Mike Pitts is an English writer, journalist and archaeologist. He is the author of several books on subjects including British prehistory, Stonehenge (where he has directed excavations), human evolution and the discovery of Richard III’s grave, and was formerly the editor of British Archaeology magazine. His writing has appeared in numerous UK newspapers and magazines, and his research articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Nature and Antiquity. His first broadcast was a drama for BBC Radio 4. He has written and presented documentary series for Radio 4, and regularly appears in TV documentaries and arts magazine programme on Radio 3 and 4. He is an experienced public speaker.

In 2000, he was jointly awarded the British Archaeology Press Award, and Digging up Britain won the 2023 Archaeological Institute of America’s Felicia A Holton Book Award for a major work of public nonfiction. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Dr. Deborah Plummer is a psychology professor and diversity management thought leader who currently serves as Vice Chancellor Diversity & Inclusion/Chief Diversity Officer at UMass Medical School and UMass Memorial Health Care. Dr. Plummer is a nationally recognized authority on cross-racial friendships, racial identity development, and managing diverse work environments.

Cezary Podkul is an award-winning investigative reporter with over a dozen years of experience producing ambitious, data-driven stories for news outlets including Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and, most recently, ProPublica. Cezary has covered everything from oil markets to mortgage rent fraud, healthcare and human trafficking and taught journalism at Columbia Journalism School and Hong Kong University. He is the author of the forthcoming The Big Trace — a character-driven nonfiction thriller that will expose the dark world of Southeast Asian scam compounds staffed by human trafficking victims and their unsuspecting fraud targets in the U.S. and around the world.  

The Editor-in-Chief of Art in America, Pollock reported on the art world for The New York Sun and Bloomberg.

Joe Pompeo is a critically acclaimed narrative nonfiction author and award-winning magazine journalist. He was a senior correspondent at Vanity Fair for a number of years and previously worked at publications including Politico and The New York Observer. He's also written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York, Bloomberg Businessweek, and many other outlets.

Alana S. Portero is a transgender Spanish activist and writer.

An investigative journalist and author, Posner has written twelve books, including the New York Times bestsellers, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer in History, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11, and God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican. His wife, author Trisha Posner, works with him on all his projects.

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.

Daily Beast columnist and contributor to Forbes, The Atlantic, The Economist, and elsewhere, Poulos has appeared as a commentator on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher and MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes. He earned his PhD from Georgetown University, where he conducted research as a fellow of the Tocqueville Forum and the Bradley Foundation.

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.

Paul Pringle is an investigative journalist with the Los Angeles Times and a recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize—most recently in 2019—and the George Polk Award, among other honors. In Sunlight and Shadow is his first book.

Associate Professor of Philosophy at SUNY (Cortland), Sebastian Purcell studied Aristotle and the French philosophical tradition before concentrating on the philosophy of pre-Columbian civilizations. Winner of the the American Philosophical Association’s prize in Latin American Thought, he is one of the leading experts in the world on the philosophy of the Aztecs.

Nick Pyenson is a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution where he studies the evolution and ecology of whales. Along with his scientific collaborators, he has named over a dozen new fossil species, discovered the richest fossil whale graveyard on the planet, and described an entirely new sensory organ in living whales. He has received the highest research awards from the Smithsonian for his work, including the Secretary’s Research Prize and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Barack Obama’s Administration. Pyenson is also a member of the Young Scientists community at the World Economic Forum, and the father of two young kids.

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.

A documentary filmmaker and screenwriter, Rader wrote the screenplay for Waterworld.

Co-founder of The Atavist, a boutique digital publisher of nonfiction, and a co-writer of Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World, Ratliff has written for Wired, The New Yorker, the New York TimesMagazine, and ReadyMade, among other publications.

Erik Rebain is an archivist who works for the Chicago Tribune and Chicago History Museum. 

Ashanté Reese is a writer, anthropologist, and assistant professor of African and African Diaspora at The University of Texas at Austin. Her first book, Black Food Geographies (2020) won the Best Monograph Prize from the Association for the Study of Food and Society & the Margaret Mead Award jointly awarded by the Association of American Anthropologists and the Society for Applied Anthropology. Her work work has been supported by the National Science Foundations, The Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly known as the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), UNCF-Mellon, The American Council for Learned Society, among others.

Richard V. Reeves is President of the American Institute for Boys and Men, and Non Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. His research focuses on social mobility, inequality, and family change. He is also a contributor to the Atlantic, National Affairs, Democracy Journal, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

His previous roles include director of strategy to the British Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, director of Demos, the London-based political think-tank, Director of Futures at the Work Foundation, principal policy advisor to the Minister for Welfare Reform, Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research, and researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London. He is also a former European Business Speaker of the Year.

He earned a BA from Oxford University and a PhD from Warwick University.

A writer-at-large for Vanity Fair, Reginato has written for Architectural Digest, Harper’s Bazaar, and Sotheby’s, among other publications. He also worked as Features Director at W Magazine.

