KATIE BOOTH, writer, ghostwriter, and editor.

"The Invention of Miracles:  Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness."

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Katie Booth is a writer, ghostwriter, and editor whose work has appeared in The Believer, Harper's Magazine, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and elsewhere, and has been recognized by Longform, Longreads, and Best American Essays. She has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Library of Congress. Her first book, The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2021. It was a New York Times editors’ choice, a finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, a finalist for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, and runner-up for the Mark Lynton History Prize from the Columbia School of Journalism and the Neiman Foundation of Harvard. She grew up in a mixed hearing/ deaf family.

Invention of Miracles is a story of brilliance and a reminder of the ethical responsibilities of great minds. Taking place in the Victorian Age and an era of expansive innovation and invention, Booth tells parallel stories - the first details the advent of one of the world’s most famous inventions, the telephone; while the second powerfully reveals the many unintended and dire consequences that were perpetrated during this time by its inventor, Alexander Graham Bell.

Booth’s biographical account of Alexander Graham Bell depicts a passionate and brilliant man who gained international fame racing to invent the telephone while he was also fixated on curing deafness by teaching the deaf to speak. Each of his pursuits originated from a place of love -- for his mother and his wife each of whom lived with non-congenital deafness, and for his father who was an internationally renowned elocutionist. Despite his good intentions, Bell had a profound and long-lasting negative impact on the language development and education of the world’s deaf community in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

As the story unfolds, Booth demonstrates that good intentions can easily be corrupted by the absence and the denial of scientific data.

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The Thornburgh Family Lecture Series on Disability Law and Policy is sponsored by the Thornburgh Forum for Law and Public Policy. The series was created through the generosity of Dick and Ginny Thornburgh as 2003 recipients of the $50,000 Henry B. Betts Award. The fund has been supplemented by grants from the Office of the Chancellor and assistance from the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences,  the School of Law, the Office of Disability Resources and Services, and the David C. Frederick Honors College.