We Are Here To Serve You

MacRae Speakers & Entertainment is a full-service public speaking agency that represents some of the leading public voices from the worlds of Academia, Entertainment, Politics and Business. We are able to offer over 35 years of experience in booking, coordinating and promoting any event for our Academic, Philanthropic or Corporate clients.

  • Family owned business delivering entertaining and worry-free programming

  • Over 35+ years of experience booking college and professional programs

  • Flexible pricing and group booking options

  • Constantly bringing you the newest speakers

Meet Our Featured Speakers

Bethany Joy Lenz
Bethany Joy LenzActress and New York Times Bestselling Author
Actress, singer, and writer, Bethany Joy Lenz, is best known for her role as Haley James Scott on the iconic television series One Tree Hill. With a career spanning decades, she has charmed audiences through her work in film, television, and music, showcasing her creative range and passion for storytelling. In addition to her acting pursuits, Bethany is an accomplished author, and her debut autobiography, Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show, reveals her accidental ten-year detour in a cult. It’s an inspiring story about the importance of identity and understanding what you believe and solidifies her place as a multi-talented artist in the entertainment and literary worlds.
Marissa Bode
Marissa BodeActress, Diversity and Disability Champion
Marissa Bode is making her feature film debut starring as Nessarose Thropp, Elphaba’s sister and the Wicked Witch of the East in the blockbuster Universal motion picture WICKED, opposite Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande.

Bode is making history for being the first wheelchair user to play the character, Nessarose. As a trailblazer for authentic representation, her inspiring story and journey in the arts offer a powerful message of resilience, creativity, and inclusivity.

Dr. Jackson Katz
Dr. Jackson KatzWorld-leading Gender Violence Educator-Activist
Jackson Katz, Ph.D., is an educator, author, and scholar-activist who is internationally renowned for his groundbreaking work in sexual assault and relationship abuse prevention, as well as his pioneering contributions to media literacy education. He is also one of the world’s leading experts on the role of masculinity in politics – especially presidential politics.

Katz’s dynamic and engaging multimedia presentations have long played an important role in the education of college students because of the ways in which they combine cutting-edge analysis of gender, culture, sex, and politics with a call to action – especially for men. Since the 1990s he has been a go-to speaker for campus programmers who want to reach men – including men in athletics and Greek life — with a message that is by turns provocative, affirmative, and inspiring.

Dr. Katz is also the creator and co-founder of the mixed-gender, multiracial Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program, one of the longest-running and most widely influential gender violence prevention initiatives in North America and beyond, and the first major program of its kind in the college and professional sports culture, and all branches of the U.S. military.

His award-winning films include the classic Tough Guise series and The Bystander Moment: Transforming Rape Culture at its Roots. His next book, due from Penguin Random House in fall 2024, is Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, & How You Can Make a Difference. His TEDX talk, Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue, has been translated into 27 languages & has more than 5.5 million views.

Byron Hurt
Byron HurtAward-winning Documentary Filmmaker, Published Writer, and Anti-Sexism Activist
Byron Hurt combines his award-winning documentary films with a dynamic speaking style and the unique ability that challenges audiences to question and redefine manhood in American culture regardless of race, class, or culture.

Hurt has over two decades of experience navigating discussions about masculinity with high-profiled NCAA athletes, members of the U.S. military, fraternities, and everyday men and women throughout the world. He strengthened and honed his gender politics while working with the Mentors in Violence Prevention Program (MVP), and pioneering the Bystander Intervention Program he co-founded with Jackson Katz, Ph.D.

Hurt’s presentations focus on how representations of masculinity in popular culture normalize male violence; how heteronormative masculinity performed by all races contribute to gender oppression: how homophobia and transphobia make LGBT communities vulnerable to male violence: how positive male leadership and bystander intervention can end gender-based violence: and how to use male privilege to ally with women and girls to redefine masculinity and promote healthy relationships.

Jes Baker
Jes BakerMeet The Militant Baker, Promoting Body Positivity and Self-Love
Jes Baker, the veteran blogger known as The Militant Baker, is a positive, progressive, and magnificently irreverent force to be reckoned within the realm of self-love advocacy and mental health. With nearly a quarter of a million social media followers, she has amassed a devout following because of her her dedication to shifting social paradigms into a place where all people are offered the opportunity to love
themselves just as they are.

Jes is best known for her visual campaigns, including: The “Attractive and Fat” Campaign to Mike Jeffries c/o Abercrombie & Fitch; The Smash the Scale Revolution; Body Love Spans Generations, #LoveTheMirror, and most recently her letter to Lane Bryant/#EmpowerALLBodies.

Jes is also the author of bestselling Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls, a manifesto and call to arms for people of all sizes and ages, published in October 2015. Her second book, Landwhale, was published in 2018. The memoir chronicles her journey as a body positive activist.

