Monday, September 28, 2026

5:30 PM - 8:00 PM

Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Shelby Van Pelt (PPE ’02) is a bestselling author and Emmy-nominated producer. Her debut novel, Remarkably Bright Creatures, has sold five million copies worldwide and been translated into over forty languages. Collectively, it’s spent over two years on New York Times bestseller lists. In May 2026, Netflix released a film adaptation, executive produced by Van Pelt and starring Sally Field; it topped streaming charts for weeks. Prior to her creative career, Van Pelt worked in Litigation Consulting, a field which she found interesting mostly for its dramatic narratives and the untold stories often unearthed by searching boxes of documents. As a full-time fiction writer, she now splits her time between the Chicago suburbs and northwest Montana.