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 is author and illustrator of Water, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town. Her reporting appears in publications including The New York Times and The Atlantic, and on The World radio program and podcast. She's currently working on an illustrated book about cooperative relationships with nature in Japan's satoyama landscapes, where the lines between cultivated and wild blur.

A comedy writer and stand-up comic, Klein was the head writer and executive producer of Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer, and also worked as a writer on Amazon's Transparent. She’s received two Emmy nominations, one for her season writing for Saturday Night Live and one for Inside Amy Schumer.

Rebecca Kling is an educator, transgender rights advocate, and co-founder of the equity consulting firm Better Worlds Collaborative.

A contributing editor at Marie Claire, Kohen has written for New York, Salon, The Daily Beast, The New York Daily News, and The New York Sun.

As the guitarist for the Doors, Robby Krieger is one of the most influential musicians in rock and roll history. Krieger wrote or co-wrote many of the Doors’ greatest hits, including “Light My Fire,” “Love Me Two Times,” and “Love Her Madly”; he is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and was listed by Rolling Stone as one of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time.

Sam Kriss is a writer living in London. He writes for the Spectator, and writes a popular blog, ‘Numb at the Lodge'.

A former professor of history at Carthage College, Kuhn has written extensively about the British monarchy and Victorian high politics.

Laetitia Ky is an activist, artist, and model from the Ivory Coast, who creates sculptures with her hair.

Dana LaRue is the founder of the award-winning blog The Broke-Ass Bride. Her wedding expertise has appeared in Brides, The Bridal Guide, Southern Weddings, OneWed and others, as well as on several television networks. Dana regularly speaks about weddings, entrepreneurship and blogging at conferences both in the US and internationally. She is the author of The Broke-Ass Bride Wedding Guide (Random House).

Carrie Lane is a professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, and the author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment, which won the 2012 Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2012 Book Prize of the Society for Economic Anthropology.

Nico Lang is an award-winning editor and journalist.  Their work has been featured in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Washington Post, Vox, BuzzFeed, Jezebel, The Guardian, Out, The Advocate, and the L.A. Times.

An Academy Awards-winning actress for her roles in Tootsie and Blue Sky, Lange is also the recipient of two Emmys, 5 Golden Globes, and one Sag Award. She currently stars on the hit FX show American Horror Story.

Assistant Professor of Sociology at Swarthmore, Laurison is the co-author of The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged and Social Class in the 21st Century. He is also the Associate Editor of the London School of Economics’ British Journal of Sociology.

Sam Leith was a King’s Scholar at Eton College and took a first in English Literature from Magdalen College, Oxford. He has worked in literary journalism for more than 25 years and has been literary editor of the Spectator since 2016, where he hosts their weekly ‘Book Club’ podcast. Before that he was literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, where he also served at different times as comment editor, senior feature writer, New York correspondent and Peterborough editor. He has been a judge of the Man Booker, Samuel Johnson, David Cohen, Costa, Wingate, Forward and Orwell Prizes (among others), and has chaired or interviewed any number of writers on stage, for broadcast and in print. He has also been a columnist for the Guardian, the FT, Prospect, the Evening Standard, Spears, the Daily Telegraph and Wall Street Journal Europe and lead book reviewer for the Daily Mail. His reviews have appeared regularly in the TLS, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the FT, the Sunday Times (London), the Spectator and UnHerd.

John Lithgow is a Tony, Emmy, and Golden Globe award-winner, a bestselling author, a talented humorist, and a renowned performer. He is best known for his time on the mega-hit NBC comedy 3rd Rock From the Sun, his performances in The Crown and Dexter and his starring roles in The World According to Garp, Terms of Endearment, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Pelican Brief, This is 40, Interstellar, Pet Sematary, Bombshell, and Late Night, among many others.

Emily Lordi is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University and a writer-at-large for the New York Times’s T Magazine. She has published three acclaimed books on Black artistry, with Rutgers University Press, Bloomsbury’s 33⅓ series, and Duke University Press, and her writing as appeared in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and elsewhere.

A bi-weekly magazine, New York covers life, culture, politics, and style with a particular emphasis on New York City. In the past decade, New York has won 34 National Magazine Awards, including six General Excellence awards.

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.

