Sasha Abramsky is an author, freelance journalist, lecturer at the University of California, and a senior fellow at Demos. His work has appeared in the Nation, Atlantic Monthly, New York magazine, American Prospect, Salon, Slate, NewYorker.com, LA Weekly, Village Voice, Daily Beast, and Rolling Stone. His 2013 book, The American Way of Poverty, was listed as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and his 2015 volume, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, was selected by Kirkus as one of the best nonfiction books of the year. Abramsky lives in Sacramento, California, with his wife and their two children.

Jill Filipovic is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and a regular columnist for Cosmopolitan.com, where she was previously a senior political writer. A former columnist for the Guardian, she is also an attorney. Her work on law, politics, gender and foreign affairs has appeared in the Washington Post, Time, Nation, Foreign Policy and others.

Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015) was one of Latin America’s most distinguished writers. A Uruguayan journalist, writer, and novelist, he was considered, among other things, “a literary giant of the Latin American left” and “global soccer’s preeminent man of letters.” He is the author of the three-volume Memory of Fire, Open Veins of Latin America, Soccer in Sun and Shadow, The Book of Embraces, Walking Words, Upside Down, and Voices in Time. Born in Montevideo in 1940, he lived in exile in Argentina and Spain for years before returning to Uruguay. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. He is the recipient of many international prizes, including the first Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, the Casa de las Americas Prize, and the First Distinguished Citizen of the region by the countries of Mercosur. Galeano once described himself as “a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia.” Isabel Allende, who said her copy of Galeano’s book was one of the few items with which she fled Chile in 1973 after the military coup of Augusto Pinochet, called Open Veins of Latin America “a mixture of meticulous detail, political conviction, poetic flair, and good storytelling.”

Sarah Jaffe is a Nation Institute fellow and an independent journalist covering labor, economic justice, social movements, politics, gender, and pop culture. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Salon, The Week, American Prospect, Washington Post, Atlantic, and The New Republic, where she is a contributing writer. She is the co-host, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast, as well as an editorial board member at Dissent and a columnist at New Labor Forum. Jaffe was formerly a staff writer at In These Times and the labor editor at AlterNet. She was a contributing editor on The 99%: How the Occupy Wall Street Movement Is Changing America, from AlterNet books, as well as a contributor to the anthologies At the Tea Party and Tales of Two Cities, both from OR Books. She was also the web director at GRITtv with Laura Flanders.

Ibram X. Kendi is an award-winning scholar and a New York Times bestselling author. He is Professor of History and International Relations and the Founding Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. His second book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, won the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction. At 34 years old, he was the youngest ever winner of the NBA for Nonfiction. Stamped from the Beginning was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and it was nominated for a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a NAACP Image Award. Stamped was named to several Best Books of 2016 lists, including by the Boston Globe, The Root, the Washington Post, and Buzzfeed.

Kendi is the author of the award-winning book, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972. He has published essays in numerous periodicals, including the New York Times, Salon, Time, the Washington Post, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He has provided commentary on a host of local, national, and international radio and television outlets, including NPR, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al-Jazeera, Democracy Now, and Sirius XM. He has received research fellowships, grants, and visiting appointments from a variety of universities, foundations, professional associations, and libraries, including the Library of Congress, National Academy of Education, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Brown University, and Princeton University. He was named to The Root 100 2017, and recognized as the most 29th most influential African American between the ages of 25 and 45. His next book, which will be published by One World/Random House, is tentatively titled, How to Be an Antiracist: A Memoir of My Journey.

Nomi Prins is a journalist, speaker, respected TV and radio commentator, and former Wall Street executive. The author of six books, including All the Presidents’ Bankers, Other People’s Money, and It Takes a Pillage, her writing has been featured in the New York Times, Fortune, Mother Jones, Guardian, and Nation, among others. She was a member of Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) Federal Reserve Reform Advisory Council, and is on the advisory board of the whistle-blowing organization ExposeFacts.

Jeremy Scahill is one of the three founding editors of The Intercept. He is an investigative reporter, war correspondent, and author of the international bestselling books Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield and Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere across the globe. Scahill has served as the national security correspondent for The Nation and Democracy Now!.

Scahill’s work has sparked several congressional investigations and won some of journalism’s highest honors. He was twice awarded the prestigious George Polk Award, in 1998 for foreign reporting and in 2008 for Blackwater. Scahill is a producer and writer of the award-winning film Dirty Wars, which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.

Mychal Denzel Smith is a Knobler Fellow at the Nation Institute and a contributing writer for the Nation magazine. He has also written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon, Feministing.com, The Guardian, The Root, theGrio, ThinkProgress, and Huffington Post, and he has been a featured commentator on NPR, BBC radio, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera America, HuffPost Live, and a number of other radio and television programs.