Banning Eyre is a respected broadcaster, journalist, musician and radio/film producer, and author of the highly acclaimed In Griot Time, An American Guitarist in Mali (Temple University Press 2000). Over 25 years, Eyre has researched music and culture in Mali, Congo, Morocco, Egypt and beyond. He is based in Connecticut.

Morgan Falconer is a Program Director at Sotheby's Institute of Art in New York. He previously worked as a journalist and critic for newspapers and magazines including The Times, The Economist, Art in America and Frieze. His most recent book is Painting Beyond Pollock.

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Alison Fensterstock is a New Orleans-based writer and editor. A contributor to NPR Music since 2016, she’s written and edited for Turning the Tables and appeared on NPR programs including All Things Considered, World Café and Word of Mouth; her writing about popular music and culture has appeared in Rolling Stone, the NewYork Times, the Oxford American and MOJO, among others.

America Ferrera is an award-winning actress, producer, director and activist. In 2016 Ferrera co-founded HARNESS, an social justice story telling non-profit, and she speaks throughout the country as an advocate for human and civil rights and was the opening speaker at the monumental Women’s March on Washington in January 2017.

Best known as the costume designer on Sex and the City, Patricia Field is a designer, stylist, boutique owner, and fashion icon. For her work on The Devil Wears Prada, she was nominated for an Academy Award, and for her work on Sex and the City, she’s been nominated for five and won one Emmy Award.

The recipient of the Oxford American's 2018-19 Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship, Fields has published essays and photography in the Oxford American, the Baffler, Columbia Journalism Review, Sonora Review, War, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and hails from Houston, Texas.

Amanda FitzSimon’s work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Magazine, The Economist, Teen Vogue, and ELLE, where she was a senior editor in the features department until 2017. A graduate of Northwestern University, she’s also held staff roles at Teen Vogue and Women’s Wear Daily. FitzSimons has produced several podcasts including Killed (Audiochuck), which peaked at number one on Apple’s charts in 2022 and was nominated for a Webby Award.

A journalist whose work has appeared in the Atlantic, Runner’s World, and elsewhere, Flanagan has coached high-school girls cross-country teams in Summit, New Jersey, for nearly two decades. She is a lifelong athlete and regularly participates in media and on panels discussing youth sports and coaching.

John Fogerty is a true American treasure. As the leader of Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR), Fogerty forged a distinctive, groundbreaking sound all his own, equal parts blues, country, pop, rockabilly, R&B, swamp boogie, and Southern fried rock ‘n’ roll, all united by his uniquely evocative lyrical perspective. Fogerty is a Grammy winner and has been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as well as the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Formed in December 2020 in partnership with Kelly McCartney’s Rainey Day Artist Fund, the Color Me Country Artist Fund is an extension of Rissi Palmer’s popular Color Me Country radio show on Apple Music that works to spotlight the voices and stories of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx artists that have shaped the history of the genre. In its first three months, the CMC AF raised over $15,000 and distributed 21 grants to BIPOC country music artists, several of whom have also been honored with inclusion in CMT’s Next Women of Country program.

Meryl Frank has been an activist, mayor, ambassador, and champion of women’s leadership and political participation around the world.

Dr. Valerie Fridland is a professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno. An expert on the relationship between language and society, her work has appeared in numerous academic journals and she is co-author of the book Sociophonetics by Cambridge University Press. She also writes for Psychology Today and lectures for The Great Courses.

Johanna Katrin Fridriksdottir currently works at the National Library of Norway in Oslo. She is currently contributing to a documentary by Ash Thayer entitled Viking Women: The Crying Bones. Her research focuses on Vikings, old Norse-Icelandic sagas, mythology and poetry, late medieval Iceland, medieval manuscripts and gender.

A documentary filmmaker and a Primetime Emmy Award-winner, Friedberg has had his work appear on CBS, PBS, and The History Channel, among other television outlets.

Elysa Gardner currently covers cabaret for The New York Times and has at various points been a regular contributor to The New Yorker (as “Night Life” columnist), Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, and VH1. Formerly the theater and music critic for USA Today, Elysa has served on the Pulitzer Prize drama jury twice, most recently (2017) as chair, and is a board member of the Drama Desk.

American historian, literary critic, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, and has hosted the PBS shows Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gate Jr. and The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault is an Emmy- and Peabody-winning journalist who over the course of her distinguished fifty-plus-year career has worked at The New Yorker, TheNew York Times (where she established the paper’s Harlem bureau), PBS NewsHour, NPR, and CNN. She is the author of four previous books: In My Place (Vintage, 1992), New News Out of Africa (Oxford University Press, 2006), To The Mountaintop (Square Fish, 2014), and Corrective Rape (Agate, 2015).

