Barbara Heller was inspired to create the letters and ephemera in Pride and Prejudice, Anne of Green Gables, Persuasion, and Little Women by a desire to hold the characters’ letters in her own hands. In addition to curating the Handwritten Classic Series for Chronicle Books, she finds furnishings for many film and television shows, including Poker Face, Blue Bloods, The Americans, and When They See Us. A native of New Orleans, she graduated from Brown University with a degree in English Literature. She lives with her son in New York City.

David Greenberg is a professor of history at Rutgers University. His latest book, John Lewis: A Life (Simon & Schuster, 2024), is a biography of the congressman and civil rights hero. The winner of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, Greenberg is the author or editor of several books on American history and politics including Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image (2003) and Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (2016), both prize-winning volumes.

Edda L. Fields-Black’s previous book, Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora, as well as her work as executive producer and librettist of "Unburied, Unmourned, Unmarked: Requiem for Rice" (with Emmy® Award-winning composer John Wineglass), reflect her long involvement with the interconnective story of rice cultivation in pre-colonial West Africa and on antebellum Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia plantations.

Alison Fragale is a professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School. Her academic research on negotiation, and the determinants and consequences of power, status, and hierarchy, have been published in her field’s top academic journals. She is also the author of Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve, published by Penguin Random House in September 2024. Prior to her academic career, Alison worked as a consultant for McKinsey and Company, Inc.

Dr. Anthony Fauci served as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health from 1984 to 2022. He also served as the Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden. He is currently a Distinguished University Professor at Georgetown University with a joint appointment in the School of Medicine and the McCourt School of Public Policy.

Alison Espach is the author of the novels The Adults, a New York Times Editors' Choice and a Barnes & Noble Discover pick, and Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, which was named a best book of 2022 by the Chicago Tribune and NPR. Her short stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, Vogue, Outside, Joyland, and other places. She is a professor of creative writing at Providence College in Rhode Island.

CHARLES DUHIGG is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and the author of The Power of Habit, which spent over three years on bestseller lists and has been translated into 40 languages, Supercommunicators, also a bestseller published in 2024, and Smarter Faster Better, a third bestseller. Mr. Duhigg writes for The New Yorker magazine and is a graduate of Yale University and the Harvard Business School. He has been a frequent contributor to CNBC, This American Life, NPR, PBS’s NewsHour and Frontline. He was also, for one terrifying day in 1999, a bike messenger in San Francisco.

Dr. Jennifer Doudna
Biochemist and Nobel Prize-winning co-inventor of CRISPR technology

Eric Cook is the Executive Chef and Owner of award-winning New Orleans restaurants Gris-Gris and Saint John. A combat veteran who served six years in the United States Marine Corps, Cook entered the culinary world and worked in many of the city's most well-renowned kitchens before building a culinary empire of his own.

Catherine "Cady" Coleman is a chemist, an engineer, a former United States Air Force colonel, and a retired NASA astronaut. She is also now a highly regarded media adviser and on-air expert, known for her STEM/STEAM advocacy. Most recently Coleman co-anchored Netflix and Time’s livestream coverage of the SpaceX launch of four civilians into space (she had helped coach them) and, as a regular ABC contributor, co-anchored its special reports covering the SpaceX launches and the Perseverance Mars rover landing.