Jill Lepore, a prize-winning historian, is the author of the book New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery and Conspiracy in Eighteenth Century Manhattan, an early history of "a city that slavery built," and the story of a rarely recounted plot by black slaves to burn colonial New York City to the ground in 1741.

Lepore received the Bancroft Prize and the Phi Beta Kappa Society's Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (1999), an insightful account of a bloody and little-studied war that erupted in 1675 between the Wampanoag Indians and the English colonial settlers of what is now Massachusetts. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Gordon Wood called it, "A product [of] imaginative and wide-ranging scholarship… a fascinating book." Writing in the Boston Globe, Barry O'Connell praised Lepore for her narrative style saying, "Her achievement in this book puts her in the company of our best contemporary prose stylists. It takes only a few sentences to be caught up."

Lepore is also the author of A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (2002), a study of the role of language in forging early American identity. She is also the editor of Encounters in the New World: a History in Documents (1998), a collection of primary sources that illustrate early encounters between Native Americans and European newcomers.

A professor of history at Harvard University, Lepore is cofounder and coeditor of the Web magazine Common-place and a contributor to The New Yorker. She is currently working on a book about the Boston Massacre.

Jill Lepore will appear on Saturday, Oct. 28, 3:30 pm in the Salt Lake City Main Library, Auditorium.