Emma Allen is the cartoon editor of The New Yorker and edits humor pieces on newyorker.com. She has been a member of the magazine’s editorial staff since 2012 and has written more than a hundred stories for the magazine and its Web site.

‘Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her writing has been published in Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, One Story among others, and won O. Henry Prizes. Her novel-in-progress won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. She was a 2021 Fiction Fellow with the Miami Book Fair, a 2022 MacDowell fellow, and is the current Hortense Spillers Assistant Editor at Transition Magazine. Her first book, Ghostroots (Norton, 2024), was a finalist for the National Book Awards in Fiction.

Alexander Smalls is James-Beard-Award-winning chef, author, Raconteur and the visionary co-owner of renowned restaurant, Alkebulan, the first African Dining Hall in the World located in Dubai. He is also former co-owner of the celebrated restaurant The Cecil and Minton’s Playhouse located in the heart of historic Harlem.

Nate Silver is the New York Times bestselling author of The Signal and the Noise and On the Edge. He writes the popular Substack “Silver Bulletin,” and was the founder of FiveThirtyEight.

A pioneer in the field of data journalism, he has been named one of Fast Company‘s 100 Most Creative People in Business, TIME's 100 Most Influential People, and Rolling Stone's 100 Agents of Change.

Dr. Vivek H. Murthy served as the 19th Surgeon General of the United States from December 15, 2014 to April 21, 2017 and as 21st Surgeon General of the United States from March 23, 2021 to January 20, 2025.

In his first term as America’s Doctor, Dr. Murthy created initiatives to tackle our country’s most urgent public health issues. He chose areas of focus that were raised by people across America during his inaugural listening tour. Highlights included:  

Nicholas Mattei is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Tulane University and Co-Director of the Tulane Center for Community Engaged AI in New Orleans, LA, USA.

Chris Lipp is a social psychologist and author of three books on personal power and persuasion. His first book The Startup Pitch introduced the modern framework for investment pitches that is now used ubiquitously by global accelerators and institutions. He regularly works with business leadership and delivers talks to large organizations. Currently he serves as professor and director of management communication at Tulane University Freeman School of Business, where he teaches popular classes in leadership communication.

Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a columnist for The Washington Post, and a bestselling author. His new book, "Reagan: His Life and Legend" is a New York Times bestseller.

W. Kamau Bell is a comedian, author, and filmmaker. His CNN docu-series United Shades of America won five Emmy awards, and he was awarded a Peabody for his docu-series We Need To Talk About Cosby. He is most proud of his Emmy award winning and Television Academy Honors award winning documentary 1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed. Kamau is a NYT best-selling author of the book Do The Work: An Antiracist Activity Book. In March of 2025, Kamau will have a chapter in bestselling author Michael Lewis’ new book Who is Government?

Bryan Stevenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults.