Biography

Hannah Bowyer-Rivette brings over four years of experience working in remote operations management to her role at Honored. Most recently, she served as the COO/Director of Ops at SystemsUp, providing back-end support to growing online businesses. Her expertise includes strategic planning and process optimization. With a bachelor’s degree in Musical Theatre from Emory & Henry College, Hannah brings a blend of creativity and adaptability to her work. She is excited to be a part of a mission-driven organization and to apply her skills to further Honored’s initiatives.

Biography

Karen co-founded Honored in 2016 and served as its CEO until 2023.  Previously, she worked at Warner Bros. in business development and at Goldman Sachs in investment banking.  She is a Trustee, member of the Executive Committee, and Chair of the Advancement Committee of The Potomac School, an independent K-12 school outside of Washington, DC. She also serves on the President’s Advisory Council and the Advisory Council of the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.  She has served on the boards of San Francisco Ballet, East Palo Alto Tennis and Tutoring, Ambassadors for Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, the Los Angeles Zoo, and KCET, Southern California’s largest public television station.  While with KCET, she co-founded the award-winning KCET Council for Children and Families.  Karen graduated magna cum laude with a degree in Economics from Princeton, where she was co-captain of the varsity tennis team, and received an MBA with honors from UCLA.

Biography

Melissa Rubin has been a learning specialist for more than 25 years. After working in a number of independent schools and an educational non-profit in the Boston area for 15+ years, she founded The Student First, dedicated to providing direct service to students with learning difficulties and collaborating with families, teachers, and support service professionals to help students maximize their learning potential. She holds an AB from Princeton University and a masters in special education from Boston University. She is a member of the Pi Lambda Theta and Phi Delta Kappa Honor Societies and serves as Vice President on the Board of Directors for the Northeast Association of Learning Specialists and Chair of the Boston Committee for the Princeton Prize in Race Relations.

Biography

Sherrese Smith currently serves as Managing Partner of Paul Hastings. In addition, she is the Vice-Chair
of the Data Privacy and Cybersecurity practice and a partner in the Media, Technology, and
Telecommunications practice. Ms. Smith is based in the firm’s Washington, D.C. office.
As Managing Partner, Ms. Smith helps direct the growth, management, and strategy of the firm. In her
practice areas, she is known as one of the preeminent Data Privacy and Cybersecurity and Media and
Technology attorneys in the country. Consistently ranked as a leading lawyer in Chambers USA and Legal
500, she is consistently recognized throughout the legal, media, communications, and technology
industries for her leadership, business acumen, and dedication to clients. Her work includes data privacy
and cybersecurity and breach response issues, crisis response, regulatory investigations, and
enforcement proceedings as well as counseling on global privacy and cybersecurity matters. Ms. Smith is
also renowned for superior advisement on crisis issues, and as a result is regularly sought after by
corporate board members and the C-Suite.
Before joining Paul Hastings, Ms. Smith served as Chief Counsel to Chairman Julius Genachowski at the
Federal Communications Commission. She was responsible for determining the agency’s business and
policy agenda on a multitude of media and technology matters and for leading the FCC’s cross-agency
efforts to refine and implement new rules on data privacy and cybersecurity for multinational
companies navigating complex data and privacy rules in the U.S., EU, and Asia. Ms. Smith’s work also
involved extensive interaction with external stakeholders, including wireless, media, cable, and
telecommunications companies; industry groups and trade associations; federal and state agencies; and
Congress.

Biography

Brooklyn is the Chief of Staff at Kode with Klossy, a nonprofit introducing young women and non-binary students to STEM. Prior to that she served as the Senior Director of Programs and Partnerships at the Honored. She also spent time in the education policy sector consulting with multiple K-12 and higher education clients. She spearheaded her passion for elevating education equity as an 8th grade ELA teacher in Denver, CO. Brooklyn received her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Denver and went on to receive a Master’s in Teaching from Relay Graduate School of Education and a Master’s in Education Policy at Georgetown University. She now resides in Washington, DC and enjoys coaching lacrosse, watching live sports and exploring the city.

Biography

Kareem Farah spent his teaching career as a high school math educator in Hawaii and Washington, DC. He earned his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis and later received a master’s degree in secondary education at Johns Hopkins University. Instead of using a traditional lecture model, Kareem taught mathematics through a blended model where students accessed content through his self-made videos. The cornerstone of his classroom was the ability for students to work through the content at their own pace and Kareem’s ability to employ mastery-based grading to evaluate student learning. In 2018, Kareem received the DC Public Schools Award for Classroom Innovation and was featured in Edutopia and CBS News for his work.

In an effort to scale his classroom model, Kareem co-founded a nonprofit, Modern Classrooms Project. As the CEO of the Modern Classrooms Project, Kareem and his team train and support teachers who seek to redesign their classrooms around blended, self-paced, mastery-based learning to better meet all students’ unique needs.

Kareem tweets regularly about education at @KareemFarah23.

Biography

Alka is a professional in the K-12 education sector, currently Director of Strategy and Partnerships at the Council of the Great City Schools. She has been a middle school teacher, Dean of Students at a public boarding school in DC, researcher and project director, and company leader. She’s lived in Washington, DC, for over 25 years. She holds a B.A. from Northwestern University and an M.Ed. from George Washington University.

Biography

Karen is Co-founder of Honored and served as its CEO until 2023.  Previously, she worked at Warner Bros. in business development and at Goldman Sachs in investment banking.  She is a Trustee of The Potomac School, an independent K-12 school outside of Washington, D.C., and she serves on the President’s Advisory Council and the Bridge Year Program Committee at Princeton University.  She has served on the boards of San Francisco Ballet, East Palo Alto Tennis and Tutoring, Ambassadors for Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, the Los Angeles Zoo, and KCET, Southern California’s largest public television station.  While with KCET, she co-founded the award-winning KCET Council for Children and Families.  Karen graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University with a degree in economics and received an M.B.A. with honors from UCLA.

Biography

Dr. Melissa Collins has been an elementary school teacher at John P. Freeman Optional School in Memphis, TN for 19 years, where she is constantly amazed by her students’ curiosity about the world around them. She is an expert in teacher leadership and voice, and she is an advocate for global learning, STEM education, and high standards. She is a member of Tennessee Hope Street Group where she collaborates with some of the best teachers in the state to advance policy and practice. To help ensure that all children have access to a caring and committed teacher, she has mentored several teachers through the National Board process. She is the recipient of several awards and honors, including: the 2018-2019 National Board Fellowship Program, the 2018 Global Teacher Prize Finalist (Top 50), the Queen Smith Award, the Stephen Sondheim Award, the Horace Mann Award for Teaching Excellence, the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching, the National Science Teaching Association Sylvia Shurgrue Award, and the West Tennessee Teacher of the Year. She is a proud National Board Certified Teacher in the area of Early Childhood Education.

