An Academy Award-winning actress and film director, Lahti is known for her work on the TV series Chicago Hope, The Blacklist, and Hawaii Five-O. She has been nominated for eight Golden Globes and six Emmys.

Andrew Lam is the web editor of New America Media, a regular contributor to the Huffington Post and NPR’s All Things Considered, and author of the essay collection East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres (Heyday) and the short story collections Birds of Paradise Lost (Red Hen Press) and PEN Open Book Award–winner Perfume Dreams (Heyday).

Natalie Lampert is a Fulbright fellow and independent journalist who has written about egg freezing, abortions, and women’s health for The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Slate.

Regents professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, Lauretta is also the principal investigator on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission.

Cory Leadbeater received his MFA in fiction from Columbia in 2014, where he was the recipient of the Jacob P. Waletzky Fellowship. Before that, he attended Trinity College, where he was the recipient of the Fred Pfeil Memorial Prize in Creative Writing, the John Curtis Underwood Memorial Prize in Poetry, andthe Ruel Compton Tuttle Prize in Scholarship. His memoir, KISSING THE 6 is forthcoming from Ecco. He lives in New Jersey with his family.

After a career in law and academia, Levin spent the last twenty years working with governments and institutions, focused on economic development and political reform. Over the past ten years, he’s run the Liechtenstein Foundation for State Governance, through which he’s helped monarchies democratize their political foundations and state and non-state actors in armed conflict zones. His first book, Nothing But A Circus, was published in the UK, Germany, Russia, and Japan.

Diane and Bernie Lierow live outside of Nashville, Tennessee. The story of their daughter, Dani, was the subject of a Pulitzer Prize-winning article in the St. Petersburg Times.

Patty Lin is a writer and producer known for Freaks and Geeks, Friends, Desperate Housewives, and Breaking Bad. She has also written pilots for Fox, CBS, and Nickelodeon. Her Breaking Bad episode, “Gray Matter,” was nominated for a Writers Guild Award. She retired from TV writing in 2009 to pursue other interests and occasionally appears in background acting roles.

Ernesto Londoño is a journalist for The New York Times. He joined the newspaper in 2014 as a member of the editorial board and served as Brazil bureau chief from 2017 to 2022. He previously worked at The Washington Post, where his assignments included covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring and the Pentagon. He was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia.

Grammy winner and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Member Mike Love is a founding member and lead singer of the legendary rock group The Beach Boys. In addition to a Grammy Award, he has received an Ella Award from the Society of Singers and has co-authored more than a dozen Top 10 Singles. He is the author of Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy (Blue Rider Press), co-authored with James Hirsch.

Tom Macher is the author of the memoir Halfway, recounting his time in a halfway house in Louisiana. National Book Award winner Jaimy Gordon proclaimed, “I felt an exhilaration, even a joy, in coming across a voice so brilliantly calibrated to make this life visible from inside. Tom Macher invented a unique language for the job…broken in pieces, muttered, slangy, more spat out than sung, yet eloquent, poetic in its way, and devastatingly clear.” Macher received his MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has twice been a fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His short stories have appeared in the Mississippi Review, Slice, Day One, and other magazines.

David Magee is the director of institute advancement at the University of Mississippi, helping create the William Magee Center for Wellness Education at the university (www.magee.olemiss.edu), named after his late son William who died of an accidental drug overdose. Magee, whose website is www.daviddmagee.com, is author of multiple books including How Toyota Became 1 (Portfolio), named a Booklist best business book of the year, and The Education of Mr. Mayfield, named an IPPY best non-fiction book in the South.

Detective Kim Mager is a 27-year law enforcement officer who has been with the Ashland Ohio City Police Division for 23 years.

Trans right advocate and activist known for her work as TV’s first trans superhero, Nia Nal, on Supergirl, The Flash, and D.C.’s Legends of Tomorrow.

