Author, playwright, poet, and multi-media artist Claudia Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric. Her new book, Just Us: An American Conversation, is described by Kirkus Reviews as a “genre-defying work, [that] combines poetry, essay, visuals, scholarship, analysis, invective, and argument into a passionate and persuasive case about many of the complex mechanics of race in this country.”

Yamiche Alcindor is the White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour and a contributor for NBC News and MSNBC. She often tells stories about the intersection of race and politics, and has garnered national attention for her robust and sober questioning of President Donald Trump. One week after the 2020 Presidential Election, Alcindor will join us for a live, online-only event.

Yaa Gyasi is the author of Homegoing, one of the most celebrated debut novels of 2016. A riveting, kaleidoscopic novel, Homegoing is a story of race, history, ancestry, love, and time that traces the descendants of two sisters torn apart in eighteenth-century Africa across three hundred years in Ghana and America. Gyasi’s new book, Transcendent Kingdom, is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.

Maggie Smith is the author of four award-winning books: Lamp of the Body, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and Good Bones, named by the Washington Post as one of the Five Best Poetry Books of 2017. Her most recent book, Keep Moving, is a beautiful nonfiction work of quotes and essays, in which she writes about new beginnings as opportunities for transformation.

Madeline Miller is the author of two New York Times bestsellers, The Song of Achilles (2012), a reimagining of The Iliad, and Circe (2018), a feminist inversion of The Odyssey. In each book, Miller brings a fresh perspective to ancient tales, re-centering these stories on characters whose voices have been excluded from the narrative for thousands of years.

Gabrielle Hamilton is the chef/owner of Prune restaurant in New York’s East Village and the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef. Anthony Bourdain called Blood, Bones & Butter “simply the best memoir by a chef. Ever.” Hamilton also writes for the New York Times on food, memory, and the restaurant industry.