Author Betty Shamieh delivered the morning keynote address at Claiming Williams Day on Feb. 5, themed “Transforming Futures Through Dialogue,” while activist and professor Dr. Loretta Ross headlined the evening event.  

Shamieh implores students to listen to a diversity of voices

Shamieh, the author of this year’s Williams Reads book “Too Soon,” delivered the morning keynote address before engaging with students during a Q&A session. In a conversation with Assistant Professor of Theatre Samer Al-Saber, Shamieh discussed identity, her experience as a Palestinian American woman in the arts, and her transition from two decades of playwriting to publishing her novel “Too Soon.”

During her speech, Shamieh asked the audience to be mindful of the preconceived notions they carry when they pick up a novel or encounter a new person. “When you walk into a room, or in the case of an artist, present yourself to an audience… you are either rewriting or confirming preexisting ideas of what people of your background, race, class, or gender are like.” 

Shamieh urged audience members to be open to listening to a diverse set of voices, even those that they might not be accustomed to hearing. “Reading a book by a Palestinian American woman may not have been your first choice,” she said during her address.

Open-mindedness was at the core of Shamieh’s talk. “What I was trying to convey in my keynote is that it’s very important to seek stories [that are] different from yours, not as a favor or an act of social justice, but as an act of trying to find wisdom,” Shamieh said in an interview with the Record.

Shamieh grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area before graduating from Harvard and then the school of drama at Yale. Afterwards, she pursued playwriting professionally in New York City. During her 20-year career as a playwright, she wrote more than a dozen off-Broadway plays, including “Malvolio,” a sequel to Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” 

Shamieh said that regardless of the work she creates, her identity is always linked to her art. “Being a Palestinian American, even if I’m writing about Shakespeare, [my work] will be seen as political,” she said partway through the address.

In November 2025, when Shamieh was announced as a Claiming Williams speaker, she spoke about her novel “Too Soon” in an interview with the Record. The book, while tackling topics such as nationalism, sovereignty, and war, is also humorous and romantic. She described her novel as a “Palestinian American ‘Sex and the City,’” in an interview with NPR. She feels that fiction of this kind, which weaves together levity and serious themes, captures the complexity of the world. “I think dramedies or tragic comedies are more akin to real life than anything else,” Shamieh told the Record. 

Humor is also an important element of Shamieh’s work because she sees it as a potential tool for anti-violence. “Something in me believed, if I made enough people laugh, it makes it a little harder to keep killing people like me,” she said.

Ross champions activism and compassionate disagreement 

Dr. Loretta Ross, a human rights activist, feminist scholar, and Smith College professor of the study of women and gender, delivered the evening keynote address. 

Ross began her address by describing her early life in activism and human rights work, speaking frankly about her experiences to the audience. “I got tear gassed at my first demonstration when I was 16 years old, a first-year student at Howard University,” Ross said.

Since then, Ross’s career has included working in the nation’s first rape crisis center in Washington D.C., monitoring hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, and assisting in developing strategies for “reproductive justice,” a term that she and other activists coined. 

Ross’ most recent work has focused on writing and teaching on the subject of “call out” culture. “Calling out is publicly shaming people for something you think they’ve done wrong,” Ross said during her address. 

Ross believes that the practice has become more common in recent years, and that it is detrimental to activism. “Activism is all about having conversations with people who aren’t necessarily your friends,” she said. “Handling radical politics with radical love.”

Ross contrasted calling out with what she described as the practice of “calling in.” She explained that this approach treats others with empathy and tries to understand, rather than shame them. “Calling in is giving people a chance to grow without calling them out for the fact that they haven’t already grown,” she said during her talk. 

Later in her speech, Ross applied her philosophy of “calling-in” to the contemporary debate around Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “I’m asking my heart, how can I hold accountable that institution called ICE, while not losing sight of the humanity of the people in the uniform,” she said. “I want to hate the puppeteers, not the puppets, who have very real pain.” 

Ross’ address captivated much of the audience — ending in a standing ovation. Emery Dunbar ’26 attended the talk and said that they found Ross’s reflections deeply engaging. “Seeing her in Chapin having this very normal conversation that was also quite profound was really cool,” Dunbar told the Record. “You don’t see a lot of that in academia.”

As a women’s, gender, and sexuality studies major, Dunbar was familiar with Ross’ work, but didn’t make the connection until they attended the speech. “Her theories of reproductive justice have been super central to what I’ve done at Williams,” Dunbar said. “So it was really cool to put a face to the name and see how normal a person she was.”