Dr. Bettina L. Love is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University and author of the New York Times bestseller Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal. In 2022, the Kennedy Center named Dr. Love one of the Next 50 Leaders making the world more inspired, inclusive, and compassionate.

Steven Hahn received his Ph.D from Yale University and is a specialist on social and political history, slavery and race, American empire, and the international history of emancipation struggles. He has taught at the University of Delaware; the University of California, San Diego; Northwestern University; and the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently Professor of History at New York University where he also teaches in the NYU Prison Education Program.

C.W. Goodyear is an author and historian based in Washington, DC. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and graduated from Yale University.

His most recent is a critically-acclaimed biography of President James Garfield. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic and TIME.

Drew Gilpin Faust is Arthur Kingsley Porter University Research Professor at Harvard University where she served as president from 2007 to 2018. She came to Harvard in 2001 as founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study after twenty five years on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania.

Kyle DeCoste (he/him) is a scholar of popular music from New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. He is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Music at Tulane University. His work, which is often collaborative and (auto)ethnographic, examines how sound—and popular music in particular—is used to articulate and contest ideas about race, gender, class, and childhood.

Raymond Antrobus MBE FRSL was born in London, Hackney to an English mother and Jamaican father.

Kwame Alexander is a poet, educator, producer and #1 New York Times bestselling author of 39 books, including Why Fathers Cry at Night, An American Story, The Door of No Return, Becoming Muhammad Ali (co-authored with James Patterson), Rebound, which was shortlisted for the prestigious UK Carnegie Medal, and The Undefeated, the National Book Award nominee, Newbery Honor, and Caldecott Medal-winning picture book illustrated by Kadir Nelson.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is the author of the bestselling short story collection Friday Black and the novel Chain-Gang All-Stars. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Guernica, Compose: A Journal of Simply Good Writing, Printer’s Row, Gravel, and The Breakwater Review, where he was selected by ZZ Packer as the winner of the 2nd Annual Breakwater Review Fiction Contest. He is from Spring Valley, New York. He graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University.

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and is currently a professor of creative writing at Tulane University.

Amor Towles is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow. The two novels have collectively sold more than four million copies and have been translated into more than thirty languages. Towles lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.