Iñaki Alday received a Master of Architecture degree from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in 1992. Together with Margarita Jover, he founded aldayjover architecture and landscape in 1996 in Barcelona. The multidisciplinary, research-based practice focuses on innovation and is particularly renowned for its leadership in a new approach to the relation between cities and rivers, in which the natural dynamics of flooding become part of the public space, eliminating the idea of “catastrophe.”

Rumaan Alam is the author of three novels: Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and Leave the World Behind which was a Read With Jenna Book Club Pick and New York Times bestseller. Other writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and the New Republic. He studied writing at Oberlin College. He lives in New York City with his family.

John M. Barry is an award-winning and best-selling author whose books have also involved him in policy making. The National Academies of Science named his 2004 book The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history, a study of the 1918 pandemic, the year’s outstanding book on science or medicine.

Betsy Fischer Martin is an Emmy-winning journalist and TV news executive. Currently she is Executive Director of AU School of Public Affairs' Women & Politics Institute and an SPA Executive in Residence. She is also a former co-host of Bloomberg Politics' Masters in Politics Podcast. She also founded her own consulting business, Fischer Martin Media, where she specializes in providing media training to corporate executives.

Freddi Williams Evans is an author, independent scholar and founder of www.congosquareconnection.org, an online collection that promotes the study of historic Congo Square. Her book Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans, the first comprehensive study of the historic location, received the Louisiana Humanities Book of the Year Award and is published in French.

Jacob Weisberg is co-founder and Executive Chair of Pushkin Industries, an audio publishing company he founded with Malcolm Gladwell in 2018. Pushkin produces audiobooks and podcasts, including Revisionist History, Against the Rules with Michael Lewis and The Happiness Lab with Laurie Santos.

Darren Walker is president of the Ford Foundation, a $16 billion international social justice philanthropy. Under his leadership, the Ford Foundation became the first non-profit in US history to issue a $1 billion designated social bond to stabilize non-profit organizations in the wake of COVID-19.

Before joining Ford, Darren was vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation, overseeing global and domestic programs. In the 1990s, he was COO of the Abyssinian Development Corporation, Harlem’s largest community development organization.

The Baby Doll tradition had been a fairly underground tradition in New Orleans for decades but recently become much more visible due to the research of women's studies scholar, Kim Vaz-Deville, a professor at Xavier University of Louisiana.  Vaz-Deville authored the groundbreaking book The “Baby Dolls”: Breaking the Race and Gender Barriers of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Tradition (2013) and edited the anthology Walking Raddy: The Baby Dolls of New Orleans (2018).

Michael Tisserand is a New Orleans-based author whose 2017 book, KRAZY: GEORGE HER-RIMAN, A LIFE AND BLACK AND WHITE explored the art and life of cartoonist George Her-riman, New Orleans-born creator of the comic strip “Krazy Kat.” THE NEW YORK TIMES includ-ed KRAZY in its one hundred notable books for 2017. KRAZY also received the Eisner Award for best comics-related book, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle and PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld awards for biography.

Michael Strecker is a writer from Louisiana. His debut novel, "The Knights of Wade" was released in the spring of 2024, by Pelican Publishing.