Timothy Snyder is the Bird White Housum Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of five award-winning books. His 2010 book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, was selected as the best book of the year by The Economist, The New Republic, and The Guardian and received a number of honors, including the Leipzig Prize for European Understanding and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award in the Humanities.

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and the author of seven books, including the international bestseller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin and, most recently, The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, to be published in April. She writes regularly for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and other publications. She was born in Moscow, educated in the United States, and spent most of her adult life in Russia before immigrating to America again just over a year ago.

Justinian Jampol is Founder and Executive Director of the Wende Museum. His work focuses on visual cultural studies and the connection between contemporary art and Cold War iconography. The curator of several exhibitions, Jampol has also produced two documentary films on the Cold War, as well as urban art programs, including The Wall Project. His work has been featured in The Atlantic, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, andThe New York Times. He is the author of Beyond the Wall: Art and Artifacts from the GDR, published by Taschen in December 2014.

Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. His most recent book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize as well as the Lincoln and Bancroft Prizes.

Randall Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He is the author of six books, including, most recently, For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law. He is a member of the bars of the Supreme Court of the United States and the District of Columbia and a recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Race, Crime, and the Law.

David Axelrod is a 35-year veteran of American politics and journalism. Prior to becoming a political consultant, Axelrod spent eight years as a reporter and columnist for the Chicago Tribune, including a stint as the City Hall bureau chief. As a political consultant, Axelrod has managed media and communications strategy for more than 150 local, state, and national campaigns. Axelrod most recently served as Senior Strategist to President Obama's successful re-election campaign. He served in that same role in then-Senator Obama's 2008 presidential campaign before going on to serve in the White House as Senior Advisor to the President. After the 2012 campaign, Axelrod founded the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago.

Michel Martin is heard across NPR programs bringing her 25+ years of journalistic experience to coverage of education, families, faith, race, and social issues. She also hosts NPR Presents Michel Martin, a national live event series. From 2007- 2014, Martin hosted Tell Me More, a daily news/talk show that dipped into thousands of conversations taking place in corridors of power and around kitchen tables alike.

Jill Leovy is a reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times, where she has worked for fifteen years. She's the recipient of numerous journalism awards, including, as a member of a six-reporter team, the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. In 2007, Leovy created an innovative blog project called "The Homicide Report" that covered every single one of the 845 murders in Los Angeles that year.

Warren Olney is the host and executive producer of Which Way, LA? and To the Point. WWLA is the signature daily local news program on 89.9 KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com. Olney reaches a national audience with To the Point, distributed by Public Radio International and several other public radio markets nationwide. Olney and both of his programs have been honored with nearly 40 national, regional, and local awards for broadcast excellence since its inception. Most recently, Olney received the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award for his broad achievements in television news, as well as his storied career over 20 years on public radio, both locally and nationally.

Larry Siems balances writing and activism, having published scores of articles on human rights and serving for many years as director of Freedom to Write Programs for the writers' advocacy organization PEN, in both Los Angeles and New York. His work has appeared in a wide range of publications. He is the author of three books: Between the Lines: Letters Between Undocumented Mexican and Central American Immigrants and Their Families and Friends (1993); The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America’s Post 9/11 Torture Program (2012); and the forthcoming Guantánamo Diary.

Nancy Hollander is an internationally recognized criminal defense lawyer from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and an Associate Tenant with Doughty Street Chambers in London. Her practice is largely devoted to representing individuals and organizations accused of crimes. She has also argued and won a case involving religious freedom in the United States Supreme Court. Ms. Hollander represents two prisoners at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base and is lead counsel for Chelsea Manning on appeal. She is listed in the "Top 250 Women in Litigation in the U.S." for 2012-2014, and was named one of America’s top fifty women litigators by the National Law Journal in 2001. In 1992-93, she was the President of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Erwin Chemerinsky is the founding dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law. He has authored eight books, most recently The Case Against the Supreme Court (2014), and more than 200 law-review articles. He has argued several cases before the Supreme Court and various circuits of the United States Court of Appeals.

Reza Safai co-starred in the 2011 Sundance Audience Winner Circumstance, which went on to win key awards at several international film festivals. Since his short film The Mario Valdez Story took home second place at Cannes—he has been a mainstay in the US indie film scene as both an actor and producer. His latest film, produced by Black Light District (founded by Reza Safai and Daniel Grove), is the Sundance sensation A Girl Walks Home at Night, an Iranian Vampire/Western. His next film will be The Loner, neo-noir thriller set in the opium underworld of Tehrangeles.

Jeff Chang has written extensively on culture, politics, the arts, and music. He is the author of the award-winning Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, and co-founder of ColorLines, the SoleSides hip-hop crew, and CultureStr/ke. His latest book is Who We Be: The Colorization of America. Named by the Utne Reader as one of the "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World," Chang has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature and currently serves as the executive director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University.

Justin Simien, one of Variety magazine’s "10 Directors to Watch", is the writer and director of the critically acclaimed film Dear White People, which won the Special Jury Award for "Breakthrough Talent" at Sundance 2014. In addition to producing and directing online companion pieces for The Help, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and Middle of Nowhere campaigns, he has also written, produced and directed for Take Part TV and the Streamy-nominated web series INST MSGS.