Declared one of America’s most influential women by Vanity Fair, Malcolm is the founder and chairwoman of the venerated political action committee EMILY’s List. Malcolm has been named a Woman of the Year by Glamour and one of the 100 Most Important Women in American by Ladies’ Home Journal.

Ndaba Mandela is the founder and chairman of the Africa Rising foundation, executive director of MM Afrique Investments, and a global ambassador for UNAIDS. The grandson of Nelson Mandela, he lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Bob Mankoff is the author of How About Never? Is Never Good for You?: My Life in Cartoons, published by Henry Holt in 2014. Mankoff was the cartoon editor for The New Yorker for twenty years, and before he succeeded Lee Lorenz as editor, Mankoff was a cartoonist for the magazine for twenty years. He is now the humor and cartoon editor at Esquire.

A former equestrian and an accomplished editor and writer, Halimah Marcus is the Executive Director of Electric Literature and the Editor-in-Chief of its weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading. Her short stories and essays have been published in One Story, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, the Out There Podcast, and by Amazon Original Stories. She has an MFA from Brooklyn College and is editing a collection called Horse Girls about women, wildness, and power forthcoming from Harper Perennial.

Sabrina Orah Mark is the acclaimed and award-winning author of the book-length poetry collections The Babies (2004) and Tsim Tsum (2009), as well as the chapbook Walter B.’s Extraordinary Cousin Arrives for a Visit & Other Tales from Woodland Editions. Her collection of stories, Wild Milk, was a winner of the Georgia Author of the Year Award for Short Story Collection. Mark’s poetry and stories most recently appear in American Short Fiction, The Bennington Review, Tin House (Open Bar), The Believer, and she writes a monthly column for The Paris Review. She lives in Athens, Georgia with her husband, Reginald McKnight, and their two sons. Her essay collection, Happily, as well as a forthcoming collection of fiction, will be published by Random House.

A longtime cartoonist for The New Yorker, Maslin had his first cartoon published in the magazine in 1977. He’s married to fellow cartoonist for The New Yorker, Liza Donnelly.

Oksana Masters is a Paralympian on Team USA. She currently competes in Biathlon, Cross Country Skiing, and Road Cycling. Though, she began her athletic career in rowing. She is an eight-time Paralympian medalist (2 gold, 3 silver, 3 bronze) and winner of four Nordic skiing world titles. She was Team USA's flagbearer for the 2018 PyeongChang Paralympics closing ceremony, Among her many honors, she received the enormously prestigious Laureus World Sports Award for a Sportsperson with a Disability in 2020.

Owen Matthews was born in London in 1971. He studied Modern History at Oxford University before beginning his career as a freelance journalist in Bosnia. His stories have appeared in a number of publications including the Spectator, Harper’s& Queen and Private Eye, The Times and Sunday Times, the Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, the Independent and the Independent on Sunday, the Daily Mail and the Times Literary Supplement. From 1995 to 1997 he worked at The Moscow Times, a daily English-language newspaper in Moscow, with forays into Lebanon and Afghanistan.In 1997 Owen became a correspondent for Newsweek magazine, covering the second Chechen war as well as Russian politics and society. From 2001 to 2006 he was based in Istanbul, covering the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and from 2006 – 14 he was Newsweek’s Moscow bureau chief. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Newsweek.

Andrew McCarthy is a director, an award-winning travel writer, and—of course—an actor. He made his professional début at 19 in Class and has appeared in dozens of films, including such iconic movies as Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo’s Fire, Less Than Zero, and cult favorites Weekend At Bernie’s and Mannequin. Both his travel memoir The Longest Way Home (Free Press, 2012) and YA novel Just Fly Away (Algonquin, 2017) were New York Times bestsellers. His latest memoir, Brat: An ’80s Story, will be published by Grand Central on May 11, 2021.