Biography

Wendy Kopp is CEO and Co-founder of Teach For All, a global network of independent organizations that are cultivating their nations’ promising future leaders to ensure their most marginalized children have the chance to fulfill their true potential. Wendy founded Teach For America in 1989 to marshal the energy of her generation against educational inequity in the United States. Today, more than 8,000 Teach For America corps members—outstanding recent college graduates and professionals of all academic disciplines—are in the midst of two-year teaching commitments in 52 urban and rural regions, and Teach For America has proven to be an unparalleled source of long-term leadership for expanding opportunity for children. After leading Teach For America’s growth and development for 24 years, in 2013, Wendy transitioned out of the role of CEO. Today, she remains an active member of Teach For America’s board.

Wendy led the development of Teach For All to be responsive to the initiative of inspiring social entrepreneurs around the world who were determined to adapt this approach in their own countries. Now in its ninth year, the Teach For All network is comprised of partner organizations in 40 countries on six continents, including its founding partners Teach For America and the U.K.’s Teach First.

Wendy has been recognized as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and awards for public service. She serves on the Board of New Profit and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of A Chance to Make History: What Works and What Doesn’t in Providing an Excellent Education for All (2011) and One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way (2000). She holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, where she participated in the undergraduate program of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Wendy resides in New York City with her husband Richard Barth and their four children.

Biography

Eric L. Motley, Ph.D., is an executive vice president at The Aspen Institute, responsible for Institutional Advancement and governance.  He previously served as Vice President and Executive Director of National Programs and prior to that he served as Vice President and Managing Director of the Henry Crown Fellowship Program. In addition to managing the Henry Crown Fellowship Program, he served as the Executive Director of the Aspen Institute-Rockefeller Foundation’s Commission to Reform the Federal Appointments Process, an independent, nonpartisan effort to evaluate the Federal government’s vetting and clearance procedures. Prior to joining the Aspen Institute, he served as the Director of the U.S. Department of State’s Office of International Visitors within the bureau of Public Diplomacy. In 2003, he became Special Assistant to President George W. Bush for Presidential Personnel, where he managed the appointment process in the White House for over 1,200 presidentially-appointed advisory board and commission positions. He joined the White House staff as Deputy Associate Director, Office of Presidential Personnel in 2001.

Eric serves on the Board of Directors of Barry-Wehmiller Companies, the Library Cabinet for the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s National Council, The John F. Kennedy Centennial Memorial Task Force, Young Concert Artists, Board of Overseers of Samford University and is a former member of the Chapter Board of the Washington National Cathedral. He is a member of the Cosmos Club of Washington, DC and the Grolier Club of New York City. Eric is a Paul Harris Fellow of the Rotary International Foundation and Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. He is an avid book collector of first editions and rare books with a concentration on the English writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson. He is currently engaged in developing a collection on the scholarship of the eminent Greek scholar Sir Kenneth Dover and has written and lectured on the intellectual and political contributions of Scottish-born American Founding Father James Wilson. In October 2006, he published a volume of poetry Luminaria.

Eric earned his bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Philosophy from Samford University. As a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, he earned a Master of Letters in International Relations and a Ph.D. as the John Steven Watson Scholar.

Biography

Anastasia serves as the vice provost for international affairs and operations at Princeton University, a role in which she leads the development and administration of partnerships, policies and programs that advance the international scope of Princeton’s research and teaching and enhance Princeton’s global connections.

Prior to coming to Princeton, Anastasia served as the inaugural dean of international and professional experience at Yale-NUS, a liberal arts college in Singapore. Her responsibilities included collaborating with faculty to shape, implement and assess international programming, as well as designing a global portfolio of academic, research and professional opportunities to enhance students’ education, international awareness, leadership skills and career development.

Anastasia also served as the executive director of the Princeton in Asia (PiA) program from 2004 to 2012. Founded in 1898, PiA promotes international understanding and mutual appreciation between East and West by sponsoring service-oriented internships and fellowships in Asia in immersive environments. During her tenure, Anastasia led PiA’s dynamic expansion, tripling its participants, doubling the endowment and introducing programming in 12 additional countries.

Anastasia draws on a wide range of professional experience in the fields of education, finance, journalism and international development. She taught middle school in the Bronx, New York, and served as a PiA fellow and English instructor at Atma Jaya University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She worked as an investment banker for Morgan Stanley in New York and in Singapore and as a photojournalist and media-trainer documenting Indonesia’s transition to democracy and Timor-Leste’s road to independence. Her award-winning images have been featured in The New York Times, Asiaweek, Businessweek, CNN, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, Newsweek and Time.

Anastasia graduated cum laude from Princeton University with BA in English in 1991 and received her MS in Secondary School Education from Mercy College. She reads Ancient Greek and Latin and is fluent in modern Greek and Bahasa Indonesia. She enjoys street food, wide-angle lenses, telling stories and climbing volcanoes.

Biography

Nina Rees is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the leading national nonprofit organization committed to advancing the charter school movement. She is responsible for setting the strategic vision of the organization, fundraising and working with her senior team to foster a climate in which charter schools can grow and have a positive impact on the academic achievement of all students.

Nina has over 20 years of experience in Washington, D.C., most recently as Senior Vice President for Strategic Initiatives for Knowledge Universe, a leading global education company with investments in early childhood education, before- and after-school programs and online instruction.

Prior to her tenure at KU, she served as the first Deputy Under Secretary for Innovation and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education. In this capacity, she oversaw the administration of 28 grant programs, supporting 1,300 projects, and was responsible for spearheading innovative federal programs and policies such as school choice, charter schools, and alternative routes to teacher certification and school leadership. Before moving to the Education Department, Nina served as Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy to the Vice President at the White House.

Prior to serving in the executive branch, Nina was the senior education analyst at the Heritage Foundation, where she authored more than two dozen policy briefs and served as the foundation’s chief spokesperson on education. She previously worked at a public interest law firm and an advocacy organization. She began her career in Washington, D.C., on Capitol Hill, where she worked for then-Congressman Porter Goss (R-FL) in 1991.

Nina has appeared on various news outlets including Bloomberg, CNBC, C-SPAN and PBS’s NewsHour. Her articles and opinions have been published in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. She also writes a regular column for U.S. News & World Report.

Nina serves on the advisory committee of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the advisory boards of Digital Pioneers Academy and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. She has also served as a fellow in the Pahara-Aspen Education program.
Nina holds a B.S. in Psychology from Virginia Tech and an M.A. in International Transactions from George Mason University.