Erin Aubry Kaplan is a journalist, columnist, author, blogger, and teacher who has been writing about black issues since 1992. She has been a staff writer for the LA Weekly and an opinion columnist for the L.A. Times, the first African American to hold the position. She has contributed to many publications and nonfiction anthologies. Her collection of essays and reportage, Black Talk, Blue Thoughts and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches From a Black Journalista, was published in 2011 by Northeastern University Press. Her second book, about the cultural legacy of Barack Obama, is due out in 2015.

Sarah Thornton is a non-fiction writer and sociologist of art. 33 Artists in 3 Acts, her long-awaited follow-up to Seven Days in the Art World, a witty account of the machinations of the art world, which was an international hit. Thornton has written regularly for The Economist and many other publications. She lives in London but travels widely.

Allison Agsten has served as Curator of Public Engagement at the Hammer Museum since 2010, where she directs an innovative new curatorial program focused on creating an exchange between visitors and the museum through works of art. Agsten previously worked at LACMA, where she developed a number of pioneering digital projects, and prior to that, at CNN, where she was a producer regularly covering the arts.

David Finkel is the award-winning author of The Good Soldiers. A staff writer for The Washington Post, he is also the leader of the Post’s national reporting team. Finkel received the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2006 and the MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2012. He lives in Maryland with his wife and two daughters.

Albert "Skip" Rizzo is a clinical psychologist and Director of Medical Virtual Reality at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. He is also a research professor with the USC Department of Psychiatry and at the USC Davis School of Gerontology. Rizzo conducts research on the design, development, and evaluation of Virtual Reality systems targeting the areas of clinical assessment, treatment, and rehabilitation across the domains of psychological, cognitive, and motor functioning in both healthy and clinical populations. This work has focused on PTSD, TBI, Autism, ADHD, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, and other clinical conditions. In his spare time, he listens to music, rides his motorcycle, and thinks about new ways that VR can have a positive impact on clinical care by dragging the field of psychology, kickin’, and screamin’, into the 21st Century.

Thomas Curwen is an award-winning staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, where he has worked as the editor of the Outdoors section, as a writer-at-large and editor for the features sections, and as the deputy editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for mental health journalism, and in 2008 he was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

Robin Coste Lewis is a Provost’s Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies at USC. A Cave Canem fellow, she received her MFA from NYU and an MTS in Sanskrit from Harvard's Divinity School. A finalist for the International War Poetry Prize, the National Rita Dove Prize, and the Discovery Prize, her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies. She has taught at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College, and the NYU/MFA in Paris. Born in Compton, her family is from New Orleans. Her book of poems, Voyage of the Sable Venus, is forthcoming from Knopf.

Claudia Rankine is the author of four previous books, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. She currently serves as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Pomona College in California. She is a recent recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize, given annually by Poets & Writers, "to an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition."

Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include The Argonauts (forthcoming in May 2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets, The Red Parts: A Memoir and Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions. Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes and Jane: A Murder. She is the recipient of many awards, including an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She has taught on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts since 2005.

Adam Michnik is the founder and editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, a daily often referred to as "The New York Times of Eastern Europe." He is among Poland’s most prominent public figures, with a distinctive voice dedicated to dialogue, tolerance, and freedom. He spent a total of six years in prison between 1965 and 1986, detained by the Communist Polish regime for his dissident activities as a prominent "Solidarity" activist. In 1989, he participated in the Round Table Talks, which resulted in Poland’s nonviolent transition to democracy, and he served as a deputy in Poland’s first non-communist parliament (1989-1991). He is the author of several books and countless essays, analyses, and interviews. His four books in English include: Letters from Prison (1987); The Church and the Left (1993); Letters from Freedom ( 1998); In Search of Lost Meaning ( 2011); and The Trouble with History (2013). Among his many honors are the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award and the Order of the White Eagle –the highest distinction attainable in Poland. He regularly travels throughout the world, giving lectures on democracy, totalitarianism, and the paradoxes and dilemmas of contemporary politics. He lives in Warsaw.

Yasmine El Rashidi is an Egyptian writer. She is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and a contributing editor to the Middle East arts journal Bidoun. A collection of her writings on the Egyptian revolution, The Battle for Egypt, was published in 2011, and her essays feature in the anthologies Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The New York Review Abroad: Fifty Years of International Reportage. Her writing on the revolution was nominated for an Amnesty International Media Award, and she was a 2013 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University's Lewis Centre for the Arts. She lives in Cairo.

Mike Shuster is an award-winning diplomatic correspondent and former roving foreign correspondent for NPR News. In recent years, Shuster has helped shape NPR’s extensive coverage of the Middle East as one of the leading reporters to cover this region—from Iraq to Iran and Israel. His 2007 week-long series The Partisans of Ali explored the history of Shi'ite faith and politics, providing a rare, comprehensive look at the complexities of the Islamic religion and its impact on the Western world. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his reporting, including an Overseas Press Club Lowell Thomas Award. He was NPR's senior Moscow correspondent in the early 1990s when he covered the collapse of the Soviet Union and a wide range of political, economic, and social issues in Russia and the other independent states of the former Soviet Union.