Keith Sawyer, Morgan Distinguished Professor in Educational Innovations at UNC-CH, will be at Bull’s Head Bookshop on Tuesday, September 22nd at 3:30pm to share from his book Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity.

“No matter what kind of creativity I studied, the process was the same. Creativity did not descend like a bolt of lightning that lit up the world in a single brilliant flash. It came in tiny steps, bits of insight, and incremental changes. Zigs and zags. When people followed those zigs and zags, ideas and revelations started flowing.” (from the Introduction)

Can you be more creative? Absolutely, and Zig Zag shows you how. Dr. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist, professor, jazz pianist, and former video game designer, is one of the world’s leading experts on creativity. To develop his accessible eight-step creativity program, Sawyer explored the lives of exceptional creators, tapped into the back stories of world-changing innovations, and analyzed laboratory experiments that delved deeply into the everyday creativity that all of us share. He discovered many surprising secrets of highly creative people—how they question assumptions when presented with new problems, how they get beyond creative blocks, and above all, how they negotiate the many twists and turns along the way.

“Zig Zag is the most fun and most useful creativity book I have ever read. Keith Sawyer’s gem sweeps you up with a host of great stories, quizzes, and exercises and teaches you one way after the other to be more creative.” –Robert I. Sutton, professor of Management Science, Stanford University

Jossey-Bass: $26.95 (hardcover)
Facebook Event Page – https://www.facebook.com/events/1032574813420304/

Dr. R. Keith Sawyer, a professor of education at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, studies creativity, learning, and collaboration. After receiving his computer science degree from MIT in 1982, he began his career with a two-year stint designing videogames for Atari. His titles included Food Fight, Neon, and Magician. From 1984 to 1990, he was a principal at Kenan Systems Corporation, where he worked as a management consultant on innovation technologies. His clients included Citicorp, AT&T, and U.S. West. In 1990, Dr. Sawyer began his doctoral studies in psychology, where he studied creativity with Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of best selling books such as Flow and Creativity). Since receiving his Ph.D. in 1994, he has dedicated his career to research on creativity, collaboration, and learning. He has been a jazz pianist for over 30 years, and spent several years playing piano with Chicago improv theater groups.

Dr. Sawyer has published fourteen books and over 80 scientific articles. His research has been featured on CNN, Fox News, TIME, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR and other media. A popular speaker, he lectures to corporations, associations, and universities around the world on creativity and innovation.

Bull’s Head Bookshop is located in UNC Student Stores on the campus of UNC-CH. All events at Bull’s Head are free and open to the public. Call 919-962-5060 for more details.