Evelyn McDonnell has been writing about popular culture for more than 30 years. She has been a pop culture writer at The Miami Herald, senior editor at The Village Voice, and associate editor at San Francisco Weekly. Her writing on music, poetry, theater, and culture has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including the Los Angeles Times, Ms., Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Spin, Travel & Leisure, Us, Billboard, Vibe, Interview, Black Book, and Option. She is an Associate Professor in the English Department and Director of the Journalism Program at Loyola Marymount University.

Daniel Metcalfe graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Classics in 2002. Having lived and worked in Iran, and in countries across Central Asia, he now lives in London. Out of Steppe: The Lost Peoples of Central Asia was his first book and was published by Random House in 2009. It was shortlisted for the Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award. His recent travels in Portuguese-speaking Africa and across the African continent have given rise to the highly acclaimed Blue Dahlia, Black Gold: A Journey into Angola (Random House, 2014). Daniel has written for The Economist, Guardian, Financial Times, Foreign Policy and the Literary Review.

Michelle Miller is an Emmy, Gracie, Du Pont, and Murrow award-winning journalist who co-hosts CBS This Morning: Saturday. She first joined CBS News in 2004, and her work is also regularly featured on CBS This Morning, CBS Sunday Morning, and the CBS Evening News.

Sergeant Travis Mills is a Bronze Star winner and a wounded warrior who lost portions of both arms and legs to an IED while on active duty in Afghanistan. Travis is now a motivational speaker and head of the Travis Mills Foundation. He is also the author of Tough as They Come (Crown).

Fashion designer and culture icon, Mizrahi is the recipient of multiple CFDA awards and has designed clothes for film, theater, dance, and opera. He was the subject of the documentary film Unzipped, and currently stars as a judge on Project Runway: All-Stars. Beyond the fashion world, he performed in an off-Broadway cabaret show called Les MiZrahi and directed a recent production of "Peter and the Wolf" at the Guggenheim Museum. He is a regular host on E! and QVC, for which he launched a lifestyle collection in 2012.

Molho, who is Global Emeritus Distinguished Professor, Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, NYU, grew up in a Jewish family in Thessaloniki during World War II.  As the Germans tightened their grip on Northern Greece and the city’s large Jewish population, his parents through luck, spunk, and the kindness of strangers spirited young Tony to a monastery in Athens. His travels saved his life and left searing questions of identity behind.  He’s writing a memoir called Tony’s War: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Greece.

Earl “The Pearl” Monroe is a National Basketball Association legend whose unorthodox, “playground” style of play and high-flying feats on the court have had an enduring impact on the sport. Monroe was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 1990 and named to the NBA’s 50 Greatest Players list in 1996. He is also the author, with Quincy Troupe, of Earl the Pearl: My Story (Rodale).

Internationally renowned action sports star Colten Moore’s memoir Catching the Sky (37 Ink), written with acclaimed journalist Keith O’Brien, is the true story of two brothers from a remote corner of Texas who grew up to become world-class athletes and ATV and snowmobile pioneers. In the wake of his brother Caleb’s tragic death, Colten persevered and won a gold medal in his brother’s honor at the 2014 Winter X Games. Colten repeated this accomplishment at the 2015 Winter X Games in Aspen.

Allison Moorer is a singer-songwriter, producer and author has released ten critically acclaimed albums. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and lives in Nashville. You can learn more about her on her website: www.AllisonMoorer.com.

Tarek El Moussa is the co-star of the hit HGTV show Flip or Flop, currently in its eighth season, with 22 million viewers and ranked the 1 cable show in its time slot, with Season Nine on the way. He also stars in his own solo series on HGTV, Flipping 101 with Tarek El Moussa, and he hosts a digital series, Tarek’s Flip Side. In addition to successfully flipping more than 500 properties over the years, Tarek is a successful entrepreneur, real estate expert, and investor, with a portfolio of over 100 properties, a wholesale real estate company, and a production company. A two-time cancer survivor, today cancer-free, Tarek now donates his time and energy to a number of cancer-focused charities, bringing awareness and aid to those in need. Tarek’s number-one priority is being a hands-on dad and spending time with his wife, Heather Rae, his daughter, Taylor, and his son, Brayden.