Daphna Renan is the Peter B. Munroe and Mary J. Munroe Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Her work focuses on the U.S. presidency and the design of American democracy from the perspective of administrative and structural constitutional law.  She is writing a book with Nikolas Bowie currently titled Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People for Liveright.

The New York Post’s eminent theatre critic since 1998, Riedel co-hosts the weekly talk show Theatre Talk on PBS. He also played himself on the TV show Smash.

Amanda Ripley is a contributing writer at the Atlantic, a senior fellow at the Emerson Collective and the author of The Smartest Kids in the World—and How They Got That Way, a New York Times bestseller. Her first book, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why, was published in 15 countries and turned into a PBS documentary.

Jessica Riskin is a historian of science, and Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University in the United States. She is also the Jean-Paul Gimon Director of the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Stanford. She was educated at Harvard and UC Berkeley, and has taught at Iowa State, MIT and Sciences Po, Paris. She is a regular contributor to a number of publications, including Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.

Alice Robb is the author of Why We Dream (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) and has written for The New Republic, New York, The New Statesman, The Atlantic, Elle, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Vice, The BBC and British Vogue. Her work has been republished by Slate, CNN, The Week, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and Town & Country. She graduated from Oxford with a BA in Archaeology and Anthropology.

Karin Roffman has taught literature at Yale, West Point, and Bard, and is the author of From the Modernist Annex and The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

James Romm is an author, reviewer, and the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College in Annandale, NY. His books include Ghost on the Throne, Dying Every Day, and the forthcoming Love’s Warriors, and his writing on the ancient world has appeared in The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Review of Books, and the Daily Beast, among others.

Born in London in 1971, Neil Root has published several non-fiction crime books and is an expert on the history of UK Crime in the 20th century. He has written literary criticism on Aldous Huxley, James Baldwin, and Truman Capote, and a primer and critical guide to the true crime genre. His journalism has featured in national newspapers and magazines including the BBC News Magazine and Sunday Mirror. He has also contributed to several true crime TV documentaries.

Allegra Rosenberg is a writer and journalist living in Brooklyn. A graduate of NYU's Experimental Humanities MA program, she covers digital culture and fandom for publications such as Polygon, The Verge, and Insider. In her spare time she plays indie rock music, produces alternative comedy, and researches the history of polar exploration.

Hazel Rowley was the highly acclaimed author of numerous books including Tête à Tête: The Tumultuous Lives & Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (HarperCollins) and Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Richard Rubin is  a historian and the author of two accounts of America’s involvement in the First World War, The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War, and Back Over There, and a memoir of a year spent in the deep south, Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Travel section and to the Atlantic. He has also written for the New Yorker, New York Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine. From 2008 to 2010, he was the Viebranz Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY.

A professor at Occidental College, Russell has a Ph.D. in American history and has taught at Columbia University and The New School.

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.

An English professor at West Point, Samet received her BA from Harvard and her PhD from Yale. Soldier’s Heart won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest and was also named one of The New York Times’s 100 Notable Books in 2007.

The Washington Post’s Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa were key reporters on the newspaper’s award-winning series George Floyd’s America and contributors to the well-received Post Reports podcast episode on Floyd’s life.Samuels has earned distinction for his intimate reporting style while writing on-the-ground stories about politics, policy and the American identity, and contributed a chapter to The Post’s best-selling book, Trump Revealed. Samuels grew up in the Bronx and is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. At the Miami Herald, Samuels won several statewide awards for feature writing as an enterprise reporter. Since joining The Post in 2011, he has been a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and the Toner Prize for National Political Reporting, the nation’s premier award for political reporting.

María Sánchez is a Spanish writer and field veterinarian and the author of Cuaderno de campo (Field Notebook), Almáciga: Un vivero de palabras de nuestro medio rural (Seedbed), and Tierra de mujeres: Una mirada íntima y familiar al mundo rural (Land of Women), a bestseller in Spain, with translations into French and German. Her poetry and prose have been translated into French, Portuguese, English, and German, and she is a regular contributor to publications on literature, feminism, and rural culture.

Julian Sancton is a writer and editor based in New York. He has worked for publications including Vanity Fair, Esquire, Bloomberg Businessweek, and is currently the senior features editor at Departures. His formative years were split between the United States and France.

Donald Sassoon is Emeritus Professor of Comparative European History at Queen Mary, University of London. He was born in Cairo and educated in Paris, Milan, London and the USA. He obtained his PhD under Eric Hobsbawm’s supervision. In 2019, he won the Acqui Award of History (Premio Acqui Storia) for lifetime achievement in the field of history.

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.

The author of five nonfiction books, Schneider has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, Elle, and O: The Oprah Magazine, among other publications.

The co-author with Sam Kashner of Hollywood Kryptonite: The Bulldog, the Lady, and the Death of Superman – which the movie "Hollywoodland" was based on – and of Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century, Schoenberger is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the College of William and Mary.

A journalist at The New Yorker covering culture and the arts, Michael has written features, reviews, and over 50 "Talk of the Town" pieces. He is the theatre editor of Goings On About Town, and an ongoing contributor to the New York Times.

