Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of the novels The Story of Land and Sea, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and one of Vogue’s Best Books of 2014; Free Men; and The Everlasting, a New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book of 2020. Her writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Granta, and elsewhere.
A former Paris bureau chief for TIME magazine, Tom Sancton is the author of Song For My Fathers (2006), an acclaimed memoir of his jazz apprenticeship in 1960’s New Orleans. Sancton’s Bettencourt Affair (2017), about a scandal surrounding L’Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, has been optioned as a TV mini-series.
Nathaniel Rich is the author, most recently, of two works of nonfiction on environmental themes: Second Nature, which includes the story that serves as the basis for the film Dark Waters; and Losing Earth, a finalist for the PEN/E.O.
Tom Piazza is celebrated both as a novelist and as a writer on American music. His twelve books include the novels A Free State and City Of Refuge, the short-story collection Blues and Trouble, the post-Katrina manifesto Why New Orleans Matters, and Devil Sent The Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America, a collection of his essays and journalism.
Imani Perry is the Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Perry is the author of 8 books, including the New York Times Bestseller South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation which received the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction, the inaugural Inside Literary Prize, and was named one of President Obama’s favorite books of 2022.
Prof. Richard Campanella, geographer and associate dean for research with the Tulane School of Architecture and holder of the Jean and Saul A. Mintz Professorship, is the author of fifteen books and 300 articles on New Orleans and Louisiana geography, history, urbanism, and related topics.
Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University, a CNN Presidential Historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He has received seven honorary doctorates in American Studies. He works in many capacities in the world of public history, including for boards, museums, colleges and historical societies. Six of his books were named New York Times “Notable Books of the Year” and seven became New York Times bestsellers.
Roy Blount Jr. is the author of Alphabet Juice, Alphabetter Juice (or The Joy of Text), Save Room for Pie, Be Sweet, and twenty other books whose subjects include the movie Duck Soup ("delightfully erudite"-- Times), the 70s Pittsburgh Steelers ("Deserves a place on the short shelf of the cracked masterpieces of New Journalism" -- Dwight Garner in the Times), and Robert E. Lee ("A miniature masterpiece" -- Bookpage).
Jason Berry is an author and documentary producer. "City of a Million Dreams: New Orleans History at Year 300" [2018] is the subject of his latest film which treats jazz funerals as a prism
Marc Morial, who has been described as one of the few national leaders to possess “street smarts”, and “boardroom savvy”, is the current President and CEO of the National Urban League, the nation’s largest historic civil rights and urban advocacy organization.
He served as the highly successful and popular Mayor of New Orleans as well as the President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. He previously was a Louisiana State Senator, and was a lawyer in New Orleans with an active, high profile practice.
