John Tracy Kidder was an acclaimed American nonfiction writer best known for combining literary narrative with journalistic precision. He gained national prominence with The Soul of a New Machine (198…
Ralph Ellison was a scholar and writer. He was born Ralph Waldo Ellison in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, named by his father after Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ellison was best known for his novel Invisible Man, w…
Anne Fadiman is the author, most recently, of the essay collection Frog (2026). Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997), won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Ang…
Audre Lorde was a revolutionary Black feminist. Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s — in Langston Hughes' 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in bla…
Frederick Douglass (né Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey) was born a slave in the state of Maryland in 1818. After his escape from slavery, Douglass became a renowned abolitionist, editor and femin…
Dorothy Roberts is a scholar, professor, author and social justice advocate, and currently the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She has published …
Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. She won both Hugo and Nebula awards. In 1995, she became the fir…
Laura Hillenbrand (born 1967) is the author of the acclaimed Seabiscuit: An American Legend, a non-fiction account of the career of the great racehorse Seabiscuit, for which she won the William Hill S…
GREG MELVILLE is an author, adventure journalist, and tombstone tourist whose writing has appeared in many of the country's top print publications including Outside, Men's Health, National Geographic …
Vicky Beeching is a writer, keynote speaker and equality campaigner. A regular on BBC TV and radio, she often commentates on current affairs, faith and LGBT equality. She has been featured in publicat…
Christina Sharpe is Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects…
Michael Harriot is a columnist at theGrio.com where he covers the intersection of race, politics, and culture. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, The Atlantic, NBC, BET, and on his mother's…
Laurie Forest is a New York Times, USA Today & Internationally Bestselling Author who lives deep in the backwoods of Vermont where she sits in front of a wood stove drinking strong tea and dreaming up…
Kaveh Akbar's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, PBS NewsHour, A Public Space, Guernica, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent…
Deirdre Cooper Owens is The Charles and Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and Director of the Humanities in Medicine program. She is also an Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) …
Tommy Orange is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is a 2014 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow. He is an enrolled member of the Ch…
Jonathan Van Ness is a Critics' Choice Award winning, Emmy nominated television personality, podcaster, and hairstylist to the stars. He can be seen starring on Netflix's Emmy Award-winning reboot ser…
Alice Wong (she/her) was a disabled activist, media maker, and consultant based in San Francisco. She was the Founder and Director of the Disability Visibility Project® (DVP), an online community dedi…
Emily Ladau is an internationally known disability rights activist, speaker, and author of Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to be an Ally. She is the editor in chief of the …
Gretchen Sisson, PhD, is a sociologist who studies abortion and adoption in the United States. She is a researcher at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, part of the Department of Obstetri…
Antonia Hylton is the author of MADNESS: Race and Insanity in Jim Crow Asylum. She’s a Peabody and two-time Emmy award-winning Correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC and the cohost of the hit podcasts S…