Nelson George is an award-winning author, filmmaker, television producer and critic with a long career in analyzing and presenting diverse elements of African-American culture. His books have been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Before Columbus Foundation. As a filmmaker, George was a producer on the Emmy Award-winning The Chris Rock Show (HBO) and executive producer of the highly rated American Gangster crime series (BET). He directed Queen Latifah to a Golden Globe in the HBO film Life Support, which he also co-wrote, and was a writer/producer on The Get Down (Netflix); he does most of his work through his production company, Urban Romances.

Holly George-Warren is an award-winning writer and music consultant. As editorial director of Rolling Stone Press from 1993-2001, she created over forty books, including New York Times bestsellers and ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award-winners. She has worked as a curator for the GRAMMY Museum, which opened in L.A. in December 2008, and currently serves on the nominating committee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. A two-time Grammy nominee, she teaches Arts Journalism at the State University of New York in New Paltz, NY.

The late David Gilkey was a celebrated conflict photographer who over the course of his career worked at NPR, The Detroit Free Press and The Boulder Daily Camera, bringing to vivid life big and small stories with global impact. Known for chronicling pain and beauty in war and conflict, he was on assignment when he and NPR’s Afghan interpreter, Zabihullah Tamanna were killed during the ambush of their convoy in Afghanistan’s Helm and province in 2016. Considered one of the best photojournalists in the world, his work received numerous awards including a 2007 Free Press Award, a 2010 George Polk Award, dozens of honors from the White House News Photographers Association including the 2011 Still Photographer of the Year, a 2015 Edward R. Murrow Award and a 2015 Peabody Award, among others.

John Giorno is a poet and visual and performance artist, and is also widely known as the subject of Andy Warhol’s first film, Sleep (1963). In addition to his creative work, he is the founder of the not-for-profit organization Giorno Poetry Systems and has been celebrated for his AIDS activism and fundraising.

Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Givhan is the fashion editor for The Washington Post. She’s formerly a fashion correspondent and fashion critic for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Givhan’s The Battle of Versailles is under option to HBO.

An American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor, Goldberg received a Pulitzer Prize for his political cartooning in 1948. He was also a founding member and the first president of the National Cartoonists Society.

Danny Goldberg is the author of How the Left Lost Teen Spirit and Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business. Since 2007 he has been president of Gold Village Entertainment, whose clients include Steve Earle and Against Me. Previously, Goldberg was president of Gold Mountain Entertainment (Nirvana, Bonnie Raitt, the Allman Brothers), CEO of Air America Radio, chairman of Warner Bros. Records, president of Atlantic Records, and vice president of Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song Records.

Eric Goode is an American entrepreneur, naturalist, and conservationist. He is known as the founder of the Turtle Conservancy, a global conservation organization whose mission is to preserve and protect natural ecosystems, focusing on turtles and tortoises. Goode is also the co-creator and co-owner of the nightclub Area, B Bar restaurant, Lafayette House, and the Bowery Hotel.

Wade Graham is a writer, historian, and landscape designer with a practice based in Los Angeles. His writing, on cultural history, environment, urbanism, landscape, art, and other topics, has appeared frequently in the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, and Harper’s, among other publications. His most recent books are Braided Waters: Environment and Society in Molokai, Hawaii (University of California Press, 2018) and Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World (HarperCollins, 2016).

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A stage and screen actress, Grant has appeared in seminal movies such as Detective Story, In the Heat of the Night, Valley of the Dolls, The Landlord, Shampoo, and Voyage of the Damned. She has received two Academy Awards, two Emmys, a Directors Guild Award, and over ten other major nominations.

Robin Green is a TV writer/producer known for her work with her husband Mitchell Burgess, both as an Executive Producer and writer for The Sopranos on HBO and for creating the CBS drama Blue Bloods, now in its ninth season. She has won four Emmys, as well as several Golden Globes, two Peabodys and a Writers Guild Award, with many nominations for Emmys and WGA awards. She has been a writer at Rolling Stone and California Magazine, and has written for The Boston Real Paper, City Magazine of San Francisco, Magazine, and the L.A. Times, among others.

Linda Gregerson is the author of eight books of poetry and the winner of many awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Kingsley Tufts Award, an American of Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and a finalist nomination for the National Book Award. The New York Times calls Gregerson “a storyteller at heart,” and the Los Angeles Review of Books praises “her remarkable ability to make imagination feel appropriate.” Reviewing Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, The New Yorker described her work as “dauntless, serrated.” Her new collection, Canopy, will be published in 2022. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.Linda Gregerson is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Tony and Academy Award winning actor, Grey has appeared in Broadway classics such as Cabaret, George M!, Goodbye Charlie, Chicago, Wicked, and Anything Goes, and in films such as Cabaret and Dancer in the Dark. His photographs are part of the Permanent Collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art and the New York Public Library.

