What Stories Are Shaping Your Life?

Unlikely Collaborators Hosts New York Times Best-Selling Author Katherine Center for a Spark Salon on Story, Identity, and Transformation

LOS ANGELES, June 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- We all live inside stories. They influence how we see ourselves, what we believe is possible, how we interpret setbacks and relationships, and even how we imagine the future. Often, we mistake these stories for reality itself.

On Thursday, June 18 at 7pm PT, Unlikely Collaborators will host New York Times best-selling author Katherine Center for a Spark Salon exploring the transformative power of story titled:

The Transformative Power of Story

Best known for beloved novels including The Love Haters, The Bodyguard, Things You Save in a Fire, How to Walk Away, and Happiness for Beginners, Katherine Center has built a career exploring resilience, love, reinvention, and human transformation through fiction.

Blending personal reflection, conversation, and insights from her creative process, Center examines how the stories we live by shape identity, possibility, and emotional experience: not only the stories we read, but the narratives we construct about ourselves.

At the heart of the conversation is a question central to the Perception Box framework: What happens when we recognize that the stories we've been living inside are interpretations rather than fixed truths? And what becomes possible when we relate to those stories with greater awareness, flexibility, and compassion?

As a fiction writer, Center works at the level where identity is formed: character, internal dialogue, belief, fear, memory, and turning point. Through the disciplined craft of narrative, she studies how people organize experience into meaning and construct a sense of self from the stories they carry.

Her work suggests that much of our experience is shaped not simply by what happens to us, but by the meanings we assign to those experiences. Through story, we construct identities, expectations, fears, and possibilities. Transformation may begin when we recognize that many of those narratives are interpretations rather than immutable facts.

Drawing from both her novels and her own creative life, Center reflects on resilience, vulnerability, belonging, ambition, heartbreak, hope, and the ways narrative framing influences how we move through the world.

The evening invites audiences to explore how inherited beliefs, unconscious assumptions, and deeply held narratives shape their experience of themselves and others. Through the lens of story, participants will consider how greater awareness of those narratives can create more space for possibility, resilience, and connection.

The evening will take place in person at Unlikely Collaborators' Santa Monica headquarters and will also be livestreamed online.

Event Schedule

6:00 p.m. — Doors open and reception
7:00 p.m. — Program begins promptly (late entry not permitted)
8:00 p.m. — Reception and book signing

Cost: Free (registration required)

Register to Attend in person

Register to join live online

About Katherine Center

BookPage calls Katherine Center "the reigning queen of comfort reads." She's the New York Times best-selling author of over half a dozen books, including How to Walk Away, Things You Save in a Fire, What You Wish For, The Bodyguard, and The Love Haters.

Katherine writes laugh-and-cry stories about how life knocks us down — and how we get back up. She has been compared to both Jane Austen and Nora Ephron, and The Dallas Morning News calls her novels "satisfying in the most soul-nourishing way."

Her books have appeared on countless best-of lists, including Real Simple's Best Books of 2020, Amazon's Top 100 Books of 2019, and Goodreads' Best Books of the Year. Best-selling author Emily Henry called The Bodyguard "a shot of pure joy."

Film adaptations of her work include The Lost Husband, which reached #1 on Netflix, and Happiness for Beginners, produced as a Netflix original starring Ellie Kemper.

Katherine lives in her hometown of Houston, Texas, with her husband, their two children, and their fluffy-but-fierce dog.

About Spark Salons

Spark Salons are a signature program of Unlikely Collaborators, the nonprofit founded by Elizabeth R. Koch. These gatherings bring together grantees, researchers, artists, and collaborators for conversations that challenge perspectives and deepen connections. Past Spark Salon speakers have included illusionist Harris III, psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, PhD, nutrition therapist Kim Shapira, MS, RD, mythologist John Bucher, Harvard Business School professor and author Michael Norton, PhD, visionary violinist Vijay Gupta, chef and entrepreneur Ellen Bennett, artist Candy Chang, digital workplace expert and author Alexandra Samuel, PhD, grief experts Brennan Wood and Dr. Donna L. Schuurman, neuroscientist and best-selling author Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, neuroscientist and NYU Dean Wendy Suzuki, PhD, futures designer Nick Foster, RDI, sleep psychologist Jade Wu, PhD, broadcaster and author Krista Tippett, journalist and author Eliot Stein, medical anthropologist and author Theresa MacPhail, PhD, poet, activist, and author Ian Manuel, psychologist and bestselling author Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD, pediatrician and bestselling author Cara Natterson, MD, contemplative scholar and author Dr. Andrew Holecek.

Watch the Spark Salons Trailer

About Unlikely Collaborators

Unlikely Collaborators is a nonprofit focused on helping people better understand themselves and each other. Founded and led by CEO Elizabeth R. Koch, the organization is built around the Perception Box™ framework, the idea that our beliefs, experiences, emotions, and conditioning shape how we interpret ourselves and the world around us. By becoming aware of that lens, we create more space for reflection, flexibility, and meaningful change.

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SOURCE Unlikely Collaborators