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.
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.
