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.

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel.

Dwight Garner is a book critic for the New York Times. His work has also appeared in The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) and Saveur. HIs most recent book is "The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading about Eating and Eating While Reading," in which "thoughts about food and literary criticism are stacked, Alexandra Schwartz wrote in The New Yorker, "like the bright layers of a Venetian cookie." 

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

James R. Doty, MD is a renowned neurosurgeon, neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, who is transforming how we understand the mind and compassion. As the founder and director of Stanford's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE), with the Dalai Lama as its founding benefactor, Dr. Doty has positioned himself as a global leader in the science of compassion. He remains a professor at Stanford and is a key figure in advancing research on compassion and its profound impact on mental health.