“What the Fact: How to Tell Truth from Lies”: Mark Kurlansky & Seema Yasmin, M.D.

Jill Tracey has been a member of the Hot 105 FM radio family for more than a decade and has the distinction of being one of South Florida’s most popular personalities. A native of Detroit, she first burst onto the media scene as a South Beach gossip columnist, which led to a career in radio and TV that has taken her to Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, and now back to Miami. She’s currently on air as the Sunday night host of Hot Talk with Jill Tracey. Tracey will be appearing at Miami Book Fair 2002 to moderate a conversation with Seema Yasmin, author of What the Fact?: Finding the Truth in All the Noise (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers) and Mark Kurlansky, author of Big Lies: From Socrates to Social Media (Tilbury House Publishers).

A New York Times bestselling and James Beard Award-winning author, Mark Kurlansky is a recipient of a Bon Appétit American Food and Entertaining Award for Food Writer of the Year, and a Glenfiddich Food and Drink Award for food book of the year. He is presenting two very different titles at Miami Book Fair 2022. In The Importance of Not Being Ernest: My Life with the Uninvited Hemingway (Books & Books), Kurlansky focuses on the sprawling life and work of Ernest Hemingway while drawing parallels to his own. In this memoir-cum-biography, he offers an in-depth analysis of the places and people in Hemingway’s life. In Big Lies: From Socrates to Social Media (Tilbury House Publishers), Kurlansky shifts his attention to young readers with a book that alights on the great injustices of the Middle Ages, the big lies of Stalin and Hitler and their terrible consequences, and the reckless lies of contemporary demagogues, which are amplified through social media. The modern age has provided ever-more-effective ways of spreading lies, but it has also given us the scientific method, which is the most effective tool for finding what is true.

Seema Yasmin, M.D., is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Emmy Award-winning journalist, medical doctor, professor, poet, and author. She is the author of five books, including Muslim Women Are Everything and Viral BS: Medical Myths and Why We Fall for Them. Yasmin trained in medicine at the University of Cambridge and in journalism at the University of Toronto. She is presenting two new works at Miami Book Fair 2022. In What the Fact?: Finding the Truth in All the Noise (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers) the author addresses the importance of media literacy, fact-based reporting, and the ability to discern truth from lies. What is a fact? What are reliable sources? What is fake news? Conspiracy theories and online hoaxes have increasingly become a part of our national discourse – and it has never been more vital to develop the discernment necessary to tell fact from fiction. In her poetry collection If God is a Virus (Haymarket Books), Yasmin draws on original reporting from West Africa and the United States, as well as her experiences as a doctor and journalist. It charts the course of the largest and deadliest Ebola epidemic in history, telling the stories of survivors, outbreak responders, and journalists. Documentary poems explore which human lives are valued, how editorial decisions are weighed, what role the aid industrial complex plays in crises, and how medical myths and rumors can travel faster than microbes. These poems also give voice to the virus itself, and shed light on viruses in general – 8% of the human genome is inherited from viruses, and the human placenta would not exist without a gene descended from one.