John Green took the stage as a keynote speaker for ETSU’s 2026 Festival of Ideas Feb. 26 at a packed Martin Center for the Arts.

Green is a well-accomplished author, advocate, and educator. He has several best selling novels, some of which include: “The Fault in Our Stars”, “Turtles All the Way Down”, “Everything is Tuberculosis”, “Looking for Alaska”, and this year’s ETSU common read pick, “The Anthropocene Reviewed”. Alongside his brother, Hank Green, he is also well known for co-founding “Crash Course”, a YouTube series that offers free education on a range of subjects. Their media studio, Complexly, also features “SciShow”, a project geared toward spreading accurate news within the field of science.

“I met a few authors when I was in college and it meant a lot to me. It helped humanize the role of (a) writer and also helped me glimpse that writing might be possible for me too,” says Green. “… I benefit a lot from meeting young people because I learn from them and I learn about their values and their priorities in ways that are helpful to me. … What I really hope people take away from tonight is a feeling of hope … I still think hope is the correct response to the human condition and so I always try to communicate a hopeful message if I can.”

John Green sat down for a conversation with the East Tennessean prior to Thursday’s event. (Savanna Shaw/East Tennessean)

The East Tennessean had the privilege of sitting down with Green to discuss both his career and perspective of the ever-changing world around us. This compliments the themes of “The Anthropocene Reviewed”,  a book that serves as a collection of miniature essays describing the minor details of life that Green has felt a connection to, ranking them on a five-star scale.

“Nonfiction can respond to a moment in a literal way,” says Green in reference to his relationship with the genre, “which is kind of nice when you are in a difficult moment, and I have been. I think my country has been for the last several years, and so I’ve felt more called to respond to it through a nonfictional lens. The other nice thing about nonfiction is that you can’t make things up, which is limiting and frustrating sometimes for a fiction writer. But I find that if you pay enough attention, the truth always suffices … that moment where things click together feels so good that I’m happy to chase it for as long as I need to.”

Discussing the growing digital age and its affect on education, Green said, “I think digital media and education have a very complicated relationship. In some ways, there’s never been more access to information … but at the same time, finding reliable information has never been harder. And so, Hank and I and everyone who works in Complexly sees an opportunity to help make reliable information more accessible, not just information.”

In Green’s presentations, he made remarks on the value of attention and his newfound consciousness of where he places his attention. He also made note that he finds inspiration from many of the people in his life such as his parents and brother, as well as every writer he knows. He noted, “Everyone who takes that leap and tries to find a way to bring form and structure and language to these difficult concepts that we all try to write about.”

In an interview with Fortune, Green previously discussed the term “empathy gap” when it comes to a decreased interest in reading among younger generations. When asked by the East Tennessean to elaborate on this stance, Green said, “One thing fiction does really well is help us empathize, help us see the world from other people’s perspectives, help us imagine people in their complexity, and that’s something I really value about story. I worry that the more distance we can create between ourselves and other people, the easier it is to dehumanize them, the easier it is to treat people as if they’re not fully worthy of our respect, and that really scares me. And whatever we can do to close those empathy gaps is good news.”

“I think story is only one way … for instance, in ‘Everything is Tuberculosis’, I wanted to tell these statistical stories about the breadth of this disease that has killed a hundred million people since it became curable, but I also wanted to tell one person’s story because when you tell one person’s story, it just moves us as humans differently than when you talk about statistics,” Green continued.

Discussing how the concept of writing what you know has evolved for him from college years to later adulthood, Green said, “The funny thing is, when I was in college, I didn’t write about college. I should have been writing about college. I should have been writing about what I knew. I look back at that work and I’m like, ‘why didn’t you write more about college? I would have loved to be able to learn from you in my current guise as a 48-year old’…We all write from within our own experience. We all write, you know, there’s no bird sitting on your shoulder, whispering the story into your ear. You’re writing from within yourself, and if you know that, you’re going to be a much stronger writer than if you don’t know that … I think for me, in some ways my last two books have been my attempt to write of myself, to not try to inhabit someone else, but to just accept that, to try to find my own voice for myself …”

Green is working on a new book, one that he confirmed is for an adult audience within a similar age range to most of those in attendance for Festival of Ideas.

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