Mother of bestselling authors John Elder Robison and Augusten Burroughs, Robison has published six volumes of poetry.

Geena Rocero is a model, writer, producer, transgender advocate, and public speaker, born and raised in Manila, Philippines. Geena is the founder of Gender Proud, a media production company that tells stories on what it means to be trans and gender non-conforming. She is the first trans woman ambassador for Miss Universe Nepal; the first trans Asian Playboy Playmate; and the first trans woman to be named a Playboy Playmate of the Year. Geena is also a board member of the NY LGBT Center and the 2020 National Chair for Stonewall Day in June. On March 31, 2014, in honor of International Transgender Day of Visibility, Geena came out as transgender in an instantly viral TEDTalk. Her speech has since been viewed close to five million times, and has been translated into thirty-two languages.

A multi-platinum, Grammy Award-winning music producer, songwriter, and member of Chic, Rodgers has written and produced for Madonna, David Bowie, Diana Ross, Duran Duran, Cyndi Lauper, Peter Gabriel, Sheena Easton, Jeff Beck, and Mick Jagger, among many others and is a 2014 Grammy Award winner for Record of the Year and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance for "Get Lucky."

DJ, songwriter, and record producer Mark Ronson has won seven Grammy Awards, including two for his eleven-times platinum single “Uptown Funk” featuring Bruno Mars. In 2019, he received an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for the song “Shallow,” which he wrote with Lady Gaga for the film A Star is Born. Mark has collaborated with Amy Winehouse, Miley Cyrus, and Adele, among numerous other artists.

An american painter and printmaker, Salle has helped define postmodernism. His work can be found at MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Tate Modern, among other places.

A Yemeni peace activist, Al Samawi is interested in interfaith dialogue and cross-cultural outreach. He is a frequent public speaker and lecturer on the war in Yemen, the refugee crisis, and extremism in the Middle East.

Suzanne Scanlon is an MFA/MA candidate and Litowitz Fellow in Creative Writing at Northwestern University. She is the author of Promising Young Women (Dorothy, 2012), a novel in stories, and 37th Year, an Index (Noemi, 2015), a fictional memoir in the form of an index. She is at work on Committed, a memoir about madness in life and literature, for Vintage.

Erika Schickel is an author, journalist, and essayist and has written for such publications as Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, LA Weekly, LA City Beat, LA Observed.com, Bust Magazine, The Huffington Post, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. Erika’s first book, You’re Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom (2007), was a People Magazine pick and a Walmart “Latest and Greatest” book.

Creator, co-producer, co-writer and star of the sketch comedy series Inside Amy Schumer, comedian and actress Schumer won a Peabody Award and was nominated for seven Primetime Emmy Awards, winning for Outstanding Variety Sketch Series, in 2015. Schumer also wrote, starred in, and produced the Judd Apatow directed movie Trainwreck in 2015.

Laurie Segall is an award-winning investigative journalist known for her interviews with tech founders. Formerly the senior technology correspondent for CNN, she developed and hosted a series of docuseries that explored the impact of technology on sex, love, and death.

Hannah Selinger is a sommelier and lifestyle journalist based in New York and Massachusetts.  She is a 2022 James Beard finalist for the MLK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award and was a 2020 IACP Award finalist in Narrative Beverage Writing

Tom Selleck is an actor and producer best known for his roles as Thomas Magnum on the original Magnum P.I. television series, Dr. Richard Burke, Monica’s older boyfriend on Friends, and NYPD Commissioner Frank Reagan on the hit crime drama Blue Bloods. He has also made numerous films including Three Men and A Baby, in which he played Peter Mitchell, The Closer, and Mr. Baseball.

Elizabeth Shackelford was a foreign service officer with the State Department in Poland, Washington, South Sudan, and Somalia. She resigned in 2017 protest of President Trump’s policies in a letter to former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, which went viral, and she now works as an international human rights consultant.

Humaira Awais Shahid is the author of the memoir Devotion and Defiance: My Fight for Justice for Women. A Pakistani legislator, journalist, and human rights activist, she was a spokesperson for the International Violence against Women Act and was a 2009–2010 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.

Maurice “Mopreme" Shakur is a critically acclaimed, multi-platinum performer, writer, and producer. Best knownfor his collaborations on every album of his late brother Tupac and his work developing THUG LIFE and the Thug Code, Shakur has produced several documentaries, series, and films about Tupac in the years following his death. The only surviving member of both THUG LIFE and the Outlaw Immortalz, Shakur is currently pro-ducing a feature documentary about the influence of THUG LIFE, developing a video game, producing a scripted series and three feature films, and writing his memoir.

