Iyanla Vanzant

Iyanla Vanzant is the booking for an audience that has had every motivational talk and needs the harder conversation about what it is actually carrying.

Her authority for that conversation comes from an unusual combination. She is a lawyer, with a Juris Doctor from the City University of New York School of Law, an ordained priestess in the Yoruba tradition since 1983, an ordained New Thought minister, and holds a master's degree in spiritual psychology. The name Iyanla, meaning great mother, came with the priesthood. That mix is why her material does not sound like the genre it is shelved in: it is direct about accountability in a way that most inspirational content is not, and she has the training to hold a room through it.

She hosted Iyanla: Fix My Life on OWN from 2012 to 2021, nine seasons of the same conversation conducted in public with people at the worst point of their lives, and earlier appeared as a life coach on Starting Over, for which she won a Daytime Emmy in 2005. She has been a regular on The Oprah Winfrey Show since the 1990s, co-hosted Oprah's Lifeclass, and toured with Oprah's The Life You Want Weekend in 2014. She has won NAACP Image Awards in 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2019.

She has written seventeen books, translated into twenty-three languages, with more than ten million copies sold, including Acts of Faith, In the Meantime, Yesterday I Cried and Peace from Broken Pieces.

She is booked most often for women's leadership events, conferences on wellbeing and healing, and organizations whose audience is carrying more than the agenda admits. The format is a keynote or, often more effectively, a moderated conversation, because her strength is the exchange rather than the lecture. She is based in the Atlanta area and travels for events.