Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White. He is a contributing writer at the Atlantic, a 2019 New America Fellow, a visiting fellow at AEI, and a visiting professor of humanities at Bard College, where he is a Senior Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center. He was previously a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and a columnist at Harper’s.
Curtis Wilkie covered civil rights activity in Mississippi in the 1960s and afterward served as a national and international correspondent for a quarter century at the Boston Globe. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
Dr. Weill is the former Director of the Center for Advanced Lung Disease and Lung and Heart-Lung Transplant Program at Stanford University Medical Center, where he provided oversight for the interstitial lung disease, cystic fibrosis, and transplant programs. He is currently the Principal of the Weill Consulting Group which focuses on improving the delivery of pulmonary, ICU, and transplant care.
Jeanette Weiland currently works for the New Orleans Business Alliance (NOLABA) as the Senior Vice President of Bio, Innovation, & Special Projects. In this role, she reports to the CEO and is responsible for facilitating collaboration with local institutions and companies, attracting new businesses and investment to the City, assisting existing businesses and startups with retention and expansion efforts, and working with area partners to help ensure that the state’s legislative environment is friendly to all of these efforts.
Qian Julie Wang was born in Shijiazhuang, China. At age 7, she moved to Brooklyn, New York, with her parents. For five years thereafter, the three lived in the shadows of undocumented life in New York City. Qian Julie's first book is a poignant literary memoir that follows the family through those years, as they held onto hope and joy while confronting poverty, manual labor, and the perpetual threat of deportation. A graduate of Yale Law School and Swarthmore College—where she juggled classes and extracurriculars with four part-time jobs—Qian Julie is now a litigator.
Mark J. VanLandingham, Ph.D., is the Thomas C. Keller Professor at Tulane University. He currently teaches Population Mobility and Health and Health Problems of Developing Societies (with Katherine Andrinopoulos). Professor VanLandingham directs Tulane’s Center for Studies of Displaced Populations (CSDP) and leads research teams focusing on rural-to-urban migration within Southeast Asia; long-term post-disaster recovery; and acculturation, health, and well-being among Vietnamese immigrants living in New Orleans.
Emma Straub is the New York Times-bestselling author of four novels—All Adults Here, The Vacationers, Modern Lovers, Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures—and the short story collection Other People We Married. Her books have been published in more than 20 languages, and All Adults Here is currently in development as a television series. She and her husband own Books Are Magic, an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, New York.
Anne Snyder is the Editor-in-Chief of Comment Magazine and the author of The Fabric of Character: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Renewing our Social and Moral Landscape. From 2016-2019 she directed The Philanthropy Roundtable‘s Character Initiative, a program that sought to help American foundations and business leaders strengthen “the middle ring” of morally formative institutions.
Clint Smith is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2021. How the Word Is Passed (Adapted for Young Readers), with Sonja Cherry-Paul, will be published in September 2025 (Little, Brown).
