Tue, October 7, 2025 6:00 P.M. Add to your calendar
Parkway Central Library
Cost: Pay what you wish

The Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation presents a community conversation with Natalie Nixon.

With Nina Johnson

MOVE. THINK. REST. by Natalie Nixon is both a call to action and an invitation to pause. This Community Conversation departs from the traditional Author Event Series format by using a dynamic fishbowl discussion, where participants move in and out of the circle to create a living, breathing dialogue. Anchored by Nixon’s insights on creativity, rest, and reimagining the pace of our lives, the program becomes less of a lecture and more of a shared exploration for neighbors, colleagues, and friends to exchange stories, challenge assumptions, and imagine new rhythms.

Natalie Nixon, known as the creativity whisperer, helps corporate leaders catalyze creativity's ROI for more inspired business results. In Move. Think. Rest. she reveals how the best organizations allow the personal and the professional to converge at strategic moments, which often come when we step away from our desks and phones. According to Nixon, it is this MTR framework (pronounced "motor")--which allows us to make time for strategic thinking, prevent burnout, build leadership resilience and redefine performance for the Imagination Era.

Nixon's MTR framework (Movement, Thought, and Rest) will change the way you work. And it will do so without demanding that you adhere to a rigid protocol or life-hack the liveliness out of your working hours. When you allow yourself to pause, unabashedly pay attention to your emotions, and allow your intuition to guide you, then you achieve fluency, ease, and even greater productivity. Move. Think. Rest. will help you shift the ways you work and live.

Natalie Nixon, Ph.D. helps corporate leaders achieve transformative business results by applying wonder and rigor to their work. In 2021, her firm, Figure 8 Thinking, was named one of the top 20 women-led innovation firms by Core 77. As a popular and increasingly in-demand keynote speaker, Natalie's accessible advice on creativity, and the future of work and innovation has landed her on the "Top 50 Keynote Speakers In The World" list for 2022 by Real Leaders.

Nina Johnson is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology and Black Studies at Swarthmore College. Consistent with her training in Urban Studies, Africana Studies, and Culture and Communication, her research interests lie in the areas of inequality, politics, race, space, class, culture, stratification and mobility. Her forthcoming book revisits the classic works of W.E.B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier and considers meaning making processes among the black elite, its relationship to the larger Black population, and its role in any projects of collective racial advancement. She wholeheartedly endorses every word of James Baldwin but finds the following particularly prescient in shaping and informing her work, “The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here.”

Please make a donation when you register for this event to ensure that this series continues to inspire Philadelphians.

Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night!