Evan Peters
Evan PetersEmmy and Golden Globe award-winning Actor
Evan Peters has gained wide recognition for playing multiple roles over ten seasons in Ryan Murphy’s FX anthology series American Horror Story, from 2011 to 2021. His performance as Detective Colin Zabel in the HBO crime miniseries Mare of Easttown (2021), starring opposite Kate Winslet, won him a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series. Peters won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor for portraying the serial killer character in Murphy’s Netflix miniseries Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022).

Peters has also appeared as the mutant Quicksilver/Peter Maximoff in the superhero films X-Men: Days of Future Past, X-Men: Apocalypse, and Dark Phoenix. In 2021, Peters made a surprise appearance in the Disney+ series WandaVision, portraying an alternate version of his character from the X-Men film series.

Peters is in production now on a new F/X television series The Beauty, also starring Rebecca Hall, Ashton Kutcher, Anthony Ramos, and Jeremy Pope.

Dr. Bernard Lafayette Jr.
Dr. Bernard Lafayette Jr. Freedom Rider and Civil Rights Icon. Co-Founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
This is the powerful harrowing and ultimately inspirational story of six months in 1961 that changed America forever, seen through the eyes of a 20 year old college student, Bernard Lafayette. From May until November, more than 400 black and white Americans risked their lives and many endured savage beatings and imprisonment – for simply traveling together on buses and trains as they journeyed through the Deep South. Deliberately violating Jim Crow Laws, the Freedom Riders met bitter racism and mob violence along the way, sorely testing their belief in nonviolent activism.
Dr, Lafayette, Jr. co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960 with his college roommate, Rep. John Lewis, and was a core leader of the civil rights movement in Nashville, TN, and in Selma, AL, in 1965. As part of the May 17th Nashville Student Movement Ride, Lafayette endured riots and fire bombings in Montgomery, AL, and arrest in Jackson, MS, and jail time at Parchman State Prison Farm during June 1961. He directed the Alabama Voter Registration Project in 1962. He was appointed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to be National Program Administrator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and National Coordinator of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign.
David J. Peterson
David J. PetersonLanguage Creator for HBO's Game of Thrones and the motion pictures DUNE and DUNE: PART TWO
David J. Peterson came to international prominence after creating the Dothraki and Valyrian languages for the HBO television series Game of Thrones. He has also created the Chakobsa language for the films DUNE and DUNE: PART TWO.

Master language creator Peterson offers a captivating overview of language creation, covering its history from Tolkien’s creations and Klingon to today’s thriving global community of conlangers.

Along the way, behind-the-scenes stories lift the curtain on how he builds languages. It’s an inside look at a fascinating culture and an engaging entry into a flourishing art form-and it might be the most fun you ever have with linguistics.

He has also created languages for Syfy’s Defiance, the CW’s The 100, Showtime’s Penny Dreadful, Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World, NBC’s Emerald City, and MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles.

He is the author of living language Dothraki and The Art of language Invention.

Jean Kilbourne
Jean KilbourneReworking The Image of Women in Advertising
Jean Kilbourne is internationally known for her pioneering work on alcohol and tobacco advertising and the image of women in advertising. Through her illustrated lectures & her award-winning films and publications, Kilbourne explores the serious cumulative impact of advertising on individual attitudes, values, & behavior and on the society as a whole. With expert knowledge, insight, humor and commitment, she brings her audiences to see that, although ads may seem harmless and silly, they add up to a powerful form of cultural conditioning. Kilbourne is known for her ability to present provocative topics in a way that unites rather than divides, that encourages dialogue, and that moves and empowers people to take action in their own and society’s interest. She is the creator of the award winning documentary film, “Killing us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women.”
Charlie Savage
Charlie SavagePulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times Washington correspondent
Savage is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington correspondent for the New York Times. Originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana, Savage graduated from Harvard College and earned a master’s degree from Yale Law School as part of a Knight Foundation journalism fellowship.

He has been covering post-9/11 issues-including national security, individual rights and the rule of law-since 2003, when he was a reporter for the Miami Herald. Later that year, he joined the Washington bureau of the Boston Globe; he then moved to the Washington bureau of the New York Times in 2008. He has also co-taught a seminar on national security and the Constitution at Georgetown University’s political science department.

His first book, Takeover, chronicles the Bush-Cheney administration’s efforts to expand presidential power. His second book, Power Wars, is an investigative history of national- security legal policy during the Obama administration.

Jared Klickstein
Jared KlicksteinFirsthand Account of Addiction, Homelessness, and Redemption
In the midst of an escalating overdose crisis, Jared Klickstein, author of “Crooked Smile”, reveals a powerful and heart-wrenching journey through addiction, homelessness, incarceration, and ultimately, redemption. His firsthand account sheds light on the harsh realities of drug abuse and provides critical insights into the changes needed in public policy to reduce suffering and save lives. After finding sobriety in 2018, Klickstein penned Crooked Smile to educate and raise awareness about the devastating impact of drug experimentation and the urgent need for policy reform in tackling the opioid crisis, homelessness, and addiction.