We’re thrilled to announce that bestselling author and advocate David Sheff will be the featured speaker for the 16th Annual Circle of Support Luncheon.
David Sheff is the author of Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction and Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy. Clean, a follow-up to Sheff’s New York Times #1 bestseller Beautiful Boy, is the result of the years he spent investigating the disease of addiction and America’s drug problem, which he sees as the greatest public health challenge of our time.
In 2009, Sheff was named to the Time 100, Time Magazine’s list of the World’s Most Influential People. The Partnership for Drug-Free Kids honored him with a Special Tribute Award “in recognition of his voice and leadership for families who are struggling with addiction.” He was also awarded the 2013 College of Problems on Drug Dependence (CPDD) Media Award, 2017 American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) Media Award, and 2017 American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) Media Award “to recognize his compelling portrayal of addiction and its personal effects on families and society as a whole.”
Beautiful Boy, published in 2008, was based on his article, “My Addicted Son,” which appeared in the New York Times Magazine. The article won a special award from the American Psychological Association for “outstanding contribution to the understanding of addiction.” Beautiful Boy was made into a film, released in October 2018, directed by Felix Van Groeningen and starring Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet. Sheff also contributed to HBO’s Addiction: Why Can’t They Just Stop. HIGH: Everything You Want To Know About Drugs, a book for young adults written with Nic Sheff, published in January 2019. He is currently working on his next book, The Buddhist on Death Row: Finding Light in the Darkest Place.
David is on the advisory boards of the The Jed and Clinton Health Matters Campus Program “designed to help colleges and universities promote emotional well-being and mental health programming, reduce substance abuse and prevent suicide among their students,” and the International Bipolar Foundation.
Along with the New York Times Magazine, Sheff has also written for such publications as the New York Times, Wired, Rolling Stone, Outside, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. He has conducted seminal interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, nuclear physicist Ted Taylor, Congressman Barney Frank, Steve Jobs, Tom Hanks, Betty Friedan, Keith Haring, Jack Nicholson, Carl Sagan, Salman Rushdie, Fareed Zakaria, and others. He also wrote an award-winning documentary about John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and a radio special about Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, both for National Public Radio.
He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. David lives with his family in Northern California.
The Circle of Support Luncheon will be held on April 26, 2019. Find out more about the event here.