Maura Moynihan, the author of Yoga Hotel, and her mother, Elizabeth, oversee the estate of her father, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait In Letters was chosen by the New York Times as one of the top 20 nonfiction books of 2010 and was a Washington Post bestseller.

Bernadette Murphy is an MFA professor, author, former book critic, and collaborative writer. She is the author of the bestselling ZEN AND THE ART OF KNITTING and HARLEY AND ME. Her collaborative writing includes Minka Kelly’s TELL ME EVERYTHING.  Her essays have appeared in LitHub, Ms. Magazine, The Rumpus, Climbing Magazine, New York Observer, and elsewhere. She was a weekly book critic for the Los Angeles Times,and an Associate Professor for the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles, and she currently teaches at The Newport MFA at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island.

Eddie Ndopu is an award winning, internationally acclaimed activist and humanitarian. Diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy at age two and given only five years to live, he has gone on to become a beacon of hope and possibility for people with disabilities around the world. Holding official positions at both the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, he aspires to be the universe’s first physically disabled astronaut.

Joy Neumeyer is a journalist and historian of Russia and Easter Europe. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Vice, and elsewhere.

A renowned soprano who has performed with the world’s most storied opera companies, including the Orchestre de Paris, and the Philharmonics of Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, and London, Norman is the youngest winner of a Kennedy Center Honor, has earned a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and received the National Medal of the Arts from President Barack Obama.

Gravely injured former football player Chris Norton and his wife Emily are an in-demand motivational speakers with a message of hope, resilience and faith.

Vanessa O’Brien is a British-American mountain climber, explorer, public speaker and former business executive. As a result of her dual nationality, she simultaneously became the first American woman and the first British woman to summit K2 on July 28, 2017 when, on her third attempt, she led a team of 12 members to the summit and back. In 2020, Vanessa received a Guinness World Record for becoming the First Woman to Reach Earth’s Highest (Mt. Everest) and Lowest Points (Challenger Deep). She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and an Honorary Advisory Board member of the Scientific and Exploration Society.

The youngest ever recipient of an Oscar for her role in Paper Moon, O’Neal’s first book, A PAPER LIFE, was a New York Times Bestseller. She appeared on Rescue Me and produced and starred in the OWN show Lost and Found with her father Ryan O’Neal.

The founder of O Pictures, Oreck produced hundreds of music videos, many iconic, including for Prince, Madonna, Janet Jackson, Mick Jagger, Chris Isaak, and Sheila E, among many others.

Alice Ozma graduated from Rowan University in the spring of 2010. A New York Times article about the author and her father, a children’s book librarian who read to her every night from the time she was in the 4th grade until the day she left for college, 3,218 nights in all, generated intense public and media interest. Alice Ozma’s first book, The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared, is published by Grand Central.

A former CEO of Reddit and junior partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Pao is a cofounder of the Project Include diversity-in-tech initiative.

A writer who began his career while in Arizona State Prison, Parker received a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University.

Liz Phair is a Grammy-nominated musician and one of music’s most influential artists and feminist pioneer. Her debut record, Exile in Guyville, is considered a landmark in rock music and appears in countless critics “best-of” lists, including, Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time lists. She has written for The New York Times and The Atlantic.

Critically acclaimed actor and social advocate, Pierce is best known for his work as detective Bunk Moreland in The Wire, trombonist Antoine Batiste in Treme, and Michael Davenport in Waiting to Exhale.

