Suleika Jaouad &Jon Batiste

Turning fear into curiosity and wonder

Author Suleika Jaouad has always kept a journal. She’s used it to mark life’s biggest occasions and to buoy her through illness, heartbreak, and the deepest uncertainty. Writing can be a way of asking hard questions, engaging with discomfort, uncovering your truest self, and dreaming big. It can help us tap into the creativity we all possess. And that creativity can be transformative.

Inspired by these ideas, she collaborated with musician Jon Batiste to develop an evening of storytelling, music, and creativity. Like a literary event evolved into something new. Batiste sings and plays piano and melodica. He performs a live piano score while Jaouad narrates stories of facing and overcoming fear, inspired by themes and experiences she explores in her new nonfiction work, The Book of Alchemy. And they engage in thoughtful, playful conversation about the place of creativity in their lives. What it has meant to them, and done for them. And what it can do for all of us. 

Batiste and Jaouad debuted their collaboration with a series of performances in Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, in partnership with Random House. 

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Suleika Jaouad is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, author, artist, and advocate. She documented her odyssey of illness, healing, and self-discovery in the instant New York Times–bestselling memoir Between Two Kingdoms, which has been translated into over twenty languages. In her second bestselling book, The Book of Alchemy, she meditates on the central questions of life and distills how a creative practice can help us transmute the seemingly commonplace or difficult parts of living into something meaningful, useful, and even beautiful.

 

Jon Batiste is a five-time Grammy Award-winning and Academy Award-winning singer, songwriter, and composer. Batiste released his ninth studio album, Big Money, in August 2025 via Verve Records/Interscope. That follows Beethoven Blues (Batiste Piano Series, Vol. 1), release November 2024, and World Music Radio, released August 2023. Featuring collaborators including Jon Bellion, Lana Del Rey, Lil’ Wayne, and more, World Music Radio received positive reviews from critics who praised the project for its universal message and genre-defying sound. The album received a total of five Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year. Batiste’s innovative score is featured in Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, which was released in theaters in October 2024. He was the subject of Matthew Heineman’s moving 2023 documentary American Symphony, released on Netflix in partnership with Higher Ground. Batiste and Grammy winner Dan Wilson penned the emotional song “It Never Went Away” for the film, which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song and two Grammy nominations. In 2021, Batiste released We Are, which was nominated for 11 Grammy Awards across seven different categories, a first in Grammy history. He went on to win five Grammy Awards that evening, including Album of the Year. In 2018, he received a Grammy nomination for Best American Roots, and in 2020, he received two Grammy nods for the albums: Chronology of a Dream: Live at the Village Vanguard and Meditations (with Cory Wong). Batiste also composed and performed music for the Disney/Pixar film Soul, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Original Score alongside fellow composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Soul also earned Batiste a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, an NAACP Image Award, and a Critic’s Choice Award. From 2015 until 2022, Batiste served as the bandleader and musical director of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS.

 

Duettist inspires and supports creative collaborations between pairs of people who do different things. It was launched in 2025 in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators.

 

PERCEPTION BOX ^TM QUESTIONS FROM UNLIKELY COLLABORATORS

1. What scares you? Why?
2. How does the thought of your own mortality influence your daily decisions and long-term goals?
3. What adverse experience in your career helped you grow, and in what way?
4. What need inside yourself have you been neglecting? When did you start neglecting it and why?
5. What is love? How do you show love? What makes you feel loved?
6. How has your understanding of love and relationships evolved over your lifetime?

To learn more about Unlikely Collaborators and Perception Box please visit unlikelycollaborators.com.