Misfit," is forthcoming. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA Award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader's Choice. She also wrote the novel Dora: A Headcase, three books of short fictions - Her Other Mouths, Liberty's Excess, and Real TO Reel, and a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence.

Watch Lidia's TED Talk here!

Tickets to Lidia Yuknavich start at $29, with student tickets available, through the generosity of donors to the Park City Institute, for $5. For this performance, parents who purchase a full-price ticket in the Amethyst section can add a $5 student ticket in the same section.

Park City Institute is a non-profit organization, dedicated to bringing world-class performances and new ideas to the community. Since 1998, PCI has presented internationally renowned and cutting edge musicians, actors, authors, comedians, dancers, speakers and film at The George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts (a joint-use facility with the Park City School District). The organization will embark on its 14th season of headliner concerts at Deer Valley Resort next summer. PCI is dedicated to introducing young people to the arts through free student outreach workshops, shows and demonstrations. Since 2010, PCI has offered a free after-school literacy program to students in grades one through 12 at the thinky and fun retail-fronted tutoring hub, the Mega-Genius Supply Store and IQ HQ (located at 435 Swede Alley in Old Town). The organization continues to illuminate with Curiosities evenings and the Saints and Sinners Ball.

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