South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg in conversation with Frank Bruni

A mayor’s inspirational story of a Midwest city that has become nothing less than a blueprint for the future of American renewal.

Once described by The Washington Post as “the most interesting mayor you’ve never heard of,” Pete Buttigieg, the thirty-six-year-old Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has improbably emerged as one of the nation’s most visionary politicians. First elected in 2011, Buttigieg left a successful business career to move back to his hometown, previously tagged by Newsweek as a “dying city,” because the industrial Midwest beckoned as a challenge to the McKinsey-trained Harvard graduate. Whether meeting with city residents on middle-school basketball courts, reclaiming abandoned houses, confronting gun violence, or attracting high-tech industry, Buttigieg has transformed South Bend into a shining model of urban reinvention.

While Washington reels with scandal, Shortest Way Home interweaves two once-unthinkable success stories: that of an Afghanistan veteran who came out and found love and acceptance, all while in office, and that of a Rust Belt city so thoroughly transformed that it shatters the way we view America’s so-called flyover country. The mayor will be in conversation with Frank Bruni to discuss his new book, Shortest Way Home. Shortest Way Home will be on sale courtesty Greenlight Books, and the mayor will sign copies.

Pete Buttigieg, born in Indiana in 1982, is currently serving his second term as mayor of South Bend. A dynamic national lecturer and TEDx speaker, as well as a Rhodes Scholar and Navy veteran, Buttigieg was educated at Harvard and Oxford. He and his husband, Chasten Glezman, live in South Bend, Indiana.

Frank Bruni has been an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times since June 2011. His previous jobs at The New York Times include writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine (2009-2011), chief restaurant critic (2004-2009) and Rome bureau chief (2002-2004). A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, he is the author of three bestselling books: Ambling into History, Born Round, and Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be. He lives in Manhattan.