Biography

Michael Lewis has published many books on various subjects, all but one New York Times best sellers. His most recent book, The Undoing Project, published in December 2016, explores the collaboration between the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who explored the way the human mind responds to uncertainty, and gave birth the field of behavioral economics. Other recent works are The Big Short and Boomerang,  narratives set in the global financial crisis—and another, Flash Boys, published in April 2014. The Blind Side, published in 2006, tells the story of Michael Oher, a poor, illiterate African-American kid living on the streets of Memphis whose life is transformed after he is adopted by white Evangelical Christians. Before that he wrote Moneyball, a book ostensibly about baseball but also about the way markets value people. Along with The Big Short, both of his books about sports,  became movies, nominated for Academy Awards. His other works include The New New Thing, about Silicon Valley during the Internet boom; Coach, about the transformative powers of his own high school baseball coach; Losers, about the 1996 Presidential campaign; and Liar’s Poker, a Wall Street story based in part on his own experience working as a bond salesman for Salomon Brothers.

Michael is a columnist for Bloomberg News and a contributing writer to Vanity Fair. His articles have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Gourmet, Slate, Sports Illustrated, Foreign Affairs, and Poetry Magazine. He has served as editor and columnist for the British weekly The Spectator and as senior editor and campaign correspondent for The New Republic.  He has filmed and narrated short pieces for ABC-TV’s “Nightline;” created and presented a four part documentary on the social consequences of the internet for the British Broadcasting Corporation; and recorded stories for the American public radio show, This American Life.

Michael grew up in New Orleans and remains deeply interested and involved in the city. He holds a bachelor’s degree in art history from Princeton and a master’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics.

Biography

Lauren Bush Lauren is the CEO, Creative Director and Co-Founder of FEED Projects LLC, with a mission to create good products to help feed the world. In 2004, she was an Honorary Spokesperson for the UN World Food Program, traveling to eight countries to visit WFP operations. She also helped to start the Universities Fighting Hunger Campaign in the United States.

Prior to the founding of her company, Lauren worked as a fashion model, appearing on the cover of notable publications such as W, Australian Vogue, Glamour, Town and Country and Tatler. She studied photography and fashion design at Parsons in NY, and Central Saint Martins College of Arts & Design in London. She graduated from Princeton University with a BA in Anthropology, and a certificate of photography.

Biography

Katherine Brittain Bradley is the founding chair of CityBridge Education, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit investing in the creation of the city’s future portfolio of public schools. Focusing on new models that improve personalization, equity and student achievement, CityBridge works with educators, school leaders, and school-based teams to launch brand-new schools or to redesign existing ones.
Katherine serves as a board member for the KIPP Foundation, Princeton University, the D.C. College Access Program, and the National Geographic Society. She is a former chair, and current board member, of the Washington regional board for Teach For America. In the winter of 2010-2011, she co-chaired Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s education transition team. Katherine graduated in 1986 from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Biography

Garrett co-founded The Container Store, a FORTUNE magazine “100 Best Companies to Work For” 17 years in a row and ranked #1 the first year they applied. Garrett was presented the Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year award in 1991 and is a recipient of the National Retail Federation’s 1998 Innovator of the Year Award. He has been inducted into both the Retailing Hall of Fame and the Dallas Business Hall of Fame inductee.

Garrett is President of The Boone Family Foundation and is Chairman of the Board for TreeHouse, Inc. He serves on the advisory boards for Groundworks Dallas, The Trinity Trust, The Dallas Women’s Foundation and Teach for America- Dallas–Ft. Worth.  He co-founded the nonprofit Texas Business for Clean Air, the 2010 recipient of the CATEE Outstanding Nonprofit Organization of the Year. Garrett is a longtime advocate for public education and served on the Dallas ISD Star Commission to share business best practices with DISD. Garrett graduated from Rice University and holds a Master’s in American History from the University of Texas.

Biography

Charles leads DonorsChoose.org, a nonprofit organization that provides a simple way to address educational inequity. At DonorsChoose.org, public school teachers create classroom project requests and donors can choose the projects they want to support. Charles launched the organization in 2000 out of a Bronx public high school where he taught history. DonorsChoose.org is one of Oprah Winfrey’s “ultimate favorite things” and was featured on the cover of Fast Company as one of the “50 Most Innovative Companies in the World.” For three years, Fortune Magazine has named Charles to its “40 under 40 hottest rising stars in business.”  Charles graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale College in 1998.  

Biography

Peter Bergen is a journalist, documentary producer, Vice President for Global Studies and Fellows at New America, CNN national security analyst, professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the author or editor of seven books about national security, three of which were New York Times bestsellers and four of which were named among the best non-fiction books of the year by The Washington Post. The books have been translated into twenty-one languages. Documentaries based on his books have been nominated for two Emmys and also won the Emmy for best documentary. He has held teaching positions at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He has testified before U.S. Congressional committees seventeen times about national security issues. Bergen produced the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997. The interview, which aired on CNN, marked the first time that bin Laden declared war against the United States to a Western audience. He has a degree in Modern History from New College, Oxford.

Biography

Katherine is Co-founder and Co-CEO of Honored.  She previously served as Managing Director and Editorial Director.  She is the Vice Chair of the board at the Boone Family Foundation, a Dallas, TX-based organization dedicated to improving children’s quality of life through education, to advancing equity for women and girls, and to promoting environmental stewardship. She also serves on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, where she chairs the Education Programs Committee. Katherine has previously served on the boards of DC Prep, Teach for America DC, Reading Partners DC, and the Greenhill School Alumni Association. Katherine graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from Princeton University and received a master’s degree with honors in American History from the University of Texas. She and her husband, Joshua Geltzer, live in Washington, DC with their three children.

Biography

Bianca Bosker is an award-winning journalist and the author of the New York Times bestseller Cork Dork. Bianca is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New Republic, and Food & Wine, among other publications. The former executive tech editor of HuffPost, she is also the author of the critically-acclaimed Original Copies.

Biography

Johann Calhoun is an award-winning K-12 education writer, editor and advocate. He’s a former bureau chief for Chalkbeat where he supervised coverage of Philadelphia’s public schools. In this capacity, Johann won awards for his stories on Philadelphia’s rise in gun violence and its impact on students. Before Chalkbeat, Johann was a senior editor at The Philadelphia Tribune with stints at the Courier Post in South Jersey, Bucks County Courier Times, The Daily Press in Newport News, Va., the Beaumont Enterprise in Southeast Texas and Black Entertainment Television. Johann is a former regional director for the National Association of Black Journalists and former chapter president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. He has taught computer assisted reporting as an adjunct at Temple University.

Biography

Kavitha Cardoza is an award-winning multimedia journalist.

She currently freelances and teaches part-time at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and loves mentoring young reporters.

Most recently, Kavitha was a correspondent for PBS NewsHour and Education Week. Previously she covered education for WAMU public radio in Washington, DC. She holds graduate degrees from Illinois and India.

She has received numerous national awards for her work on children, education and poverty.

