Dana Vachon is a novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of the novel Mergers & Acquisitions (Riverhead, 2007) and the co-author, with Jim Carrey, of the New York Times bestseller Memoirs & Misinformation (Knopf, 2020). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Vanity Fair and Slate.

Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh was born in Singapore in 1977. He is currently Editor-in-Chief at Jom, a new weekly digital magazine covering arts, culture, politics, business, technology and more in Singapore, and is a freelance contributor to the Economist’s Intelligence Unit.

From 2006-13 he worked for the Economist in Singapore, first as Associate Director at the Economist Corporate Network, then Senior Editor at Economist Insights. He has written for a variety of publications, including the Economist and the Straits Times.

Sarah Vallance has an MFA in Creative Writing from City University in Hong Kong. She was a Harkness Fellow at Harvard, and holds a doctorate in Government and Public Administration. Her essays have been published in The Gettysburg Review, The Sun, The Pinch and Post Road, among others, and have earned her a Pushcart prize.

Academy Award nominated writer and actress, Vardalos is best known for her films My Big Fat Greek Wedding, My Life in Ruins, and for her work as co-writer with Tom Hanks for Larry Crowne.

Lynx Vilden has been practicing and teaching primitive living skills with passion both in the US and in Europe since 1991. She has traveled, explored, and researched the nature and traditional cultures of arctic, mountain, and desert regions from Hudson Bay to the Kalahari Desert; in 2001 she started the Four Seasons Prehistoric Projects program dedicated to learning and sharing the ancient skills of primitive living and in 2011 created Living Wild.

Hope Wabuke is a poet, academic, and essayist. The author of the poetry collections The Leaving, Movement No.1: Trains, and Her, her work has been published in various journals and magazines, including NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Magazine, Ms. Magazine online, The Daily Beast, The Hairpin, and others. She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her forthcoming memoir Please Don't Kill My Black Son Please is forthcoming from Vintage.

A globally recognized voice in education, Tony Wagner is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Learning Policy Institute; prior to this appointment, Tony held a variety of positions at Harvard University for more than twenty years, including four years as an Expert in Residence at the Harvard Innovation Lab. Tony’s influential and widely read books on schools and education include The Global Achievement Gap and Creating Innovators.

Martha Wainwright is an internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter based in Montreal. She is the daughter of folk legends Loudon Wainwright and Kate McGarrigle and the sister of Rufus Wainwright.

Darren Walker is president of the Ford Foundation, an international social justice philanthropy with a $13 billion endowment and $600 million in annual grant making. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been included on numerous annual media lists, including Time’s annual list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, Rolling Stone’s 25 People Shaping the Future, Fast Company’s 50 Most Innovative People, and OUT Magazine’s Power 50.

Jon Ward is Chief National Correspondent for Yahoo News, author of Camelot's End: Kennedy v Carter and the Fight that Broke the Democratic Party (Twelve Books, 2019), and host of The Long Game podcast. He has covered American politics and culture for two decades, as a city desk reporter in Washington D.C., as a White House correspondent who traveled aboard Air Force One to Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, and as a national affairs correspondent who has traveled the country to write about two presidential campaigns and the ideas and people animating our times. He has been published in The Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico Magazine, Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post, and The Washington Times.

The Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock serves as the Senior Pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church of Atlanta. He also has served at the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church of Birmingham, the Abyssinian Baptist Church of New York City, and Baltimore’s Douglas Memorial Community Church. The Rev. Dr. Warnock holds degrees from Morehouse College and Union Theological Seminary, and is the author of The Divided Mind of the Black Church. In January 2021, Dr. Warnock became Georgia's first Black senator.

Lead singer of 5-time Grammy Award-winning girl-group TLC, Watkins is also the national spokesperson for sickle cell disease.

Tony Weaver, Jr. is founder and CEO of Weird Enough Productions, a new media production company dedicated to creating positive media images of black men and other minority groups, and the creator of the educational webcomic The UnCommons, whose curriculum is used by over 40,000 students per month. Tony has been the recipient of the Leadership Prize and the Black Excellence Award, participated in the NBCUniversal Fellowship Program and the Peace First Fellowship, is a TEDx speaker, and was one of Forbes’ 2018 “30 Under 30” honorees—the first comic book writer to ever make the list.