Jennifer Grotz is the author of four poetry collections: the award-winning Cusp; The Needle, which was named one of the “Five Best Books of Poetry of the Year” by NPR; Window Left Open, which the San Francisco Chronicle hailed as “Extraordinary… A contemplative spirit ― calm but alert ― permeates the poems.” Her new collection, Still Falling, will be published in 2023. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.Jennifer Grotz is Associate Professor of English at the University of Rochester and Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Michael M. Grynbaum is a media correspondent for The New York Times, covering the intersection of business, culture and politics. Since starting at The Times as an intern, he has served as City Hall bureau chief, Metro political writer, transportation reporter and economics writer during the 2008 financial crisis.

Tiffany Haas has been performing professionally for the past ten years, most notably starring as Glinda in both the Broadway production and the national tour of the acclaimed musical Wicked. In addition to being in demand nationally as an actress and singer, Tiffany is a beloved judge and host for the Miss America pageant and leads a popular master class for aspiring performers of all ages. Her career has been profiled by major media outlets such as ABC News, Playbill, Broadway World, and Theater Mania, and Tiffany has frequently been invited to organize and run theater workshops at music conservatories, symphonies, and theater and dance conventions across the country. Her collaborative writer, Jenna Glatzer, is a respected and prolific author and ghostwriter, having worked on over twenty-eight books including the award-winning The Pregnancy Project by Gaby Rodriguez and Celine Dion: For Keeps, the authorized biography of the pop superstar. Jenna’s books have been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dr. Phil, The Today Show, and The View, and Jenna herself has been interviewed for documentary series on both the E! and Lifetime networks, as well as by NBC News.

David Hallberg is a Principal Dancer with American Ballet Theater, and made history in 2011 as the first American to join the Bolshoi Ballet as a Premier Dancer. Among his numerous national and international accolades, he has received the Emerging Artist Award from Americans for the Arts and in 2017 became the first dancer to hold the title of Resident Guest Artist with The Australian Ballet.

Nick Haramis, the editor in chief of Interview magazine, was formerly the articles editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine. A contributor to publications including Billboard, Out, and The Wall Street Journal, he has interviewed everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Meryl Streep. Prior to joining The New York Times, he was the editorial director of Bullett and, before that, the executive editor of BlackBook. He lives in New York City.

Switched on Pop is a podcast on the Vox Media Podcast Network analyzing contemporary pop music. It has been listed as a top music podcast by NPR, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, Forbes, Entertainment Weekly, Christian Science Monitor, AV Club, and Chicago Reader. Switched on Pop has been cited, and its creators Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan have appeared as experts, in The Atlantic, VICE, Houston Press, Fuse, The Stranger, OZY, Portland Mercury, and Billboard.

Reina Hardy’s plays (which feature everything from sad lamps to interstellar sex goddesses to disastrous science-fiction conventions) have been seen across the US, UK, Australia and Greece; her prose has appeared in Electric Literature, Fantasy Magazine, Startrek.com, and more.

Ericka Hart, M. Ed, is a sex educator, breast cancer survivor, model and racial/social/gender justice disrupter who has been teaching at schools, universities, and other institutions for over a decade.

Patti Hartigan is the former arts reporter, cultural columnist and theater critic for The Boston Globe.

Chris Hayes is the Emmy-winning host of MSNBC’s All in With Chris Hayes and the author of two New York Times bestselling books, Twilight of the Elites and, most recently, A Colony in a Nation.

James Hibberd is an American journalist and screenwriter. He is the current Editor at Large for Entertainment Weekly, and previous staff editor for The Hollywood Reporter. His work has been published in publications including The New York Times, Salon, Details, Cosmopolitan, and Amnesty International Magazine.

Allegra Hicks is a London- and Naples-based designer whose line of fabrics, rugs, homewares, furniture, and accessories is sold worldwide in department stores and boutiques. Hicks has won both the US Elle Decor’s Best Wallpaper Award and Elle Decoration UK’s Best Fabric Award.

Mike Hixenbaugh is an award-winning national investigative reporter for NBC News. He previously worked for the Houston Chronicle, the Virginian-Pilot, and elsewhere, and has hosted two podcasts, Do No Harm and Southlake, the latter of which won a Peabody Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Hosts of the Dolls of Our Lives podcast.

