Ian Manuel lives in New York City. He is a motivational speaker at schools and social organizations nationwide.

Bryan Stevenson is the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and a professor of law at New York University Law School. He has won relief for dozens of condemned prisoners, argued five times before the Supreme Court, and won national acclaim for his work challenging bias against the poor and people of color. He has received numerous awards, including the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller Just Mercy, which was recently adapted as a major motion picture. He is a graduate of the Harvard Law School and the Harvard School of Government.

Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University and founder of Georgetown's Innovative Policing Program. From 2016 to 2020, she served as a reserve police officer with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department. She has worked previously at the Defense Department, the State Department, and for several international human rights organizations. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal, and she spent four years as a weekly opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times and another four as a columnist for Foreign Policy. Her most recent book, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2016; it was also shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize and named one of the five best books of the year by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Christy E. Lopez is a Washington Post contributing columnist and a Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. She teaches courses on policing and criminal procedure and co-directs Georgetown’s Innovative Policing Program. From 2010 to 2017, Lopez served as a deputy chief in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice. She led the division’s group conducting pattern-or-practice investigations of police departments and other law enforcement agencies. She directly led the team that investigated the Ferguson Police Department and was a primary drafter of the Ferguson Report and negotiator of the Ferguson consent decree and helped coordinate the department’s broader efforts to ensure constitutional policing.

Congressman Elijah E. Cummings was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, and died there on October 17, 2019. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Howard University, serving as Student Government President and graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and then graduated from the University of Maryland School of Law. Congressman Cummings dedicated his life of service to uplifting and empowering the people he represented. He began his career of public service in the Maryland House of Delegates, where he served sixteen years and became the first African American in Maryland's history to be named Speaker Pro Tem. First sworn in as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1996, Congressman Cummings has proudly represented Maryland's 7th District since 1996. He became a Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform in 2011 and was appointed as Chairman of the Committee in 2019. 
 
James Dale has been an author-collaborator on a number of books on topics including business, medicine, and life lessons. His works include The Power of Nice with agent-negotiator Ron Shapiro; Just Show Up with Hall of Fame baseball player Cal Ripken Jr.; and The Q Factor with Super Bowl–winning coach Brian Billick.

Dr. Maya Rockeymoore Cummings is a social entrepreneur, speaker, writer, and strategist who’s on a mission to drive society toward inclusion. After a quarter of a century of working on innovative public policy and multimillion-dollar social change initiatives in the government, nonprofit, and private sectors, Maya is a policy and political expert who understands how to build and sustain cross-sector collaborations, diverse coalitions, dynamic diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies, and effective education campaigns. An accomplished public speaker and author, Maya has appeared in a variety of media outlets such as CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and BET, and her writings have been published in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, and the Washington Post among other publications. She has served on numerous boards, including the National Association of Counties Financial Services Corporation, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, and the National Academy of Social Insurance. She is the recipient of multiple honors, such as the Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellowship Award and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Fellowship Award, and has been a candidate for Maryland governor and the U.S. Congress. A former chair of the Maryland Democratic Party, Maya earned her B.A. in political science from Prairie View A&M University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in political science, with an emphasis in public policy, from Purdue University. She is the widow of the late Congressman Elijah E. Cummings and lives in West Baltimore with her dog Andy.

André Gregory has been directing theater in New York for more than half a century. His forty-year collaboration with Wallace Shawn began with his critically acclaimed production of Shawn's Our Late Night, and he has collaborated on film versions of his theater productions with Shawn, Louis Malle, and Jonathan Demme. Gregory, Shawn, and Malle created the now-legendary My Dinner with André. As an actor, Gregory has performed in a dozen films, including The Last Temptation of Christ by Martin Scorsese, and Mosquito Coast by Peter Weir. Gregory is also a writer, a teacher, and a painter—an exhibition of his artwork was staged at Monica King Contemporary in New York City this fall.

Wallace Shawn started writing plays in 1967. His first play to be professionally produced, Our Late Night, was written for André Gregory's company the Manhattan Project. It was directed by Gregory and opened at the Public Theater in 1975. Mr. Shawn's other plays—which include The Fever, The Designated Mourner, and Grasses of a Thousand Colors, among others—have been performed in New York and London. Also with André Gregory, Shawn co-wrote and co-starred in the classic film My Dinner with André, and Mr. Shawn's work as a film actor includes appearances in Manhattan, Radio Days, Clueless, and the Toy Story series. Mr. Shawn's most recent book, Night Thoughts, was just released in paperback.

Claudia Rankine is a poet, artistic innovator, and recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. Her next publication, Just Us: An American Conversation, is a collection of essays where Rankine questions what it means in these spaces to interrogate white privilege, well-meaning liberal politics, white male aggression, the implications of blondness, white supremacy in the White House and what it means to be an American today.

Terrance Hayes’s most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin 2018) and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float In The Space Between was the winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Hayes is a Professor of English at New York University.

Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; Discipline, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering, and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019. Martin is the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair of African American Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.

Reyna Grande is the recipient of the 2015 Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. Her first novel, Across a Hundred Mountains(2006), received a 2006 El Premio Aztlan Literary Award, a 2007 American Book Award, and a 2010 Latino Books Into Movies Award. Her second novel, Dancing with Butterflies (2009), was the recipient of a 2010 International Latino Book Award. She was a 2003 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow. The Distance Between Us was a 2012 National Book Critics Circle Awards Finalist and has been selected by numerous city-wide read programs.

Jean Guerrero, winner of the PEN/FUSION Emerging Writers Prize, is an Emmy award-winning journalist. She is the Fronteras reporter for KPBS, the NPR and PBS affiliate in San Diego, reporting on cross-border issues for radio and TV. She has also worked for the Wall Street Journal, won several prestigious reporting awards and has an MFA from Goucher College.

Author of over 20 plays, Octavio Solis is considered one of the most prominent Latino playwrights in America. Among his many works are Alicia’s Miracle, Se Llama Cristina, John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven, Ghosts of the River, Quixote, Lydia, Marfa Lights, Gibraltar, The Ballad of Pancho and Lucy, The 7 Visions of Encarnación, Bethlehem, Dreamlandia, El Otro, Man of the Flesh, Prospect, and La Posada Mágica. His plays have been mounted at the Mark Taper Forum, Yale Repertory Theatre, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and other venues nationwide. Among his many awards and grants, Solis has received the Kennedy Center’s Roger L. Stevens award, the National Latino Playwriting Award, and the PEN Center USA Award for Drama. His fiction has been published in the Chicago Quarterly Review, Huizache:and ZYZZYVA.

Édouard Louis is the author of the international bestsellers The End of Eddy and History of Violence, and the editor of a scholarly work on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. Compared to Jean Genet by The Paris Review, his work deals with sexuality, class, and violence. Louis was born Eddy Bellegeule in the working-class village of Hallencourt in northern France, and he attended the École Normale Supérieure and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

Steven Reigns was appointed the first Poet Laureate of West Hollywood. Alongside over a dozen chapbooks, he has published two poetry collections. Reigns hold a BA in Creative Writing and a Master of Clinical Psychology and is a thirteen-time recipient of The Los Angeles County’s Department of Cultural Affairs Artist in Residency Grant. He edited My Life is Poetry, showcasing his students’ work from the first-ever autobiographical poetry workshop for LGBT seniors. Currently, he is touring The Gay Rub, an exhibition of rubbings from LGBT landmarks, facilitating the monthly Lambda Lit Book Club, and is at work on a new collection.

Swati Dlamini is the granddaughter of Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the daughter of Prince Thumbumuzi Dlamini and Princess Zenani Mandela. Mandela, who holds a degree in public relations and marketing from Midrand Graduate Institute, is the founding partner and managing director of Qunu Workforce, South Africa’s leading consultancy in creating equality in the workforce for those living with disabilities. Additionally, she co-authored the autobiography 491 Days with the Nelson Mandela Foundation about her grandmother and is working with Mandy Jacobson to co-produce an authorized documentary about the life of Winnie Mandela. The film is set to be released this year in partnership with the Ichikowitz Family Foundation’s African Oral History Archive.

Sahm Venter is a former Associated Press reporter (who covered and was witness to Mandela’s release from prison in 1990) and a longtime researcher. She has co-edited several previous books, including Notes to the Future: Words of Wisdom; 491 Days: Prisoner Number 1323/69 by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, with Swati Dlamini; and Something to Write Home About: Reflections from the Heart of History, with Claude Colart. She also co-wrote Conversations with a Gentle Soul with the late anti-apartheid struggle hero, Ahmed Kathrada.

Terese Marie Mailhot graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with an M.F.A. in fiction. Mailhot’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Times, Carve Magazine, The Offing, The Toast, Yellow Medicine Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of several fellowships—SWAIA Discovery Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, Writing by Writers Fellowship, and the Elk Writer’s Workshop Fellowship—she was recently named the Tecumseh Postdoctoral Fellow at Purdue University and resides in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Roxane Gay is the author of the essay collection Bad Feminist, which was a New York Times bestseller; the novel An Untamed State, a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize; and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti. A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, she has also written for Time, McSweeney’s, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Bookforum, and Salon. Her fiction has also been selected for Best American Short Stories 2012, Best American Mystery Stories 2014, and other anthologies. She is the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She lives in Lafayette, Indiana, and sometimes Los Angeles.

Stephen Kuusisto is the author of the memoirs Have Dog, Will Travel; Planet of the Blind (a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year"); and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Ohio State University. He currently teaches at Syracuse University, where he holds a professorship in the Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies. He is a frequent speaker in the US and abroad.

Louise Steinman is the curator of the award-winning ALOUD series and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of three books: The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War; The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance; and The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation. She was a 2015 Fellow at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida. Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and on her Crooked Mirror blog.