Kavitha grew up in Bangalore, India, lives in Washington, DC and calls Rantoul, Illinois her U.S. home.

Biography

Jorge Castillo is a sports reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where he writes enterprise stories and features with a focus on baseball. He joined the Times in 2018 and spent his first three years as the Dodgers beat reporter. He previously worked as a sports reporter at The Washington Post and The Star-Ledger. He’s covered multiple World Series, Super Bowls, and the Tokyo Olympics. A champion for Puerto Rico, he’s a graduate of Yale University and still getting accustomed to life on the West Coast. You can reach him at [email protected].

Biography

Amy Chua is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Professor Chua received both her A.B. and J.D. degrees from Harvard University. While at Harvard Law School, Professor Chua was Executive Editor of the Harvard Law Review. She then clerked for Chief Judge Patricia M. Wald on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and, prior to entering academics in 1994, practiced with the Wall Street firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. Professor Chua joined the Yale Law School faculty in 2001. Her expertise is in international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization and the law. Her first book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability was a New York Times bestseller and selected by both The Economist and the U.K.’s Guardian as a Best Book of 2003. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance — and Why They Fall and the 2011 memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a runaway international bestseller translated into 30 languages. Her latest New York Timesbestseller, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups, is coauthored with Jed Rubenfeld.

Professor Chua has appeared on Good Morning America, The Today Show, The Colbert Report, Charlie Rose, and Real Time with Bill Maher. She has addressed numerous government and policymaking institutions, including the Brookings Institution, the CIA, the World Economic Forum in Davos, and the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul. In 2011, Professor Chua was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people, one of the Atlantic Monthly‘s Brave Thinkers, and one of Foreign Policy‘s Global Thinkers. She also received the Yale Law School’s “Best Teaching” award.  Her most recent book, Political Tribes, was published in February 2018.  www.amychua.com

Biography

William D. Cohan, a former senior Wall Street M&A investment banker for

17 years at Lazard Frères & Co., Merrill Lynch and JPMorganChase, is the

New York Times bestselling author of three non-fiction narratives about Wall

Street: Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World;

House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street; and,

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co., the winner of

the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. His book,

The Price of Silence, about the Duke lacrosse scandal was published in April

2014 and was also a New York Times bestseller. His book, Why Wall Street

Matters, was published by Random House in February 2017. His latest

book, Four Friends, about what happened to four of his friends of from

Andover, his high school, was published by Flatiron Press, a division of

Macmillan Publishers, in July 2019. His new book Power Failure, about the

rise and fall of GE, once the world’s most powerful, valuable and important

company, will be published in 2022 by PenguinRandomHouse.

He is a founding partner of Puck, a new digital publication owned and

operated by journalists, and a writer-at-large for Air Mail. For 13 years, he

was a special correspondent at Vanity Fair. He also writes, or has written,

for ProPublica, The Financial Times, The New York Times, Institutional

Investor, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Atlantic, Fast Company, The

Nation, Fortune, Politico, ArtNews, and Barron’s. He previously wrote a bi-

weekly opinion column for The New York Times, an opinion column for

BloombergView, as well as for the Dealbook section of the New York Times.

He is a non-staff, on-air contributor to CNBC and also appears on CNN, on

MSNBC and the BBC-TV. He has also appeared three times as a guest on

the Daily Show, with Jon Stewart, The NewsHour, The Charlie Rose Show,

The Tavis Smiley Show, and CBS This Morning as well as on numerous

NPR, BBC and Bloomberg radio programs. He was formerly a contributing

editor for Bloomberg TV.

He is a graduate of Phillips Academy (Andover), Duke University,

Columbia University School of Journalism and the Columbia University

Graduate School of Business. He grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts and

now lives in New York City with his wife and, more occasionally these

days, his two sons.

Biography

Jessica Contrera is a reporter for The Washington Post, where she writes about people whose lives are shaped by the issues in the news. Most recently, her stories have investigated the way child sex trafficking cases are mishandled and misunderstood. Since joining The Post in 2014, Jessica has written intimate stories on teenagers impacted by mass shootings and everyday gun violence, survivors of sexual assault and harassment, and communities disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. She reported and wrote key coverage of protests following the death of George Floyd and the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Jessica is a three-time finalist for the Livingston Awards for young journalists, a loyal Ohioan and a person with too many unfinished craft projects. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @mjcontrera.

Biography

Lee Cullum is a journalist based in Dallas who currently hosts CEO, a series of interviews with business leaders on KERA-TV and FM, the PBS and NPR affiliates in North Texas, and writes occasionally for the Dallas Morning News. She has been a regular commentator on “The PBS NewsHour” as well as for NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Now on the board the American Security Project, she also has served on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, The Pacific Council on International Policy, the American Council on Germany and Freedom House. In addition, she is a member of the Trilateral Commission and the InterAmetican Dialogue and a senior fellow at the John Tower Center for Political Studies at SMU. She has received the Matrix Award from Women in Communications twice, as well as the Woman of Achievement Award from Southern Methodist University and the C.E. Shuford Award for Outstanding Journalist in Dallas-Fort Worth. In addition, she was given the J.B. Marryatt Award by the Dallas Press Club.

Biography

Vanessa de la Torre is a journalist at Connecticut Public Radio. Before her recent shift to radio, de la Torre was a newspaper reporter for nearly a dozen years at the Hartford Courant, where her investigative storytelling on Hartford education won regional and national awards. She’s also been published in the Washington Post and the St. Petersburg Times in Florida. A graduate of Princeton University, de la Torre received her master’s degree from Stanford’s Graduate Program in Journalism.

Biography

USA Today bestselling author Sonali Dev writes stories that explore the experience of being a woman in today’s world. Her novels have been named Best Books of the Year by Library Journal, NPR, the Washington Post, Cosmo, Buzzfeed, Popsugar, and Kirkus. She has won the American Library Association’s award for best in genre, the RT Reviewer Choice Award, multiple RT Seals of Excellence, has been a RITA® finalist, and has been listed for the Dublin Literary Award. Shelf Awareness calls her “Not only one of the best but one of the bravest romance novelists working today.” She lives in Chicagoland with her husband, two visiting adult children, and the world’s most perfect dog. Find more at sonalidev.com.

Biography

Leah Donnella is an editor on NPR’s Code Switch team, where she helps produce and edit for the Code Switch podcast, blog, and newsletter. She created the “Ask Code Switch” series, where members of the team respond to listener questions about how race, identity, and culture come up in everyday life. Prior to NPR, Donnella worked at WHYY’s Public Media Commons, where she helped teach high school students the ins and outs of journalism and film-making. She’s also worked at the University of Pennsylvania in the department of College Houses and Academic Resources. Donnella graduated from Pomona College with a Bachelor of Arts in Africana Studies.