Alan Shapiro is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently Reel to Reel. He is also the author of the memoirs The Last Happy Occasion and Vigil, and the novel Broadway Baby. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Kingsley Tufts Award, and he was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Nina Sharma is a writer and performer whose work has been featured in journals such as the New Yorker, Electric Literature, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Longreads, The Margins, and Teachers & Writers Magazine. Nina is formerly the Programs Director at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and is currently a professor in the English Department of Barnard College, where she teaches "Women and Comedy."

White hat lobbyist Tom Sheridan is described as a “powerbroker for those without a voice.” A social worker by training and an advocate by trade, Tom brings a unique perspective to his work as one of Washington’s most senior political and public policy strategists. Tom is known on Capitol Hill and in the West Wing for using his deep understanding of the political process and decades-long relationships with senior members of Congress and top Administration officials to help organizations achieve scalable, positive social change.

A former member of the Maryland House of Delegates, Shriver is Save The Children’s Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives and Senior Advisor to the CEO.

Jagadish Shukla is a Distinguished University Professor and the Founding Chairman of the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences at George Mason University. He has made fundamental contributions to the study of climate dynamics and was one of the lead authors of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Vice President Gore.

Academy Award nominee for Best Actress, Sidibe made her acting debut in the film Precious. Since then, she has appeared in hits such as The Big C and American Horror Story. She can currently be seen in the role of Becky on Empire.

Rachel Signer is the founder and publisher of Pipette magazine, an independent natural-wine print magazine, and internationally known journalist and expert on natural wine. She lives in Australia where she and her husband, Anton Von Klopper, make a limited production of Lucy Margaux and Persephone wines.

A former Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, Simpson worked at the dictionary for thirty-seven years and served as Chief Editor for twenty of them. He co-created the online journal James Joyce Online Notes and lectures on lexicography around the world.

Safiya Sinclair is the author of the memoir How to Say Babylon, winner of the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award and a Read with Jenna BookClub/Today Show pick.  It was named a A Best Book of 2023 by The Washington Post, The New Yorker, TIME, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Times, NPR, Harper’s Bazaar, Vulture, Town & Country, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, Mother Jones, and Barack Obama. Tara Westover, bestselling author of Educated called it, "Dazzling. Potent. Vital. A light shining on the path of self-deliverance." How to Say Babylon is a shortlist finalist for the inaugural Women's Prize for Nonfiction, formerly the Orange Prize awarded for fiction.

Sinclair's debut poetry collection, Cannibal, won a Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the OCM Boca Prize for Caribbean Poetry, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.

Sinclair received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia, where she studied with Rita Dove, and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California.  She is currently Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

Chris Smalls is the founder and president of the Amazon Labor Union, an independent, democratic, worker-led labor union at Amazon in Staten Island.

Barry Sonnenfeld is a film and television director. Among his film credits are the three Men in Black movies; the two Addamms Family movies; Get Shorty. For television he has directed and produced Pushing Daisies and A Series of Unfortunate Events among many others.

Kevin Sorbo is an actor best known for his roles as Hercules in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Captain Dylan Hunt in Andromeda, and Kull in Kull the Conqueror. He is a spokesperson for the nonprofit organization A World Fit For Kids and author of the widely praised autobiography True Strength (Da Capo).

Beck Dorey-Stein spent five years as a White House Stenographer. Prior to transcribing President Obama and Trump, she taught high school English. Beck graduated from Wesleyan University, where she worked in undergraduate admissions and served as captain of the women's lacrosse team.

Comedian, director, and producer, Steinberg guest-hosted the Johnny Carson show 130 times, more than anyone else, and has directed countless episodes of Golden Girls, Friends, Seinfeld, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Dr. Adam Philip Stern is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Director of Psychiatric Applications at the Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation. His writing has been published in The New York Times, NPR.org, The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, The American Journal of Psychiatry, and Biological Psychiatry in addition to many other outlets and peer-reviewed journals.

Emily Strasser is the author of Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History, a deeply researched memoir that traces her journey to reckon with the toxic legacies of secrecy of her grandfather’s work building nuclear weapons in the atomic city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She is the winner of the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest, the 2024 Reed Prize in Environmental Writing from the Southern Environmental Law Center, and the AWP Intro Award, and she has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, Vassar College, and Colgate University.

Emily’s work has appeared in Catapult, Ploughshares, Guernica, Colorado Review, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere She was also the presenter of the 2020 BBC podcast “The Bomb.” Emily is based in Minneapolis, where she received her MFA from the University of Minnesota.

Pastors Darryl Strawberry and Tracy Strawberry are a husband-and-wife team who founded Strawberry Ministries, Straw Marketing, LLC, and the Darryl Strawberry Foundation and co-authored The Imperfect Marriage: Help For Those Who Think It’s Over (Howard Books). Darryl is a baseball legend, former New York Mets slugger, and home run leader who won four World Series titles and became an eight-time National League All-Star player.

