Vanessa Kroll Bennett is a USA Today bestselling author and podcaster who helps adults raise tweens + teens with joy. She is co-author of the bestselling book This Is So Awkward: Modern Puberty Explained, co-host of the This Is So Awkward podcast, and President of Content at Less Awkward. A frequent contributor to Scary Mommy, Vanessa was the founder of Dynamo Girl, a company focused on building kids’ self-esteem through sports and puberty education. She is a graduate of Wellesley College, Vanessa holds a Masters in Jewish History.

Jesse M. Keenan is the Favrot II Associate Professor of Sustainable Real Estate and Urban Planning and Director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at Tulane University. Keenan’s research focuses on the intersection of climate change and the built environment, including aspects of applied science, policy, and planning.

Meg Josephson, LCSW, is a licensed psychotherapist. She's the author of the New York Times Bestselling book, ARE YOU MAD AT ME? and she's been featured in The New York Times, The TODAY Show, Forbes and more. Her book has been translated into over 18 languages. In her private practice, she specializes in trauma-informed care through a mindfulness-based, compassion-focused lens.

TAYARI JONES is the author of five novels, including An American Marriage, which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection and also appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list and his year-end roundup. It won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Aspen Words Prize, and an NAACP Image Award and has been published in two dozen countries. Jones is the C.H. Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing and lives in Atlanta. Her latest novel is Kin.

Jedidiah Jenkins is the New York Times bestselling author of To Shake the Sleeping Self, Like Streams to the Ocean, and Mother, Nature. He began his professional career with the nonprofit Invisible Children, where he helped orchestrate  campaigns to end the use of child soldiers in central Africa. His parents, Peter and Barbara Jenkins, are the authors of the bestselling A Walk Across America series.

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in 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.

Beth Ann Fennelly, a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, was the poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021 and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. She’s won grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil.  Fennelly has published three books of poetry and three of prose, most recently, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W.W.

C. J. Farley is the author of “Who Knows You By Heart,” a new novel which Booklist, in a starred review, called “a timely masterpiece.” Part social thriller, part modern love story, “Who Knows You by Heart” is a sly, witty, and endlessly discussable tale of Big Tech, new money, relationships, race, and discovering what’s real in an age of artificial intelligence. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, and raised in Brockport, New York, Farley graduated from Harvard University and served as an editor of the Harvard Lampoon.

John T. Edge writes and hosts the Emmy Award-winning television show TrueSouth on the SEC Network, ESPN, Disney, and Hulu. Edge also writes a restaurant column for Garden & Gun. His 2017 book The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South was named one of the best books of the year by NPR and Publishers Weekly. Edge serves the University of Mississippi as a teacher, writer-in-residence, and director of the Mississippi Lab.

Marc J. Dunkelman is senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson School for International and Public Affairs, and a former fellow at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management. During more than a decade working in politics, he worked for Democratic members of both the Senate and the House of Representatives and as a senior fellow at the Clinton Foundation.