John Green

April 18, 2026

The world is a strange place. People are even stranger. Why do we stand in awe at the sight of a sunset? Why do diseases remain uncured despite astonishing advances in medicine? And why, in an age of touchscreens and voice commands, are we still clinging to the QWERTY keyboard? Bestselling author and perpetually curious human John Green invites us to tug at the loose threads of our beautifully baffling world. Through heartfelt storytelling woven with scientific insights and historical oddities, Green will make us fall deeply in love with the complexities of the human experience, even the ones we deem a bit strange.

Format: Speech with Audience Q&A

John Green is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of “Looking for Alaska”, “An Abundance of Katherines”, “Paper Towns”, “The Fault in Our Stars”, “Turtles All the Way Down”, and “Everything is Tuberculosis”. He is also the coauthor, with David Levithan, of “Will Grayson, Will Grayson”. He was the 2006 recipient of the Michael L. Printz Award, a 2009 Edgar Award winner, and has twice been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Green’s books have been published in more than 55 languages and over 24 million copies are in print.

Green’s latest book, “Everything is Tuberculosis”, was an instant No. 1 New York Times, Washington Post, and Indie bestseller. Regarded as a timely and “highly readable call to action” in a starred Kirkus review, the book is a deeply human social and scientific history in which Green illuminates the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease also to be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year.

Film and television adaptations of his novels have reached wide audiences. The 2014 film version of “The Fault in Our Stars”, starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort, was a critical and box office success. “Paper Towns” followed in 2015, and a Hulu adaptation of “Looking for Alaska” premiered in 2019. Green’s short story was also featured in the 2019 Netflix holiday film “Let It Snow”.

In 2007, John and his brother Hank ceased textual communication and began to talk primarily through videoblogs posted to YouTube. The videos spawned a community of people called “nerdfighters” who fight for intellectualism and to decrease the “overall worldwide level of suck.” Although the Greens have long since resumed textual communication, they continue to upload two videos a week to their YouTube channel, vlogbrothers, where their videos have been viewed more than 800 million times.

In 2011, the Green brothers co-founded the educational platform Crash Course, which offers video series on subjects ranging from history and literature to physics and economics. Crash Course has amassed more than 10 million subscribers and over 1 billion views.

He lives with his family in Indianapolis and is a graduate of Kenyon College.