Aalyia Sadruddin is an Assistant Professor of Cultural and Medical Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching interests focus on the critical study of health, demographic transitions and everyday practices of care in postconflict societies.

Abiodun Oyewole is a poet, teacher and a founding member of the American music and spoken-word group the Last Poets, which laid the groundwork for the emergence of Hip-Hop. Every Sunday for the past 30 years, Oyewole has opened his home to feed his fellow artists with food for thought, body and soul. During these sessions, Oyewole critiques, shares life experiences and a love of poetry with poets, writers and musicians from around the world.

Adrian Todd Zuniga is the author of the debut novel, Collision Theory (Rare Bird Books, 2018), a Foreword Indies Finalist for Fiction and a St. Louis Post-Dispatch best-seller.

Before leaving journalism for a career as a private investigator specializing in international financial fraud, Catherine Collins was a reporter and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and a contributor to The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. She has written several nonfiction books with her husband, Douglas Frantz, including The Man from Pakistan and Death on the Black Sea. Douglas Frantz is a former managing editor of the Los Angeles Times and shared a Pulitzer Prize as a foreign correspondent at The New York Times.