John Szwed was director of the Center for Jazz Studies and is a former professor of Music and Jazz Studies at Columbia University in New York; he is also the former John M. Musser Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies, and Film Studies at Yale University. He has authored or edited eighteen books and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post,TheVillage Voice, and many other publications. He has received fellowships from the John M. Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has produced several recordings and has appeared in a number of documentaries and television specials; as a jazz musician, he played the bass and trombone professionally for over a decade.

Souvankham Thammavongsa is a prize-winning poet and fiction writer, and author of three books of poetry, Light (2013) which received the Trillium Book Award, Found (2007), and Small Arguments (2003) which won the re-Lit Prize. Her stories have been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Harper’s, Granta, Ploughshares, NOON, and Best American Non-Required Reading. Her newest collection of poems, Cluster, was published by McClelland & Stewart in Canada in 2019 and her collection of stories, How to Pronounce Knife, is out now from McClelland & Stewart and Little, Brown.

Established in 1872, The Boston Globe is Boston and New England’s leading source for breaking news and analysis, with coverage from across the world. The Boston Globe has been awarded 26 Pulitzer Prizes throughout its history.

An ethnographer and arts journalist, Thornton has contributed to Artforum, The New Yorker, and The Economist, among other publications.

Tourmaline is an artist, activist, writer, and filmmaker whose work is dedicated to aestheticizing Black trans survival, beauty, and liberation. In addition to her prison abolition, Black liberation, and trans rights activism, she was featured in the Time 100 list in 2020, has directed several award-winning films and advertising campaigns, and has had her artwork acquired by MoMA, The Whitney, and The Tate.

Gayla Trail is the author, photographer, and designer of best-selling books on gardening, garden to table cooking, and preserving including: You Grow Girl: The Groundbreaking Guide to Gardening, Grow Great Grub: Organic Food from Small Spaces and Easy Growing: Organic Herbs and Edible Flowers from Small Spaces.

Quincy Troupe is an awarding-winning author of ten volumes of poetry, three children’s books, and six non-fiction works.

Academy Award nominated writer and actress, Vardalos is best known for her films My Big Fat Greek Wedding, My Life in Ruins, and for her work as co-writer with Tom Hanks for Larry Crowne.

Senior Vice President and Creative Director of Jujamcyn Theaters, and Artistic Director of Encores!, Viertel has worked on such acclaimed shows as Jersey Boys, Fela!, and The Book Of Mormon. He also teaches at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Jessica Vitkus is a writer and television producer living in New York City. She has written craft stories and developed craft projects for Martha Stewart magazines and television, and has worked as a writer/producer for MTV News, Pop-Up Video,The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, andLate Night with Stephen Colbert.

Martha Wainwright is an internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter based in Montreal. She is the daughter of folk legends Loudon Wainwright and Kate McGarrigle and the sister of Rufus Wainwright.

Elijah Wald has been a folk blues guitarist since childhood and a writer for more than thirty years, and his work has appeared in publications such as the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, TheTower Pulse, Songlines, Sing Out, Living Blues, and The Boston Globe, where he served as world music critic throughout the 1990s. He won a Grammy in 2002 for his album notes for The Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Box, and has produced several albums and recorded two of his own. He has taught blues history at UCLA and lectured widely on American, Mexican, and world music.

Darren Walker is president of the Ford Foundation, an international social justice philanthropy with a $13 billion endowment and $600 million in annual grant making. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been included on numerous annual media lists, including Time’s annual list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, Rolling Stone’s 25 People Shaping the Future, Fast Company’s 50 Most Innovative People, and OUT Magazine’s Power 50.

WSJ. Magazine is The Wall Street Journal’s award-winning luxury lifestyle magazine, published twelve times a year. WSJ. covers a wide range of cultural topics, from fashion and food to architecture and design and will celebrate its 10th anniversary in the Fall of 2018.

Lead singer of 5-time Grammy Award-winning girl-group TLC, Watkins is also the national spokesperson for sickle cell disease.

National Public Radio is an independent, nonprofit media organization that was founded on a mission to create a more informed public. Every day, NPR connects with millions of Americans on the air, online, and in person to explore the news, ideas, and what it means to be human. Through its network of member stations, NPR makes local stories national, national stories local, and global stories personal

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Genevieve West is a professor and chair of the English, Speech, and Foreign Languages department at Texas Women’s University. She is the editor of Zora Neale Hurston’s Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance (Amistad, 2020) and co-editor, with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Hurston’s forthcoming collected essays.

Elizabeth Winder is a poet and graduate of the College of William and Mary, with an MFA in creative writing from George Mason University. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Review, Antioch Review, and American Letters, among other publications. She is the author of Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 (HarperCollins) and Marilyn in Manhattan: Her Year of Joy (Flatiron Books).

A longtime food and travel journalist, Wulfhart writes the “Carry-On” column for the New York Times. Her work has also been published in Travel + Leisure, Bon Appétit, Condé Nast Traveler, the Wall Street Journal Magazine, and elsewhere.

Olivia Yallop was an influencer strategist, trend forecaster and head of Fairy Futures at The Digital Fairy, an all-female creative agency and digital consultancy based in London. She has a degree from the University of Oxford. She has guest lectured at the London College of Fashion on the subject of brands and social media. She hosts a DigiDebates panel series (social media-related discussions held as an old-school style debate) at Soho House in London, and also a Fairy Futures podcast. She also writes a monthly pop-cultural tech column for Miss Vogue, aimed at encouraging the next generation of women in digital.

James Zogby is founder and president of the Arab American Institute and a senior advisor to the polling firm Zogby International. He writes a weekly column That appears in twenty Arab newspapers and hosts a weekly program on Abu Dhabi television. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Democratic National Committee, and co-chair of the DNC’s Resolutions Committee, he is the author of Arab Voices (Palgrave).