Hugo Huerta Marin is a multi-disciplinary artist and graphic designer based in New York City whose work centers on gender and cultural identity. Since moving to New York in 2012, he has worked for cultural institutions in the United States and Mexico, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Most recently, Hugo has joined the studio of the performance artist Marina Abramović as an art director, with whom he has collaborated internationally for venues across the globe. Hugo's solo exhibitions have been featured at The Hole Gallery in New York, Never Apart Gallery in Montreal, Canada, and MUAC museum in Mexico City. He was also part of the prestigious Casa Nano art residency in Tokyo, Japan in 2019.

Ann Marks spent thirty years as a senior executive in large corporations, including Kraft General Foods and American Express Publishing, serving as Chief Marketing Officer of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal for the last decade of her career. She has BS and MBA degrees from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and has since put her research and analysis skills to use in unearthing the untold story of the renowned 'nanny photographer' Vivian Maier. Vivian Maier Developed is her first book.

A photographer with work in the collections of The Guggenheim, The Whitney, The New Museum, and The Saatchi Collection, Craig-Martin has taught at the School For Visual Arts and had solo shows at PS1/MOMA, White Columns, and throughout Europe. Her photography has appeared in Vogue, New York, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker.

Melissa Auf der Maur is a Canadian award-winning musician and photographer who rose to acclaim as the bassist for Hole and The Smashing Pumpkins before launching her solo career in 2001. Now based in New York, in 2010, Melissa co-founded Basilica Hudson, a multidisciplinary arts center in the Hudson Valley.

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.

With Superchunk bandmate Laura Ballance, Mac McCaughan founded the eminent independent label Merge Records, whose bands include Arcade Fire, Spoon, and Neutral Milk Hotel, among many others.

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.

A professor of history at the University of Connecticut, McElya specializes in the histories of women, gender, race, and sexuality in the U.S. from the Civil War to the present, with an emphasis on political culture and memory. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, on NPR, and elsewhere, and her previous book, The Politics of Mourning, was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Kembrew McLeod is a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. He has published and produced several books and documentaries about music and popular culture, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Slate, Salon, SPIN, MOJO and Rolling Stone. Kembrew’s documentary Copyright Criminals aired on PBS’s Emmy Award-winning Independent Lens series and his 2007 book Freedom Of Expression® received an American Library Association book award. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship to support the writing and research of his book The Downtown Pop Underground.

Maggie Mertens is a journalist with bylines in places like The Atlantic, espnW, NPR, Deadspin, VICE, Teen Vogue, Howler, The Guardian, Glamour, The Cut, Refinery29, and Fast Company, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from The New School, and was nominated for the 2021 Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting.

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Jonathan Van Meter is a contributing editor at Vogue magazine; contributing editor at New York magazine; creator and founding editor-in-chief of Vibe magazine, owned in partnership by Quincy Jones and Time Warner, from 1992-1994; executive producer of Let’s Get Frank (2003), a documentary about former U.S. Representative Barney Frank; and author of the acclaimed book The Last Good Time (Crown Publishing Group).

Jenny Minton is a writer, editor, and literary event curator. Prior to writing full time, Minton was a book editor at several Random House imprints: Delacorte/Dell Publishing, Knopf, Broadway Books, and Vintage/Anchor Books. She is the author of a memoir, The Early Birds (Knopf, 2007), and the daughter of Walter Minton, the storied former President and Publisher of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, who first dared to publish Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov in the U.S. in 1958. Minton lives in West Hartford, CT.

Katie Mitchell is a bookstore owner and podcast host based in Atlanta, Georgia. 

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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.

John Moe is the creator and host of the award-winning podcast The Hilarious World of Depression on American Public Media. Moe has enjoyed a long career in public radio serving as host of national public radio broadcast such as Weekend America,Marketplace Tech Report and from 2010- 2015, Wits. His reporting and commentary has been heard on All Things Considered, Morning Edition., Marketplace, Day to Day, and numerous other public radio programs. His writing has appeared in many humor anthologies as well as in The New York Times Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Seattle Times, MSN and many other publications. He’s the author of three books and a much in-demand public speaker.

