Shakopee High School graduate Antonia Felix is adding to her list of 20 published books with a new biography about U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a possible presidential contender in 2020.
Felix, known in high school as Toni Berg, was born in Minneapolis but moved to Shakopee as a young girl and graduated in 1976. In high school, she was involved with the debate team, speech contests and played in the band. Now she is a New York Times bestselling author who has written about powerful women ranging from former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former first lady Laura Bush to former first lady Michelle Obama and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer.
Felix’s latest work, “Elizabeth Warren: Her Fight. Her Work. Her Life,” was released Aug. 28 by Sourcebooks and is the first biography written about the Democratic senator from Massachusetts. Felix has found herself interested in Warren since 2011, when she first started keeping close tabs on her political career.
“(Warren has) written a couple of books in the last few years that are a lot about policy and politics, but she hasn’t written a full-fledged memoir,” Felix said. “There’s still a lot people don’t know about her. Finally the stars sort of aligned last year and everything came together.”
Felix is celebrating the book release with a reading and signing 7 p.m. Wednesday at Barnes and Noble, 3230 Galleria, Edina.
Though Felix did not work directly with Warren on the book, she interviewed as many people as possible to gain a variety of perspectives about Warren’s life and career.
“I’ve never interviewed any of the subjects of my biographies. I’ve met them later, which is cool,” Felix said. “I went after as many people as I could to get all these voices in — former professors she taught with, people she grew up with, all kinds of people to look at her life from these angles. And these are perspectives from other people, stories she’s not going to talk about.”
The book gives readers a look into Warren’s life growing up and the choices as a young adult that eventually led to her political career. Felix delves into some of her work as a senator, and, perhaps most notably, goes into the controversy around Warren’s claim of Native American ancestry.
“I spend quite a bit of time over the controversy over her Native American ancestry, which the president (Donald Trump) has decided to use as a slur,” Felix said. “That’s going to keep coming up. I really get into that aspect of race and why calling her Pocahontas is really a racial slur and how Native Americans feel about that and how they feel about white people making these claims of native ancestry. It’s a complex issue, and on TV and other media it’s given a sound bite but I go into quite an analysis of all that.”
The delve into racial issues is right up Felix’s alley. Along with her work as an author, Felix conducts research on racial equity in public education. She recently received her doctorate of education degree in educational leadership. Felix also holds a master of fine arts degree in creative writing (fiction), a master of arts degree in English and a bachelor’s in psychology.
She has spoken and lectured frequently on women in power, appearing on CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, NPR, PBS’s Washington Journal, BBC and others. Her research into international women’s rights led to her moderating a U.S. Senate briefing on policy options toward Iran and being a panelist in a U.S. House of Representatives caucus on women and democracy.
Her non-political biographies profiling Andrea Bocelli, Harry Connick Jr., and musical savant Tony Deblois reflect her professional background as an operatic soprano who has performed in concert and recital and conducted master classes throughout the United States and Europe, including Paris, Moscow and Prague. Felix studied music at the University of Wisconsin, the Mannes College of Music in New York City and the Institute of Advanced Vocal Studies in Paris.
In 2013, Felix was one of the inaugural inductees into the Shakopee Alumni Association Distinguished Hall of Fame.