Biography

Steve Drummond heads up two teams of journalists at NPR: NPR Ed, which launched in March 2014, provides deeper coverage of learning and education and extending it to audiences across digital platforms; as well as Code Switch, which covers race and identity across the network, and in an award-winning weekly podcast.

Drummond brings to these initiatives more than 20 years’ experience covering education issues, and nearly two decades at NPR in a variety of roles. Prior to this assignment, he was the network’s Senior National Editor.

 Drummond joined NPR in 2000 as an editor on the national desk. In 2003, he became the senior editor of All Things Considered. He returned to the national desk in 2004 to edit coverage of poverty and welfare, education, religion, and crime and punishment. From 2007 through 2013, he was NPR’s  Senior National Editor and oversaw domestic news coverage and a team of more than 60 reporters, producers and editors in Washington, DC, and 18 bureaus around the country.  

Before joining NPR, Drummond spent six years as a senior editor and writer for Education Week, and has been a reporter with The Tampa Tribune and The St. Petersburg Times in Florida and at the Associated Press in Detroit. He has written for a variety of publications including The Detroit News, The Detroit Free Press, The New York Times, and Teacher magazine.  After getting a graduate degree in education, Steve also worked as middle and high school teacher.  

At NPR his work has been honored with many of journalism’s highest awards, including three Peabody Awards, two Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the Edward R. Murrow Award.

Drummond holds a bachelor’s degree and two master’s degrees, in journalism and education, from the University of Michigan. In the fall of 2013 he was a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

Biography

Carrie grew up in Starkville, Mississippi, where she went to high school and college. She attended Mississippi State University where she received her BS in Geosciences with an emphasis in Broadcast Meteorology. During her college years at MSU, she was a member of the Chase Team where she chased tornados with classmates. Throughout her career, she has worked a blizzard in Erie, hurricanes and floods in NC, and many tropical storms and hurricanes here in South Mississippi. The most notable storm: Hurricane Katrina. Carrie was an on-air meteorologist at WLOX just miles away from where the eye of Hurricane Katrina roared ashore along the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 2005. That coverage won a Peabody award. She started her television career in 1998 in Erie, Pennsylvania. Carrie and her husband, Daniel, have two boys and a rescue dog.

Biography

Amy Ephron is the author of the award-winning and bestselling A Cup of Tea.  She is also a contributor and contributing editor at Vogue and Vogue.com. The Castle in the Mist is her first novel for children.  She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and any of their children who stop by.  

Biography

Andrew Exum is a contributing editor at The Atlantic magazine and a partner at Hakluyt & Company. Previously, he was deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East Policy at the Pentagon. He began his career as an officer in the U.S. Army and fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Andrew was educated in Philadelphia, Beirut, and London.

Biography

Amanda Fortini has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, California Sunday, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, The Paris Review, New York, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Wired, Slate and Salon, among other publications. She is a Contributing Editor at Elle, where she writes about culture, women, and women’s issues. She has also worked as an editor at Mirabella, The New York Review of Books, and Slate, and has been the William Kittredge Visiting Professor at the University of Montana. Her essays have been widely anthologized, including in Best American Political Writing and Best of Slate, and she was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award. She is currently a visiting lecturer at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. She divides her time between Las Vegas, Nevada and Livingston, Montana.

Biography

Natasha Friend is a mother of three, a part-time teacher, and an author of young-adult fiction. She became a writer in great thanks to her parents, who raised her in a house without a TV. Her books have won such honors as the Milkweed Prize for Children’s Literature, the Isinglass Teen Reader Award, and the New York Public Library’s Best Books for the Teen Age. When she isn’t writing or washing baseball pants, Natasha is reading voraciously, flipping chocolate-chip pancakes, and cheering for her kids.

Biography

Laura Furman was born in New York, and educated in New York City public schools, including Hunter College High School, and at Bennington College. Her first story appeared in The New Yorker in 1976; since then work has appeared in Yale Review, Southwest Review, Subtropics, Ploughshares, The American Scholar, and elsewhere. Her books include three collections of short stories, two novels, and a memoir. Recipient of fellowships from the Dobie Paisano Project, John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and New York State Council on the Arts, she’s been series editor of The O. Henry Prize Stories since 2002; each year she selects the twenty winning stories. She is a professor emerita in the English Department of the University of Texas at Austin. Her most recent story collection is The Mother Who Stayed. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Biography

An Orlando native and graduate of the University of Central Florida, Sam Gardner spent eight years telling athletes’ stories at FOX Sports before joining Florida Citrus Sports as the organization’s assistant director of communications earlier this year. In 2015, his “One & Done” series placed fourth in the projects category among publications with a circulation greater than 175,000 at the APSE’s annual writing contest. You can email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter at @sam_gardner.

Biography

Sonari Glinton is an award-winning journalist, podcaster, and producer. He’s known for his work at NPR, This American Life, and Planet Money. He is also the host of Shattering The System, the podcast from Macro and iHeartPodcasts that investigates crimes and the systems that enable them.
Glinton’s passion for storytelling began at an early age, when he read Night by Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate who later became his college professor at Boston University. Wiesel inspired Glinton to tell the hardest and most important stories, including the ones people don’t want to hear.
Throughout his career, Glinton has covered a wide range of topics, from politics and the economy to culture and entertainment. He has reported on the rise of Barack Obama, the Volkswagen diesel scandal, the Flint water crisis, and the #MeToo movement. He has also produced segments on culture phenoms such as, Desi Arnaz, Frank Sinatra, 9 to 5, and Soul Train.
Glinton is also committed to fostering the next generation of journalists and creating more diverse and inclusive newsrooms. He has collaborated with YR Media and co-created a virtual camp for teens during the pandemic. He also serves on the national board of Mikva Challenge, a nonprofit that supports civic education and participation for teens.

Biography

Halli Gomez writes for children and young adults and works at her local independent bookstore. She writes stories with neurodivergent characters and her young adult novel, List of Ten (Sterling, March 2021), won the 2021 AAUW North Carolina award for Young People’s Literature. When no one is looking, she sock skates through the house and talks to dogs like they are human. When people are looking, she enjoys reading, outdoors, and breaking out of escape rooms with her family. Halli lives in North Carolina with her husband, two boys, and two dogs.

Biography

Robin is senior managing editor at The Education Trust, where she leads the national advocacy organization’s editorial and design team. Prior to Ed Trust, Robin led the editorial team at Education Sector. She also has served as associate editor of Diverse Issues in Higher Education, deputy editor at Knight Ridder/Tribune Business news, and a copy-editor at several major daily newspapers. Robin’s writing has focused on education equity and justice issues. She was a national and education policy fellow at New America, pursuing a project on the racial justice origins of the parental school choice movement. She earned a bachelor’s from Howard University and a master’s and Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Maryland.