Cole Moreton is a writer and broadcaster. His Radio 4 series ‘The Boy Who Gave His Heart Away’ won Audio Moment of the Year at the Arias and Best Writing at the World’s Best Radio awards in New York and was published by HarperCollins in 2017. Cole has made seven highly acclaimed documentaries or series for BBC Radio 4 and was nominated for Best Speech Presenter at the Audio Production Awards in 2018, winning bronze. He appears on ‘Pause For Thought’ with Zoe Ball on the BBC Radio 2 breakfast show. He was named Interviewer of the Year for his work in print with the Mail on Sunday and is the author of five highly acclaimed books.

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Ann Morgan is a freelance writer and editor, formerly working for the Guardian. She blogs for Huffington Post and has written for Australian, the New Internationalist, BBC Music Magazine, the South London Press and the Literary Review. Her debut project The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe, which chronicles Ann’s worldwide reading journey as she samples one book from as many of the world’s 196 independent countries as she can, was published by Harvill Secker in the UK and Liveright/Norton in the US.

Kevin Morris’s debut collection of stories White Man’s Problems was praised by Tom Perrotta who called it a “revelatory collection that marks the arrival of a striking new voice in American fiction.” His critically acclaimed first novel, All Joe Knight, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and heralded by USA Today as “[A] two-fisted debut novel . . . Joe is John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom revised for the Trump era.” The co-producer of the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical The Book of Mormon and the producer of the classic documentary film Hands on a Hard Body, Morris has also written for The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and Filmaker.

Simon Morrison is a musicologist and cultural historian specializing in Russia, a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Music at Princeton University and a Visiting Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Southern California. Author of, most recently, Bolshoi Confidential (Liveright/Norton) and a biography of Lina Prokofiev (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Simon has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the TLS, and Time.

As the lead singer and lyricist for the Doors, Jim Morrison is one of the most legendary and influential figures in rock and roll history. A countercultural icon with a distinctive voice and gift for poetry and prose, he was posthumously honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007 and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, in both cases as a member of the Doors.

Adam Moss spent 15 years at New York magazine and New York Media as editor-in-chief. During his tenure, New York won 41 National Magazine Awards, including Magazine of the Year. Prior to New York, Moss was the editor of The New York Times Magazine from 1998 to 2004, and later oversaw the Magazine, Book Review and Culture and Style sections. He was elected to the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame in 2019.

Dan Nadel is the Curator at Large for the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis. He has been writing about the history of comics for 20 years, having published two histories of the medium and numerous monographs and anthologies; he was the co-editor of The Comics Journal from 2011 through 2017 and his work as a packager has been recognized with a Grammy Award, an Eisner Award, and a NEA Innovation Grant.

National Public Radio is an independent, nonprofit media organization that was founded on a mission to create a more informed public. Every day, NPR connects with millions of Americans on the air, online, and in person to explore the news, ideas, and what it means to be human. Through its network of member stations, NPR makes local stories national, national stories local, and global stories personal.

Alexander Nemerov is the chair of the art and art history department at Stanford University, where he is the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities. He is the author of Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine and Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov.

Real Sports Entertainment Network delivers news and analysis on everything in sports.

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.

A longtime copy editor for The New Yorker, Norris writes frequently for their "Page-Turner" blog.

Jenni Nuttall has been teaching and researching medieval literature at the University of Oxford for the last twenty years, so she’s had a lot of practice at making old words interesting. She is at work on her first trade book about the rich, provocative and entertaining history of women’s words, which explores some surprisingly progressive thinking and challenges our assumptions about the past.

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.

Liesl Olson is the Director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, a national historic landmark on the campus of the University of Illinois-Chicago, and before that was for many years the Director of Chicago Studies at the distinguished Newberry Library. She is also the author of Modernism and the Ordinary and Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis.

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.

ACM serves as a consult and agency of record for the internationally recognized media brand.

Nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Peter Weir’s Fearless, Perez was nominated for two Emmy’s for her choreography on In Living Color. Her film work includes Do The Right Thing and White Men Can’t Jump, and her theater works includes Terrence McNally’s Frankie And Johnny in the Clair de Lune. Perez is the Artistic Chair of Urban Arts Partnership.

Longtime Professor of English at Georgetown University, Pfordresher has written about various pre-Raphaelite writers. He is also a member of the National Council of Teachers of English.

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.

TV host and rock DJ, Pinfield is considered a taste-maker by music industry heavyweights and rock stars alike.