Writers & Presenters 2024
Lea Carpenter
Winter WoW 2024
Lea Carpenter is a novelist and screenwriter. Her first book, Eleven Days (Knopf 2013) was a history of America’s special operations forces told through the eyes of a young mother. Her second book, red white blue (Knopf 2018), was a thriller about CIA’s China Ops Division in the post nine-eleven era. Her first screenplay, Mile 22, about CIA’s Special Activities Division, was made into a film directed by Peter Berg starring John Malkovich and Mark Wahlberg. Carpenter spent ten years as an editor in literary publishing. She was an editor on the launch of Francis Ford Coppola’s National Magazine Award-winning literary magazine, Zoetrope, then served as Deputy Publisher for The Paris Review. Carpenter graduated summa cum laude Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton with an AB in English Literature and has an MBA with honors from Harvard Business School where she was valedictorian for the Harvard College University-wide commencement ceremony; her speech, “Auden and the Little Things,” addressed the importance of poetry in wartime. A Delaware native, Lea wrote speeches for former Delaware Attorney General, Beau Biden, having spent summers working in the Washington, D.C. office of then-Senator now President Elect Joe Biden.