Justin Webb is the longest serving presenter of BBC Radio 4’s flagship news and current affairs programme, ‘Today’, and presents the hugely popular 'Americast' podcast.

He has worked for the BBC since 1984, previously serving as a reporter for 'Today', Foreign Affairs Correspondent, presenter of 'Breakfast News', Europe and Washington Correspondent, and as North American Editor. He regularly writes for The Times (London) and the Radio Times.

John C. “Jay” Wellons is the Cal Turner Chair and Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times.

Paige Wetzel is the wife of wounded warrior and Afghanistan veteran Josh Wetzel. When not writing books together, they both work at Auburn University.

Of Chinese descent and born in Vietnam, Julie Yip-Williams is an attorney, a mother (of Mia and Isabelle), a wife (of Josh Williams) and the author of the blog, My Cancer-Fighting Journey. This is her first book.

Casey Wilson is an actress, comedian, screenwriter, and producer known for Happy Endings, Saturday Night Live, Marry Me, Gone Girl, Showtime’s Black Monday, and HBO’s series Mrs. Fletcher, as well as her popular podcast Bitch Sesh.

Mary Ann Winkowski, paranormal investigator and consultant to CBS’s Ghost Whisperer, is author of When Ghosts Speak (Grand Central) and co-author, with Maureen Foley, of The Book of Illumination and The Ice Cradle (Three Rivers/Crown), the first two titles in the Ghost Files mystery series.

Alora Young is a college student, an actor, and the 2021 Youth Poet Laureate of the Southern United States. Her poetry has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and she has performed her poetry on CNN, CBS, and the TEDx stage. Originally from Tennessee, Young currently attends Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.

Anya Yurchyshyn’s fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Noon, The Adirondack Review, Guernica, and Elimae. Her memoir, My Dead Parents, is out now from Crown.

Born in Iran and raised as a member of the Baha’i faith, Payam Zamani is the founder, chairman, and CEO of One Planet, a socially responsible hybrid tech firm that owns and operates a suite of online technology and media businesses and is an early stage investor. He is also the Founder and the Editor-in-Chief of BahaiTeachings.org.

Yara Zgheib is the author of the critically acclaimed novel No Land to Light On (Atria, 2022), which has been longlisted for the 2023 Dylan Thomas Prize and selected as an Indie Book Read. Lauded as a “masterful story of tragedy and redemption” written in “soul-searing prose,” the novel was chosen by The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, and Newsweek as one of the top books of 2022. From Alki Joshi, bestselling author of The Henna Artist, “Zgheib writes so lyrically about rootlessness, separation and a fierce longing for home.” 

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Yara’s debut novel, The Girls at 17 Swann Street (St. Martin’s Press, 2019), was a People Pick for Best New Books, which hailed it as “an absorbing page-turner,” as well as a Barnes and Noble pick for Best Books of 2019, and a BookMovement Group Read. Her new novel, Why Paris, and her essay collection An Absolute Necessity are forthcoming from Harper Via.  

Zgheib is a Fulbright scholar and holds a PhD in International Affairs in Diplomacy. She publishes a weekly essay on “The non-Utilitarian,” and her writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, Glimmer Train, Lithub, Holiday, The European, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been adapted for two musical albums, Dust and Ions (2020) and City Rhapsodies (2022)

A writer and filmmaker in New York, von Ziegesar has contributed to the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Art in America, Outside, and Out, among other publications.

Jim Ziolkowski is the co-founder of buildOn, a not-for-profit organization That today supports thousands of inner-city teenagers from across the United States while at the same time transforming communities in some of the world’s poorest countries: Malawi, Mali, Senegal, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Nepal. He is the author, with James Hirsch, of the New York Times bestselling memoir entitled Walk in Their Shoes (Free Press).

Kristal Brent Zook is an award-winning journalist and author of four books including The Girl in the Yellow Poncho, a coming-of-age story about being biracial in America, searching for her missing white father, and finding one’s authentic identity. A former contributor to the Washington Post and ESSENCE, her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, LIFE, and The Guardian among others. The Girl in the Yellow Poncho has been praised in Vanity Fair, PEOPLE, Ms., The Root, and Kirkus. Dr. Zook is a tenured journalism at Hofstra University in New York. She has appeared on outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, MTV, Fox, BET, PBS, and TV-One and NPR.