Biography

Andrea Henderson is a journalist who covers race, identity and culture. She currently reports for St. Louis Public Radio. Before working for St. Louis Public Radio, she assisted with NPR’s podcast Code Switch and produced pieces for All Things Considered. Andrea’s passion for storytelling began at a weekly newspaper in her hometown of Houston, Texas. She’s covered the arts for a number of Houston publications, along with the Post-Standard in Syracuse, New York, and The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. Andrea is an investigative fellow for the podcast Reveal from the Center of Investigative Reporting. Andrea won a 2020 Regional Edward R. Murrow Award for her contributions to St. Louis Public Radio’s news series Children Under Fire.

Biography

Skip Hollandsworth grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas, attended TCU in Fort Worth and after graduation worked as a reporter and columnist for newspapers in Dallas. He also has worked as a television producer and documentary filmmaker. Since 1989, he has been a staff writer at Texas Monthly magazine, where he has received several journalism awards, including a National Headliners Award, the national John Hancock Award for Excellence in Business and Financial Journalism, the City and Regional Magazine gold award for feature writing, and the Texas Institute of Letters O. Henry award for magazine writing. He has been a finalist four times for a National Magazine Award, the magazine industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, and in 2010 he won the National Magazine Award in feature writing for “Still Life,” his story about a young man who, after suffering a crippling football injury in high school, spent the next 33 years in his bedroom, unable to move. The movie “Bernie,” which Hollandsworth co-wrote with Richard Linklater, was released in May 2012. It is based on a story he wrote in the January 1998 Texas Monthly titled “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas.” His book, The Midnight Assassin, a true historical thriller, was published in April 2016 and became a New York Times bestseller. The Midnight Assassin is a history of Austin, Texas in the year 1885 when a brutal but brilliant serial killer went on a rampage, ritualistically slaughtering seven women over the course of twelve months, and setting off a citywide panic. Three years later, when a man nicknamed Jack the Ripper carried out a similar series of killings in the Whitechapel district of London, England, Scotland Yard detectives speculated that he was the Austin killer who had traveled overseas to continue to carry out his “diabolical work.” In its review, The New York Times described the The Midnight Assassin as “true crime of high quality,” “smart and restrained” and “chilling.” The Wall Street Journal called the book a “thoroughly researched, excitingly written history” and an “absorbing work.”

Biography

A native New Englander, Elise Hooper spent several years writing for television and online news outlets before getting a MA and teaching high-school literature and history. Her debut novel The Other Alcott was a nominee for the 2017 Washington Book Award. Three more novels—Learning to See, Fast Girls, and Angels of the Pacific—followed, all centered on the lives of extraordinary but overlooked historical women. Elise now lives in Seattle with her husband and two teenage daughters.

Biography

Theodore R. Johnson is a Senior Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. His research and writing are focused on black voting behavior, racial justice, and the role of national solidarity in addressing racial inequality. He also teaches graduate courses at Georgetown University and Northeastern University. Prior to joining the Brennan Center, Dr. Johnson was a national fellow at the New America, a Commander in the United States Navy, and a research manager at Deloitte.
His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and several other national publications. He has also provided analysis of race and politics on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR. In recognition of his leadership in public service, Johnson was selected as a White House Fellow during the Obama administration.

He is currently writing a book titled When the Stars Begin to Fall: Race, Solidarity, and the Future of America to be published by Grove Atlantic in 2020.
Dr. Johnson holds a B.S. in mathematics from Hampton University, an A.L.M. with a concentration in International Relations from Harvard University, and a Doctorate of Law and Policy from Northeastern University.

Biography

A writer focused on the connective tissue of who we are, how we live, what we consume and what it means through examining race, culture and politics, Tre Johnson’s work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vox, Atlanta Black Star and other outlets.

Prior to freelance writing, he was a veteran in the field of education working in the classroom, non-profits and school districts as a teacher and a leader.

Biography

Lizzie Johnson is an author and San Francisco Chronicle wildfire beat reporter. She led The Chronicle’s award-winning coverage of the most destructive blazes in state history, including the Wine Country Wildfires in 2017 and the Camp Fire in 2018. Her first book, Paradise, is about the Camp Fire and will publish in 2020. Before moving to Northern California, she worked at newspapers in Chicago, Dallas, Omaha and Buenos Aires.  A Nebraska native, she is an alumna of the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

Biography

Susan Keselenko Coll is the author of five novels, most recently The Stager—a New York Times and Chicago Tribune Editor’s Choice. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Washingtonian Magazine, Moment Magazine, NPR.org, atlantic.com, and The Millions. She is president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

Biography

Joshua Kosman has covered classical music for the San Francisco Chronicle since 1988, reviewing and reporting on the wealth of orchestral, operatic, chamber and contemporary music throughout the Bay Area. He holds degrees in music from Yale and UC Berkeley, and is a contributor to the New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians, 2nd Edition, and the New Grove Dictionary of Opera. He is a member of the Music Critics’ Association of North America and a past winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for music criticism, and his articles have won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club. In his spare time, he is the co-constructor of a weekly cryptic crossword puzzle in The Nation magazine, and has repeatedly placed among the top 20 contestants at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

Biography

John Lancaster is a veteran journalist who spent 20 years at the Washington Post, eight of them as a foreign correspondent based in Cairo and then New Delhi. Since leaving the Post in 2007, his work has appeared in National Geographic, The New Republic, Slate, Smithsonian, National Geographic Traveler, The Smart Set, the Big Roundtable, The Surfer’s Journal and Wyofile.com. A piece he wrote for Smithsonian was selected for the 2008 edition of “Best American Travel Writing,” and a subsequent story for National Geographic was a finalist for the 2010 edition of the same anthology. He is currently working on a book about the dawn of long-distance flying. John is married to Catherine Gail Walker, an attorney, and lives in Washington, D.C.

Biography

Benilde Little is a New York Times bestselling novelist of five books, all published by Simon and Schuster. Her most recent book is a memoir, Welcome to My Breakdown (Atria/Simon and Schuster). She lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her husband. Their son is away at college; their adult daughter lives in Los Angeles.

Biography

From journalism to corporate communications to public relations/marketing work, Aiesha D. Little has been in the business of storytelling for 25 years. She’s currently the senior editor at Cincinnati Magazine, where she leads food and drink coverage for the city/regional publication. Before diving into magazine publishing, Aiesha was a beat reporter for The Poughkeepsie Journal in upstate New York and completed several internships with The Saginaw News and The Detroit News in Michigan during her collegiate years. Aiesha previously served as vice president and programming chair of the Greater Cincinnati chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Biography

Lauren Lumpkin is a reporter for the Washington Post, where she covers education and K-12 schools in D.C. She has recently written stories about how violence affects youth in the District and how school systems throughout the country are spending billions in coronavirus aid. She is a double graduate of American University. A Cleveland native, Lauren likes running, trying new recipes and playing with her dogs, Mamba and Kai. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @laurenmlumpkin.

