Award-winning journalist and author Nancy Jo Sales is the featured keynote speaker at The Woodstock Writers Festival this year. Her latest book is American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers. She will be in conversation with Carla Goldstein, Omega Institute’s chief external affairs officer and co-founder of the Omega Women’s Leadership Center.
The dominant force in the lives of girls coming of age in America today is social media and Sales captures what it feels like to be a girl in America today. She crisscrossed the country, speaking to more than two hundred girls, ages thirteen to nineteen, and documenting a massive change in the way girls are growing up, a phenomenon that transcends race, geography, and household income.
American Girls provides a disturbing portrait of the end of childhood as we know it and of the inexorable and ubiquitous experience of a new kind of adolescence—one dominated by new social and sexual norms, where a girl’s first crushes and experiences of longing and romance occur in an accelerated electronic environment.
