Welcome Keynote

Lara Love Hardin

Lara Love Hardin is a literary agent, author, prison reform advocate, and president of True Literary. Her memoir, The Many Lives of Mama Love is a 2024 Oprah Book Club pick and a New York Times bestseller. She has an MFA in creative writing and apart from her own book, is also a five-time New York Times bestselling collaborative writer, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Designing Your Life, and 2018 Oprah Book Club pick, The Sun Does Shine, which she co-authored with Anthony Ray Hinton about his 30 years as an innocent man on Alabama’s death row. In 2019, she won a Christopher Award for her work “affirming the highest values of the human spirit,” nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and short-listed for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Lara is also the co-founder of The Gemma Project, a gender-responsive organization serving incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women with integrity and compassion. 

Called, “courageous and inspiring” by Kirkus Reviews, her Oprah Book Club memoir, The Many Lives of Mama Love, recounts her slide from soccer mom to opioid addict to jailhouse shot-caller and her unlikely comeback as a highly successful ghostwriter. After being convicted of 32 felonies, she quickly learns that jail is a class system, finding the rules and bringing love and healing to her fellow inmates as she climbs the social ladder. 

Upon her release, she reinvents herself as a ghostwriter, legally co-opting other people’s identities and getting to meet Oprah, meditate with The Dalai Lama, and have dinner with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But the shadow of her past follows her, and she must learn how to navigate life as a felon and prove to herself that she is more good than bad, and much more. In her book and inspirational talks, Hardin shares her heartbreaking and tender journey from shame to redemption, despite a system that makes it almost impossible for us to move beyond the worst thing we have ever done.