Rich Cohen is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Tough Jews; Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football; Sweet and Low; When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead (with Jerry Weintraub); The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones; The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse, and Pee Wees: Confessions of a Hockey Parent. His new book, When The Game Was War: The NBA’s Greatest season, will be published on September 5th, by Random House.
Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the internationally bestselling author of the memoir How to Say Babylon, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction and the Kirkus Prize. How to Say Babylon was included on over 17 Best Book of 2023 year-end lists, including the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of the year, the Washington Post Top 10 Books of 2023, TIME Magazine’s Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2023, and The Atlantic’s 10 Best Books of 2023.
Martha Park is a writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in Orion, Oxford American, The Guardian, Grist, The Bitter Southerner, ProPublica, and elsewhere. Her first book, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After, is forthcoming from Hub City Press in May of 2025.
Christopher Monks has been editor of McSweeney's Internet Tendency since 2007. He is the author of the Ultimate Game Guide to Your Life and has edited several other books.
Jay Hakes has an extensive background in energy and the environment, including time as head of the U.S. Energy Information Administration and director of research and policy for the presidential commission on the BP oil spill. The Presidents and the Planet (LSU Press, 2024) is his third book on the intersections between energy, the environment, the economy, and national security.
Tripp Friedler is the President and CEO of Free Gulliver, LLC, a distinguished multi-family office. A graduate of Philips Exeter Academy, Tripp earned his bachelor's degree in economics from Amherst College and a law degree from Tulane University Law School. He furthered his education with a master's degree in financial services from the American College and has completed the coursework for a master's in counseling at Loyola University.
Susan Langenhennig has worked as a journalist in New Orleans for more than 25 years. She was a member of The Times-Picayune’s team that won two Pulitzer Prizes and a George Polk Award for coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Langenhennig, a New Orleans native, has been the editor of three books: "Building on the Past: Saving Historic New Orleans"; "The Cottage on Tchoupitoulas" and "Painting the Town: The Importance of Color in Historic New Orleans Architecture," all published by the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans.
Joselyn Takacs holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Fiction from Johns Hopkins University. Her fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, Narrative, Tin House online, Harvard Review, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and elsewhere. She has published interviews and book reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Entropy. She has taught writing at the University of Southern California and Johns Hopkins University.
Madeleine Watts is the author of the novels Elegy, Southwest (2025), and The Inland Sea (2021), which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. Her nonfiction has appeared in Harper’s, the Guardian, and The Believer, among others. She was born and raised in Sydney, Australia. After over a decade in New York, she currently lives in Berlin.
John Pope, a reporter in New Orleans since 1973, was a member of The Times-Picayune team that won two Pulitzer Prizes and a George Polk Award for coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. A collection of his obituaries, "Getting Off at Elysian Fields," was published in 2015.
