Dan Savage, Humanist of the YearDan Savage is being named the 2013 Humanist of the Year for his long history of sex-positive writing, advocacy of separation of church and state, and work for LGBT youth. Savage also speaks out frequently on a variety of other issues including the Iraq War, the War on Drugs, and birth control. His syndicated relationship and sex advice column, Savage Love, is a frank, humorous and open discussion of sexuality. In 2010, Savage and his husband Terry Miller began the It Gets Better Project to help prevent suicide among LGBT youth. He is the author of several books, including How to Be a Person: The Stranger’s Guide to College, Sex, Intoxicants, Tacos, and Life Itself, The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant, and It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living.

Greta Christina, LGBT Humanist PrideGreta Christina is one of the most widely-read and well-respected bloggers in the atheist blogosphere. She is author of Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and writes regularly for AlterNet, Salon, Free Inquiry, and The Humanist. She has been writing about atheism and skepticism for her own cleverly-named "Greta Christina’s Blog" (now part of the Freethought Blogs network) since 2005. She has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind.

American Humanist Association 72nd Annual Conference Featured Awardees and Speakers

Richard Leakey, Isaac Asimov Science AwardRichard Leakey’s prolific career as paleoanthropologist, politician, and environmentalist has spanned five decades. His pioneering work in the Turkana Basin region of northern Kenya has unearthed much of the existing fossil evidence for human evolution.Currently he serves as chairman of the Turkana Basin Institute, a scientific research organization which builds upon the 40-plus years of prehistory research in the area around Lake Turkana. In addition, Leakey is a Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University, Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and former director of both the National Museums of Kenya and the Kenya Wildlife Service.

Richard Dawkins, Special GuestRichard Dawkins has written a string of bestselling books, including The Selfish Gene, which catapulted him to fame, the phenomenal The God Delusion (which catapulted many of us into secular activism), and more recently, The Greatest Show on Earth and The Magic of Reality. Richard Dawkins founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science in the UK and also in the US. The foundation’s mission is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering. We look forward to welcoming Dr. Dawkins back to San Diego.

Carl Coon, Lifetime AchievementAfter retiring from a long career as a diplomat, in 2004 Carl Coon was elected to the AHA Board of Directors, shortly afterwards becoming vice president, a position he held for five years. Coon graduated from Harvard with an A.B. in 1949 before engaging on his diplomatic career that took him mostly to Middle East and South Asia, serving as ambassador to Nepal from 1981-1984. After retiring in 1985 he began to write based on his anthropological and evolutionary psychological views about the evolution of human society. His writings include two books: Culture Wars and the Global Village and One Planet, One People, Beyond “Us versus Them.” Coon has been an advocate of the idea that the whole world must now be viewed as “us” to cope with current global challenges.

Katha Pollitt, Humanist HeroineKatha is a feminist poet, writer and essayist focusing her wit on political and social issues, including abortion rights, racism, welfare reform, feminism, and poverty. Her bimonthly column, “Subject to Debate,” appears in The Nation magazine, where she began contributing in 1980. Her column won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary in 2003. Her 1992 essay on the culture wars, “Why We Read: Canon to the Right of Me…” won the National Magazine Award for essays and criticism, and she won a Whiting Foundation Writing Award the same year. In 1993 her essay “Why Do We Romanticize the Fetus?” won the Maggie Award from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She has written two books of poetry, Antarctic Traveller, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Mind-Body Problem. Her work has been included in multiple anthologies and she has been a guest on numerous national TV and radio programs.

Sean Carroll, Keynote SpeakerTitle of Presentation: Purpose and the Universe"The idea of a “purpose” or “reason why” has a strong hold on the human imagination, and has a special resonance when we think about the universe itself. However, modern science has gradually eroded the role of purpose in our best understanding of nature. This represents an important step forward in human understanding, as we can see how apparently purposeful features of reality arise through undirected laws of nature. But it represents a challenge for questions of morality and meaning. I will argue that purposes can be created or emergent even when they are not fundamental, and that this perspective has important consequences for how we live our lives."

Dr. Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech in Pasadena, CA doing research on theoretical aspects of cosmology, field theory, and gravitation. He is especially interested in inflation, the arrow of time, and what happened at or before the Big Bang. He’s done work on dark matter and dark energy, modified gravity, topological defects, extra dimensions, and violations of fundamental symmetries. His latest book is The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Higgs Boson Leads us to the Edge of a New World. It’s about the Large Hadron Collider, the search for the Higgs Boson, and the people who made it happen.As an author, he has also written From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time and a graduate textbook, Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity. He has recorded lectures for the Teaching Company on Dark Matter and Dark Energy and the Mysteries of Time. He has maintained a popular blog since 2004.