Cheryl Strayed is the internationally acclaimed author of the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail; Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar; and Brave Enough. The New York Times Book Review hailed Wild as “a literary and human triumph." It has sold over four million copies and has been translated into more than forty languages. Wild became a major motion picture starring Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern. 

Strayed’s New York Times bestseller Tiny Beautiful Things has been embraced by readers worldwide. The Hulu series based on the book premiered in 2023, and an Off-Broadway play has been staged nationwide. Her book Brave Enough collects more than one hundred of her inspiring quotations. Strayed is also the author of the debut novel Torch and co-host of two hit podcasts, Sugar Calling and Dear Sugars.

Cheryl Strayed’s stories and essays have been published in The Best American Essays, the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Vogue, Salon, and elsewhere and have been widely anthologized. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Ericka Suzanne, a graduate of Spelman College, has spent more than a decade working in the arts. The daughter of two leading members of the Black Panther Party, Elaine Brown and Raymond Masai Hewitt, Ericka is under contract as co-executive producer with Laurence Fishburne for Party Girls, a Freeform network show based on her childhood.

Emma Tarlo is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Having authored numerous highly regarded academic titles, she published her first trade title, the prize-winning Entanglement, to great acclaim in 2016, and has recently curated ‘Hair: Untold Stories’, an exhibition at the Horniman Museum.

CeCé Telfer is a Jamaican-American athlete and the first openly transgender woman to win aNCAA title. Her story has been covered by the New York Times, ESPN, CBS Sports, PEOPLE, Forbes, Women’s Health, and many other media outlets. She is an outspoken advocate for the rights of trans-athletes and has her sights set on the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

Noa Tishby is an Israeli actress, producer, and activist. She starred on the hit Israeli television show Ramat Aviv Gimmel, and created a pathway for Israeli content to be sold into the United States entertainment industry. An unofficial ambassador for the State of Israel, Tishby helped found “Act for Israel,” the first online rapid-response advocacy group devoted to correcting misinformation about Israel and the Middle East.

Caroline Tracey holds a PhD in geography from the University of California, Berkeley and a BA In Russian literature from Yale University. Her reporting,essays, and academic research have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Journal of Latino and Latin American Studies, among other publications. She has been awarded a Silvers Foundation grant, a Fulbright fellowship, and Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Fellowship in Human and Civil Rights Journalism. Caroline currently works as an editor at Zócalo Public Square and as an independent journalist covering the Southwestern US and Mexico.

Joe Tracini is an actor, comedian, magician and writer. Born in 1988, he grew up with no friends feeling more hollow than an easter egg – which turned out to be handy, because his childhood of being alone prepared him for a lifetime of feeling it. He's the son of comedian Joe Pasquale, and was performing on stage at the end of his father's shows at five years old as a mini-Joe Pasquale. By 2012, he was snorting £2,500 worth of cocaine a week, and nearly dying of organ failure. In rehab – after a suicide attempt pushed him to find out just what was going wrong – he realized that he was the problem, and was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, a mental illness that affects nearly 1% of the population. Properly treated, he grew to – mostly – learn to live with himself, despite hating himself. He’s now eight-years clean and five-years sober, and working hard on his recovery.His videos about living with BPD have had over 40 million views, and his approach to mental health – honest, open, vulnerable and self-deprecating – has been praised widely by public and media alike.

Ly Tran graduated from Columbia University with a degree in creative writing and linguistics. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Art Omi, and Yaddo. House of Sticks, winner of the New York City Book Awards Hornblower Award, is her first book.

Phuc Tran is a tattoo artist and co-owner of Tsunami Tattoo in Portland, Maine, where he also teaches Latin at Waynflete School. He has taught Latin, Greek, German, and Sanskrit at independent schools in New York and Maine and is a former instructor at Brooklyn College's Summer Latin Institute. See his TEDx talk on “Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive” here. His first book, Sigh, Gone, is the winner of the 2021 Maine Literary Award & 2020 New England Book Award.

Quincy Troupe is an awarding-winning author of ten volumes of poetry, three children’s books, and six non-fiction works.

Gabrielle Union is an actress and activist. Currently she stars as the titular character in the critically acclaimed drama Being Mary Jane on BET. She is an outspoken activist for women’s reproductive health and victims of sexual assault. She lives in Miami, Florida.

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. From 2006-13 Sudhir worked for The Economist Group 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.Sudhir divides his time between Mauritius, where his wife currently lives, and Singapore, their permanent home. He is currently working on a book about China and India.

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. For the best part of four decades he’s been a voice on the BBC’s airwaves or a presence on TV screens.