Peter Ricchiuti is the business professor you wish you had back in college. His humor and insight have twice made him the top professor at Tulane University’s Freeman School of Business. In a worldwide competition, Peter’s teaching delivery skills placed him atop a field of professors from 500 universities representing 43 countries. Peter is a graduate of Babson College, started his career at the investment firm of Kidder Peabody & Co and later served as the assistant state treasurer for Louisiana.

Jonathan Martin is the politics bureau chief and senior political columnist at POLITICO, where he writes a reported column.  Prior to starting his column in 2022, Martin was the national political correspondent for The New York Times, where he served as the publication’s top political reporter for nearly a decade.  He is the co-author of the New York Times best-seller This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future, which gave readers in-the-room access to the extraordinary events of the 2020 election and i

Cheryl Gerber is an award-winning documentary photographer and New Orleans native. She has been a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Associated Press, New Orleans Magazine,and Gambit for more than twenty-five years. She is the author of New Orleans: Life and Death in the Big Easy and Cherchez la Femme: New Orleans Women.

The author of five best-selling books, Carl Bernstein is currently at work on several multi-media projects, including a memoir about growing up at a Washington newspaper, The Evening Star, during the Kennedy era; and a dramatic TV series about the United States Congress for HBO. He is also an on-air political analyst for CNN and a contributing editor of Vanity Fair magazine. 

His most recent book was the national bestseller A Woman In Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, acclaimed as the definitive biography of its subject, published by Knopf. 

K.A. (Kristin) Leigh is a Florida-born animal lover with a passion for helping others through her writing. She and her illustrator husband, Derek Roberts, created the Brudders® book series to give kids an engaging way to learn different social emotional concepts.

Monique Verdin is an transdisciplinary artist who documents the complex relationship between environment, culture, and climate in southeast Louisiana. She is a citizen of the Houma Nation, director of The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange and a Bvlbancha Liberation Radio collaborator. Monique is supporting the Okla Hina Ikhish Holo (People of the Sacred Medicine Trail), a network of indigenous gardeners, as the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network Gulf South food and medicine sovereignty program manager.

Rebecca Snedeker is an Emmy Award-winning nonfiction storyteller and the James H. Clark Executive Director of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, where she supports cutting-edge research and artworks, and designs public-facing programming that relates the local to the global and planetary.

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.

General John R. Allen

Eve Abrams is an audio producer, writer, editor, and educator whose work centers on amplifying the voices from her adopted hometown, New Orleans. She produced the award-winning podcast Hot Farm, about climate change and food, and the Peabody Finalist Unprisoned, which tells stories at the intersection of the criminal legal system and human lives. Eve has edited the award-winning shows Banned, TriPod, and Fine Gorilla Person.