Biography

Abby Maslin is the author of the Washington Post bestseller, LOVE YOU HARD: A MEMOIR OF MARRIAGE, BRAIN INJURY, AND REINVENTING LOVE. She is also a nationally recognized advocate for traumatic brain injury and was named Marie Claire’s Model Citizen of 2013. In addition to her writing, Abby is an elementary educator for District of Columbia Public Schools. She lives in Capitol Hill with her husband, TC, and their two children.

Biography

Elizabeth Mayhew is founder and baker behind The Dutchy (an artisanal bakery in Dutchess County, New York), and you may recognize her from her regular appearances on NBC’s Today Show as a contributing editor or her monthly column in The Washington Post. And it doesn’t stop there; Elizabeth is also a decorator and the author of FLIP! for Decorating (Ballantine). She has worked for several publications, including Real Simple, House Beautiful, Southern Living, and Woman’s Day. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, and a graduate of Georgetown University, she now divides her time between New York City and Millbrook, New York.

Biography

Bethany McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. She graduated from Williams College in 1992 with a double major in math and English, and spent the next three years working as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs.

In 1995, she joined Fortune Magazine as a reporter, and eventually became an editor-at-large. Her 2001 piece, “Is Enron Overpriced?” was one of the first skeptical articles about Enron, and after the company collapsed into bankruptcy, she co-authored “The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron” with her Fortune colleague Peter Elkind.  A documentary based on the book was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006.

In 2008, McLean joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor. In 2010, her book “All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis,” which she co-authored with New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, was published. Her most recent book is “Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants.”

She is also a columnist for Yahoo Finance and a contributor to CNBC.

Biography

Barbara McQuade is a law professor at the University of Michigan, where she teaches criminal law, criminal procedure and national security law. She is also a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC.

From 2010 to 2017, Ms. McQuade served as the U.S Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. Ms. McQuade was appointed by President Barack Obama, and was the first woman to serve in her position. Ms. McQuade also served as vice chair of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee and co-chaired the Terrorism and National Security Subcommittee.  

Before becoming U.S. Attorney, Ms. McQuade was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Detroit for 12 years, serving as Deputy Chief of the National Security Unit. Before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Ms. McQuade practiced law at the firm of Butzel Long in Detroit from 1993 to 1998, and served as a law clerk to Hon. Bernard A. Friedman on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan from 1991 to 1993. She and her husband have four children. 

Biography

Emily Miller has worked as a journalist, writing teacher, and fiction writer. She is the author of two novels, Brand New Human Being and The News from the End of the World, which was a finalist for the 2017 New England Book Award. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband, daughter, and (very mischievous) new puppy.

Biography

Robert Moore is one of Britain’s most experienced foreign correspondents, having covered war and crises across the world for over 30 years. He is currently based with his family in Washington, DC. Last year, he was the only TV correspondent in the world who was embedded with the mob that stormed Congress on January 6th, winning multiple awards for his scoop and for his subsequent reporting across the US. He is the current Royal Television Society and Foreign Press Association Journalist of the Year. He works for the UK network, ITV News. He is the author of an acclaimed bestselling book on the Kursk submarine tragedy in Russia which became a Hollywood movie starring Colin Firth.

Biography

Nina Munk is a prize-winning journalist and author whose articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Fortune, and The New York Times, among other publications. A Contributing Editor at Vanity Fair since 2001, Nina was previously a Senior Writer at Fortune and, before that, a Senior Editor at Forbes. She is the author or co-author of four books, most recently The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty (Doubleday). She is also the editor of How It Happened: Documenting the Tragedy of Hungarian Jewry (McGill-Queen’s University Press). A dual citizen of Canada and the United States, Nina graduated from Jarvis Collegiate, the oldest public high school in Toronto, then earned a B.A. in comparative literature at Smith College, an M.A. in French literature and language from Middlebury College, and a M.Sc. with honors from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

Biography

Arionne Nettles is a culture reporter and a lecturer at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Before joining Medill, Nettles worked as a digital producer at Chicago’s NPR station, WBEZ, where she ran the daily digital desk and a multiplatform editor at The Associated Press where she edited stories for AP’s 14-state central region, breaking news online and on social platforms. She also worked as digital managing editor of the Chicago Defender, one of the nation’s oldest black newspapers. Nettles obtained bachelor and master of business administration degrees from Florida A&M University and a master of science in journalism degree from Medill.

Biography

Nadra Nittle is a Los Angeles-based journalist. She is the education reporter for The 19th News. Her work has appeared in Vox, The Guardian, NBC News, Business Insider, The Atlantic and more. She is the author of Toni Morrison’s Spiritual Vision: Faith, Folktales, and Feminism in Her Life and Literature

Biography

Meg Nocero, a magical manifester, is the president of Butterflies & Bliss LLC and SHINE Networking, Inc. She is a former federal prosecutor, an inspirational speaker, a transformational coach, and the award-winning author of The Magical Guide to Bliss: Daily Keys to Unlock Your Dreams, Spirit & Inner Bliss, Sparkle & Shine: 108 MANTRAs to Brighten Your Day and Lighten Your Way and Butterfly Awakens: A Memoir of Transformation Through Grief. After she was brought on stage in Miami with Oprah Winfrey in 2014, she was inspired to manifest the life of her dreams. She founded Butterflies & Bliss LLC and SHINE Networking Inc., a nonprofit that provides educational scholarships to young innovative leaders in her community. She holds a BA in Spanish from Boston College, an MA in International Affairs from the University of Miami, a JD from St. Thomas University School of Law, and a Certificate in Happiness Studies with the Happiness Studies Academy. She is a Love Button Global Movement Ambassador and appeared on CNN Español, BookCon live, and other notable national, international podcasts and online media, such as MSNBC, CBS, Boston Herald, and the Chicago Tribune. She hosts her own YouTube channel and a podcast called Manifesting with Meg: Conversations with Extraordinary People.

Biography

Susie Orman Schnall’s most recent novel We Came Here to Shine is historical fiction set at the 1939 NY World’s Fair. She’s also the author of three other novels: The Subway Girls (about the historic NYC Miss Subways contest), The Balance Project (about work-life balance), and On Grace (about turning 40). Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, HuffPost, PopSugar, Writer’s Digest, Harper’s Bazaar, and Glamour; and she is also a frequent speaker at women’s groups, corporations, libraries, bookstores, and book clubs. Susie grew up in Los Angeles, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, and now lives in New York with her husband and their three teenage sons.