Matthew Pockrus received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota.  He is at work on a memoir about his former membership in the Mormon church and his full-time Mormon missionary service in Ukraine from 2012-2014, during the time of the Ukrainian Euromaidan revolution and the Russian annexation of Crimea.  His nonfiction appeared most recently in the literary anthology Blossom as a Cliffrose, his essay, “To Twist and To Turn,” there reflecting upon geology, landscape, and the nature of personal identity. He is a former editor at Great River Review and is co-founder of Prose Online, an online literary magazine focused on accessibility, with Tarik Dobbs.  He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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Parker Posey is an actress known for her roles in Christopher Guest movies like Party Girl, Broken English, Woody Allen’s Irrational Man, Best in Show, and Waiting for Guffman. Posey first broke into Hollywood with her iconic role in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused.

Amelia Possanza’s short fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in outlets like The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and one of her personal essays about queer dating became the subject of a comic interview on NPR’s Invisibilia. Amelia is the Assistant Director of Publicity at Flatiron Books and was named a Publishers Weekly Star Watch nominee. She lives in Brooklyn, where she swims on the world’s largest LGBTQ swim team, Team New York Aquatics.

One of the nation's most notable music critics, Ann Powers has been writing for The Record, NPR's blog about finding, making, buying, sharing and talking about music, since April 2011. Powers served as chief pop music critic at the Los Angeles Timesfrom 2006 until she joined NPR; prior to the Los Angeles Times, she was senior critic at Blender, a pop critic at The New York Times, and a senior editor at The Village Voice. The co-author of Tori Amos’ New York Times bestselling memoir, she won the 42nd annual ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in 2010.

Gene Pressman was co-CEO, creative director, and head of merchandising and marketing for Barneys New York, and a veteran of the store for more than 25 years. Under his leadership, Barneys New York emerged as the defining force in retailing for upscale men’s and women’s ready-to-wear, accessories, and home furnishings. He is the author, with Noah Kerner, of Chasing Cool: Standing Out in Today’s Cluttered Marketplace.

Owner of Regalis Foods, a Brooklyn-based purveyor of exotic foods with an extensive client list of Michelin star restaurants, Purkayastha founded his first truffle company in his home state of Arkansas when he was 15 years old.

Nathan Raab, recognized as one of the world’s most knowledgeable and respected experts in historical documents, is the President of the Raab Collection, the sole high-end, old-fashioned, person-to-person dealer in historical documents still in existence in the United States. His column, Historically Speaking, appears frequently on Forbes.com and his articles and opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer among other publications.

Ari Rabin-Havt served as Deputy Campaign Manager of Bernie Sanders's 2020 Presidential Campaign and Deputy Chief of Staff in his Senate Office. Previously he served as an advisor to Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and former Vice President Al Gore. He is the author of Lies Incorporated: The World of Post Truth Politics and The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today, Jacobin, The Nation and The American Prospect.

Jenny Radcliffe is an expert social engineer using the ‘human element’ to manipulate, persuade and influence people to gain access to buildings, data and information. She is a burglar for hire, con-artist and an expert in non-verbal communications, deception and physical infiltration, hired by companies to test their security measures.

Ladette Randolph is the author of two novels: A Sandhills Ballad, selected as a New York Times Editors Choice; and Haven’s Wake, praised by Booklist: “Randolph thoughtfully contemplates truth in a world of evasiveness.” Her debut short story collection, This Is Not the Tropics, was hailed by the reviewer for Publishers Weekly as “utterly remarkable…Quite honestly, this is the finest collection I’ve seen in years.” Randolph’s most recent book is the memoir Leaving the Pink House. A recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, she is the editor of Ploughshares magazine and teaches at Emerson College.

Emily Ratajkowski is a model, actress, entrepreneur, activist, and writer. She has been photographed for the covers of magazines including Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Vogue Italia, Vogue Australia, Vogue Spain, Vogue Germany, and GQ, and has worked with brands including Versace, Marc Jacobs, and Dolce & Gabbana. She has translated her audience of nearly 27 million Instagram followers into a direct-to-consumer clothing business, Inamorata, and as an actress has appeared in films including I Feel Pretty, We Are Your Friends, and Gone Girl. She campaigned for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, and her essay “Buying Myself Back” for New York magazine went viral in September 2020.