Bill Ivey is a writer, teacher, nonprofit executive, and long-time public servant. He is Senior Research Fellow with Americans for the Arts, a Washington-based arts advocacy group, and Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. He is past-president of the American Folklore Society and today serves that organization as Senior Advisor for China. Ivey served as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in the Clinton-Gore administration, and was team leader for arts and culture in the Barack Obama presidential transition. In 2002 he became founding director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University, and since 2001 has been a trustee of the Center for American Progress, a Washington “think-tank.” Ivey is also a four-time Grammy nominee, and has produced and written television shows for the CBS and PBS networks. He is a lecturer and consultant whose clients include the Ford Foundation and other leading nonprofits. He is based in Nashville, Tennessee and Calumet, Michigan.

Lawrence served as one of four official White House photographers during the Obama administration. He’s worked at The Associated Press and The Virginian-Pilot, and his work has been published in The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, U.S. News & World Report, among other outlets.

Wild interests and an inclination to rage against the machine with a flair that could equal the groupies and rock stars who fascinate her, vegan Lucretia Tye Jasmine earned her BFA with honors from NYU, and her MFA from CalArts. She is originally from Kentucky, and is currently a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and interviewer, whose most recent work includes the Groupie Feminism art series; online writing for Please Kill Me and the Los Angeles Beat; and interviews for Feminist Magazine Radio and the GRAMMY Museum.

Dr Tiffany Jenkins is an author, academic, broadcaster and consultant on cultural policy. Her writing credits include the Independent, the Art Newspaper, the Guardian, the Scotsman (for which she was a weekly columnist on social and cultural issues) and the Spectator. She is an Honorary Fellow in Department of Art History at the University of Edinburgh; a former visiting fellow in the Department of Law at the London School of Economics and was previously the director of the Arts and Society Programme at the Institute of Ideas. She competed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Kent and divides her time between London and Edinburgh.As a consultant she has advised a number of organisations on cultural policy, including Trinity College, Dublin; the Scottish government; the Norwegian government; the University of Oslo; Norwegian Theatres and Orchestras; and the National Touring Network for Performing Arts, Norway.Tiffany Jenkins appears regularly on Radio 4, including Thinking Allowed, Front Row and Saturday Review and Radio 3’s Free Thinking. She presented the BBC Radio 4 programme Beauty and the Brain, which explored what science can tell us about art, and most recently wrote and presented A Narrative History of Secrecy, which was broadcast on Radio 4 in December 2016.Tiffany hosts the acclaimed podcast Behind the Scenes at the Museum on which she interviews museum directors, curators, artists and activists about the big ideas rocking the cultural world.She is also speaks regularly at conferences around the world and is an accomplished keynote speaker.

A former European editor for W, Kerwin Jenkins is a contributor to Vogue. Her Encyclopedia of the Exquisite was one of Barnes and Noble’s Best 25 Books of 2010.

Scott C. Johnson is a senior writer and investigative journalist at The Hollywood Reporter. He was a Newsweek foreign correspondent, providing war reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other fronts in the Middle East, and is the author of the National Book Award longlisted The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, A Son, and the CIA.

As the keyboardist for the Memphis-based quartet Booker T & the MGs, Booker T Jones performed R&B and funk hits by Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, and Sam & Dave, and, as a member of the house band for Stax Records, helped define the sound of Southern soul music. Booker T & the MGs are also known for original hit singles like “Green Onions,” and for being one of the first integrated instrumental groups. In 1992, the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and they received a Grammys’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007.

Bong Joon-ho is a film director and screenwriter known for Memories of Murder, The Host, Mother, Snowpiercer, and Okja. In 2019, he became the first Korean director to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, for the record-breaking international blockbuster Parasite.

Janis Joplin was an American singer-songwriter known for having one of the most extraordinary voices in rock history. She was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, acknowledging her electric stage presence, powerful vocals, and legendary status as the first female rockstar.

A contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2007, Kashner is the author of several books. His book Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and The Marriage of the Century, with Nancy Schoenberger was a New York Times Bestseller and a Los Angeles Times Bestseller.

Journalist and Fulbright Scholar, Keenan has travelled the world writing about culture and foreign policy. Her pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Slate, and The Atlantic, among other publications.

Neil King Jr. served as chief diplomatic correspondent, senior political reporter and global economics editor over 20 years at The Wall Street Journal. His writings have also appeared in The New York Times, TheAtlantic and other publications. A native of Colorado, he lives now in Washington DC.

Hannah Kirshner about Japanese food and travel for The New York Times , Vogue, Saveur, Taste, Condé Nast Traveler and Atlas Obscura, among others. Sweets & Bitters is the name of her blog. She is also New York’s go to food stylist for Japanese recipes.