Erich Schwartzel is an entertainment reporter at the Wall Street Journal’s Los Angeles bureau, where he covers all the major studios and theater chains and focuses on the growing entanglement of China and Hollywood. Before moving west, he spent several years covering fracking in Appalachia for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; his investigative work there won the Scripps Howard Award for Environmental Reporting.

Jane Scovell is the author of collaborative biographies with, among others, Elizabeth Taylor, Maureen Stapleton, Ginger Rogers, Marilyn Horne, Kitty Dukakis, QVC host Kathy Levine, and Tim Conway. She has also written biographies of Oona O’Neill Chaplin and Samuel Ramey. Her books Elizabeth Takes Off (Putnam), It’s Better to Laugh (Atria), Now You Know (Simon & Schuster), What’s So Funny? (Howard Books), and Oona: Living in the Shadows (Warner Books) made the New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller lists. Her articles have appeared in The Boston Globe, the Sunday New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Travel and Leisure, and Opera News. She is currently at work on a dramatization of A Hell of a Life based on her book with Maureen Stapleton.

Variety New York Bureau Chief and former Newsweek Senior Writer, Setoodeh has written more than 20 cover stories on celebrities such as George Clooney, Bill Murray, Jake Gyllenhaal, Barbara Walters, Rosie O’Donnell, and Megyn Kelly.

Shabtai Shavit served in Israeli intelligence for 32 years, where he rose to become the Director of Mossad from 1989-1996. He received a Master’s in Public Administration from Harvard University’s The Kennedy School of Government and is currently the Chairman of the International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism (ICT) at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel.

Kathleen Sheppard is a multi award-winning Associate Professor of History at Missouri S&T, and has been on faculty at the American University in Cairo. As a historian of science whose work crosses a number of disciplinary boundaries, she is the author of numerous academic articles and three academic books; WOMEN IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS is her first trade book.

An amateur boxer, MMA fighter, and student of Muay Thai and Jujitsu, Sheridan has also worked as a wildland firefighter, Merchant Marine, and has written for Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and Men’s Journal.

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.

Lauren Shields earned a dual degree in Religious Studies and Film and Television from Florida State University, and worked in the east coast film business before returning to school to earn her Master of Divinity from Emory University. She is a pastor at Campbell United Church of Christ in California, and is interested in the intersection of popular culture, feminism, and modern religion.

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.

Gay rights advocate Marc Solomon is the author of the definitive history Winning Marriage: The Inside Story of How Same-Sex Couples Took on the Politicians and Pundits—and Won (ForeEdge). He served as National Campaign Director of Freedom to Marry until its dissolution in 2015 after the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic ruling in favor of marriage equality. He was also executive director of MassEquality from 2006 to 2009.

Colin Spoelman is a former rooftop moonshiner from Kentucky who founded Kings County Distillery with David Haskell in 2010. He is co-author of The Guide to Urban Moonshining and Dead Distillers. Spoelman also works in architecture.

Douglas Starr is a veteran journalist and co-director of the Graduate Program in Science Journalism at Boston University. His book, The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science (Knopf, 2010), tells the story of the 19th-century pioneers of forensic science and the notorious serial killer they caught and convicted with scientific techniques. The book won the Gold Dagger award in the UK, was a finalist for the Edgar Allen Poe award in the US, and appeared on the New York Times Book Review’s “Editor’s Choice” list and the True Crime bestseller lists of the Wall Street Journal and Library Journal. His previous book, BLOOD: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce (Knopf, 1998), tells the four-century saga of how human blood became a commodity.Professor Starr’s writings about science, the history of science and science in public policy have appeared in many venues, including The New Yorker, WIRED, SLATE, the New Republic, Discover, Science, Smithsonian, Public Television, National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine.

A writer and independent curator who specializes in postwar American art, Stein is a former arts reviewer for NPR’s Fresh Air and Morning Edition, and she writes regularly for Art in America. She has also written for The New York Times Book Review and other publications, and her work on Richard Bellamy earned a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.

Todd Stern is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution concentrating on climate change, and advising about ongoing efforts on climate change at both the international and domestic levels. Stern served as the special envoy for climate change at the Department of State and as President Obama’s chief climate negotiator, leading the U.S. effort in negotiating the Paris Agreement and in all bilateral and multilateral climate negotiations in the seven years leading up to Paris. Stern has taught and lectured at Yale Law School and Brown Universities. He has written for various publications, including The Washington Post, The Atlantic,The American Interest, and The Washington Quarterly and has appeared on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, and NPR, among others.

Stillman’s books include Blood Brothers (Ohioana Book Award Winner; Kirkus Reviews, starred review; “Best of the West 2018,” True West Magazine); Desert Reckoning (winner of the Spur and LA Press Club Awards for Nonfiction, an Amazon Editors Pick, based on a Rolling Stone piece), and Mustang, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. In addition, she wrote the cult classic, Twentynine Palms, a Los Angeles Times bestseller that Hunter Thompson called “A strange and brilliant story by an important American writer.” She's a member of the core faculty at the UC Riverside-Palm Desert MFA Low Residency Creative Writing Program, where she teaches nonfiction.