Biography

Steve Padilla is editor of the Times’ showcase Column One feature and director of Metpro, the paper’s training fellowship. A 30-year Times veteran, he has spent most of his career at the paper as an editor, supervising just about anything — local news, state news, higher education, politics and religion. He now works with correspondents sprinkled around the country and overseas. A specialist in narratives, he also serves as a writing coach and lectures frequently on writing technique. He also was a reporter at the San Diego Union and founding editor of Hispanic Link Weekly Report, a Washington-based newsletter on Latino affairs.

Biography

Sydney Page is a reporter who writes for The Washington Post’s Inspired Life section, a collection of stories about humanity. She has been a contributor to The Post since 2018, and has written for the Health section and The Lily. Before joining The Post, Sydney was a writer and video producer at CTV National News and an editor at a Canadian news startup called the Bullet.

Biography

Anna Quindlen is a writer whose work has appeared on fiction, nonfiction and self-help bestseller lists.  While a columnist for the New York Times, where she won the Pulitzer Prize, and later writing the Last Word for Newsweek magazine, some of her most impassioned work was about the essential role of teachers in our society.  Mother Mary Ephrem, her eighth grade nun; Jeanette Ritzenthaler, her English teacher her senior year in high school; Catharine Stimpson, her major advisor at Barnard: she believes teachers, particularly those three, made her dare to pursue a life as a writer.  (In her latest novel, “Miller’s Valley,” the life of her protagonist is changed forever through the intercession of a teacher.)  The power of teaching, and teachers, was only reinforced for her by spending time in the classroom of Elyathamby Vignarajah, who at age 81 is still teaching high school physics.

Biography

Orion Rummler is a journalist based in D.C. working for The 19th News, where he covers issues that disproportionately impact LGBTQ+ people. His reporting ranges from health policy explainers and court deep dives to statehouse breaking news and features on leading LGBTQ+ figures. He previously covered breaking news at Axios and contributed research to “Axios on HBO” projects on former President Trump. His reporting has been twice nominated for GLAAD’s Outstanding Online Journalism Award and has been published by PBS NewsHour, the Huffington Post, USA Today, and Teen Vogue, among other outlets.

Biography

Jill Santopolo is the author of the newly-released and nationally bestselling novel More Than Words and the nationally and internationally bestselling novel The Light We Lost, which was a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick, has been translated into more than 35 languages, and has hit the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Apple bestseller lists. She is also the author of the Alec Flint Mysteries, the Sparkle Spa series, and the Follow Your Heart books. She is the associate publisher of Philomel Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, where she has edited many award-winning, and best-selling books including the #1 New York Times bestsellers Girling Up by Mayim Bialik, She Persisted by Chelsea Clinton and Alexandra Boiger, Just Ask! Be Different, Be Brave, Be You by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Rafael Lopez, and Superheroes Are Everywhere by Senator Kamala Harris and Mechal Roe. Jill has worked as an MFA thesis advisor at The New School and was on the faculty of the Columbia Publishing Course. She was also formerly an adjunct professor at McDaniel College, where she helped develop the curriculum for their certificate program in Writing for Children. Jill has traveled all over the U.S.—and to Canada and Europe—to speak about writing and storytelling. She lives in New York City and Washington, DC.

Biography

Laura Scalzo is the author of two novels, The Speed of Light in Air, Water, and Glass (2018), praised as “lyrical and insightful,” and American Arcadia (5/2/23), “a gorgeous riff of a New York City novel.” Her shorter work has appeared in various literary magazines including Had, Ellipsis Zine, Reflex Fiction, and the Grace & Gravity Series. She is a 2023 Chautauqua Writer-in-Residence. She lives in Washington, DC. Find out more about her at laurascalzo.com.

Biography

Jody Serrano is a writer specialized in science and technology for Gizmodo. She began her career in Texas, where she worked for some of the biggest media organizations in the state, including the Austin American-Statesman, The Texas Tribune and KUT. She became interested in technology while working at POLITICO in Washington, D.C., where she wrote about social media and the FCC, among others. In recent years, Jody has worked in both English and Spanish. She spent years working at Gizmodo en Español, Gizmodo’s Spanish language vertical, covering international industry news. Jody has a Master’s in Management from IE Business School in Madrid. She also has a Bachelor’s in Journalism and Bachelor’s in Hispanic Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

Biography

Matt Skenazy is a Senior Editor at Outside magazine, where he has worked since 2012. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Biography

Jessica Strawser is editor-at-large at Writer’s Digest and the bestselling author of six popular book club novels, including Not That I Could Tell (a Book of the Month selection); The Next Thing You Know (a People Magazine Pick), and her latest, The Last Caretaker, an instant USA Today bestseller and Amazon Editors First Reads selection. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love, Publishers Weekly and other fine venues. She lives with her husband and two children in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she was named 2019 Writer-in-Residence for the Public Library of Cincinnati & Hamilton County and honored with a 2024 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.

Biography

Patty Talahongva is Hopi. She comes from the villages of Walpi and Sitstomovi on First Mesa in what is now known as northeastern Arizona. Her clan is Corn. She is an award-winning journalist and her work is in several museums including the Heard Museum in Phoenix, AZ and the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. She produced and directed a documentary on American Indian Code Talkers in WWII for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, as part of a traveling exhibition. She is currently writing a book about her family’s experience at the Phoenix Indian School which was one of many boarding schools under the federal Boarding School Policy. These schools were meant to abolish Native American cultures, languages and religions and assimilate them into European-American society. Patty also attended Phoenix Indian and started her career as a journalist while still a student. She wrote stories about her school for the Teen Gazette, an insert to the evening paper, The Phoenix Gazette. Her book, co-written with Heather Cabot, will be published by Legacy Lit, an imprint of Hachette Book Group in 2025. She is also working on an investigative documentary for the PBS program Frontline

Biography

Holly Thompson is a nine-time Emmy Award and multiple Associated Press Award winning journalist who co-anchors the WSMV-NBC morning show “News 4 Today” and hosts “News 4 at Noon” in Nashville, Tennessee.   Accolades include her coverage of “Operation Tennessee Waltz”—political corruption among Tennessee public officials, Middle Tennessee’s 1,000 year flood that killed 26 people and left nearly 11,000 properties damaged or destroyed, the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center explosion, Tennessee tornado outbreaks, and midstate flash flooding.  Holly speaks to dozens of organizations throughout the year and is a motivational speaker for various business groups and Christian events—often sharing her “Sisterhood—We Need Each Other” program.  Holly graduated with Distinction of University Honors from Middle Tennessee State University serving as a Student Ambassador during her years there and attended the Institute on Political Journalism at Georgetown University while in Washington, DC.  She is the spokesperson for the Tennessee Breast Cancer Coalition and works with Begin Anew of Middle Tennessee.  Holly and her husband teach Sunday school in Hendersonville, Tennessee and are often on the road with their two boys for travel soccer state and regional games.

Biography