Harker Speaker Series

Clarence B. Jones served as legal counsel, strategic advisor, and draft speechwriter to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from 1960 until King’s assassination in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968. Vanity Fair called him the man who kept King’s secrets; Jones was privy to King’s decision-making processes and political struggles. He is credited with writing the first seven paragraphs of the iconic I Have A Dream speech. He currently serves as the chairman of the Spill the Honey Foundation, an organization dedicated to Black-Jewish relations. He also founded the Dr. Clarence B. Jones Institute for Social Advocacy and serves as the founding director emeritus of the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco.

Distinguished professor, gifted writer, and prominent media personality Michael Eric Dyson, Ph.D., will be joined by professional artists and Harker student performing arts ensembles in a fascinating evening of reflection on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Join an expert distinguished panel of scholars and Charlene Nijmeh, chairwoman of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe, as they discuss the tribe’s struggle for federal recognition, repatriation of ancestral remains, gentrification, and education opportunities for tribe members.

The Harker Speaker Series is proud to present renowned author Julie Lythcott-Haims, who will discuss her book, “How to Raise an Adult.” Learn more about Julie Lythcott-Haims.

Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer and experimental filmmaker based out of the East Bay. She works with maps, seeds, food, environmental histories, speculative fiction, field recordings and hand-drawn animation. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally, including at the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, Mass.), the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Sa Sa Art Projects (Phnom Penh), Framer Framed (Amsterdam) and Salt Beyoğlu (Istanbul). She has received fellowships and awards from the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and the Puffin Foundation, among other organizations, and was a 2023 YBCA 100 awardee. Zheng’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Kadist Foundation and the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University, and has received press from Artforum, MUBI Notebook, Hyperallergic, The San Francisco Examiner, and KQED Arts. In 2021 she published a chapter in the Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, and her essays have appeared in The Back Room at Small Press Traffic, SFMOMA’s Open Space and Errant Journal.

Karimi will be featured in a conversation at the Rothschild Performing Arts Center with 6-12 visual arts chair Josh Martinez. This event will include an audience Q&A session and a 5 p.m. reception with food and drink.

Karimi’s work can be found in both private and public collections at Stanford University, the University of California, San Francisco and the University of California, Davis. Internationally, she has had digital works and prints exhibited in Iran, Algeria, Germany, Croatia, Mexico and the UK. She has also been featured by KQED Arts and Culture twice, in 2020 and 2022, and by the KQED forum in 2023.

David Amram’s almost 70-year-long career, still going strong, reads like a who’s who of music history, including collaborations with Jack Kerouac, Leonard Bernstein, Thelonious Monk, Johnny Depp, Hunter S. Thompson, Dizzy Gillespie, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Betty Carter, Arlo Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Tito Puente and more. Amram is equally at home in the classical and film genres, working with many symphony orchestras and scoring the films “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Splendor in the Grass.” This treasure of American music was interviewed on stage by historian Charles Shuttleworth and sat in with and conducted Harker instrumental ensembles. Amram’s sharp wit, incredible stories and unique outlook on today’s music industry provided an entertaining evening like no other.

Chef Toshio Tanahashi has been featured in Vogue Nippon, The New York Times and The Japan Times and has written two books on Shojin cuisine.

"Chinatown Rising": A Film Screening and Discussion with Filmmakers Harry Chuck and Josh Chuck

Against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-1960s, a young San Francisco Chinatown resident armed with a 16mm camera and leftover film scraps from a local TV station, turned his lens onto his community. Totaling more than 20,000 feet of film (10 hours), Harry Chuck’s exquisite unreleased footage has captured a divided community’s struggles for self-determination. Chinatown Rising is a documentary film about the Asian American Movement from the perspective of the young residents on the front lines of their historic neighborhood in transition. Through publicly challenging the conservative views of their elders, their demonstrations and protests of the 1960s-1980s rattled the once quiet streets during the community’s shift in power. Forty-five years later, in intimate interviews these activists recall their roles and experiences in response to the need for social change.

Pioneering entrepreneur and investor Magdalena Yeşil came to the United States in 1976 with two suitcases and $43, blind to the challenges she would face as a woman and immigrant in Silicon Valley. Today, she is best known as the first investor and a founding board member of Salesforce, the now-multibillion dollar company that ushered in the era of cloud-based computing. Yeşil is a former general partner at U.S. Venture Partners, where she oversaw investments in more than 30 early-stage companies and served on the boards of many. A technology pioneer, Yeşil founded three of the first companies dedicated to commercializing internet access, e-commerce infrastructure and electronic payments. Yeşil was interviewed on stage by a Harker business & entrepreneurship student.

The Harker Speaker Series proudly presented education activist Kakenya Ntaiya, whose childhood dream of attending college led her to an inspiring life of service and advocacy.