Nick Weldon is senior editor at the Historic New Orleans Collection, where he is editor and co-author of Captive State: Louisiana and the Making of Mass Incarceration (2025) and the award-winning graphic history Monumental: O

Margaret Orr is a Mom and Grandmother who lives in New Orleans with family and a fur boy named Skye who likes to play ball and dig in the garden. 

Internationally recognized artist Jeff Koons (b.

Gary Hoover is the Executive Director of the Murphy Institute at Tulane University. He is also a professor of economics and is an affiliate professor of law.

Michael Clune is the author of the novel Pan (Penguin, 2025), and the memoirs White Out (second ed., McNally Editions, 2023) and Gamelife (FSG, 2015).

Olivia Worley is an author born and raised in New Orleans.

Philippe VILLENEUVE

RICKEY LAURENTIIS is the author of Boy with Thorn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize.

Daniel Kehlmann was born in Munich in 1975. His novels and plays have won numerous prizes, including the Candide Prize, the Doderer Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize.

Sigrid Nunez is the author of nine novels, including The Vulnerables, What Are You Going Through, and The Friend, which was a New York Times bestseller and winner of the 2018 National Book Award, and made into a 20