MARCELLE BIENVENU is a cookbook author and food writer who has been preparing Cajun and Creole dishes since the 1960s.

Casey Michel is the director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation. He is the author of multiple books on illicit finance, international money laundering, corruption, and authoritarianism, including Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World, and American Kleptocracy: How the US Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History, which The Economist named as one of the top five books to read to understand financial crime.

Lauren Moser is senior editor at The Onion, and former associate editor and senior writer at ClickHole.

Jessi Klein is the author of You’ll Grow Out of It and the Emmy and Peabody award-winning head writer and an executive producer of Comedy Central's critically acclaimed series Inside Amy Schumer. She is an actor and consulting producer on the hit Netflix show Big Mouth, and has also written for Netflix’s Dead to Me and Amazon's Transparent as well as Saturday Night Live. Klein has been featured on the popular storytelling series The Moth, and has been a regular panelist on NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!

Oskar Eustis has served as the Artistic Director of The Public Theater since 2005. He came to The Public from Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, RI where he served as Artistic Director from 1994 to 2005. Eustis served as Associate Artistic Director at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum from 1989-1994; and prior to that he was with the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco, serving as Resident Director and Dramaturg from 1981-1986 and Artistic Director from 1986-1989.

Gary Phillips (b. 1955) is a critically acclaimed author of mysteries and graphic novels. Raised in South Central Los Angeles, Phillips grew up reading comics, classic pulp and detective fiction, and the likes of Iceberg Slim and took inspiration from all this when he created his first series character, Ivan Monk, in the early 1990s. A private detective adept at navigating the racial tensions of modern L. A. and beyond, Monk has appeared in four novels and one short story collection, Monkology (2011).