Kiara Barrow is cofounder and coeditor of The Drift and a senior editor at Penguin Press.

Leonard Benardo is senior vice president for the Open Society Foundations. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the International Herald Tribune, Bookforum, the American Prospect, Project Syndicate, and Prospect. He is the co-author, with his wife Jennifer Weiss, of two books: Brooklyn by Name: How the Neighborhoods, Streets, Parks, Bridges, and More Got Their Names, and Citizen-in-Chief: The Second Lives of the American Presidents.

Peter Constantine is a literary translator and editor, and the director of the Literary Translation Program at the University of Connecticut. His recent translations, published by Random House (Modern Library), include The Essential Writings of Rousseau, The Essential Writings of Machiavelli, and works by Tolstoy, Gogol, and Voltaire. His translation of the complete works of Isaac Babel received the Koret Jewish Literature Award and a National Jewish Book Award citation. A Guggenheim Fellow, he was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for Six Early Stories by Thomas Mann, and the National Translation Award for The Undiscovered Chekhov. His first novel, The Purchased Bride, was published in 2023.

Jeremy Tiang is a novelist, playwright and literary translator. He has translated over 30 books from across the Chinese-speaking world, including novels by Yeng Pway Ngon, Yan Ge, and Zhang Yueran; his translation of Zou Jingzhi’s Ninth Building was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023. His plays include Salesman之死 (Obie Award for Outstanding New Play), The Last Days of Limehouse and A Dream of Red Pavilions. His novel State of Emergency (World Editions/ Epigram Books) won the Singapore Literature Prize, and his short story collection It Never Rains on National Day was shortlisted for the same prize. In 2022, Tiang was the Princeton University Translator-in-Residence. He has served as a judge for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award (Translated Literature). Originally from Singapore, he now lives in Flushing, Queens.

Nikhil Goyal is a sociologist and author of Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty (Metropolitan / Macmillan). He is also a policymaker who served as senior policy advisor on education and children for Chairman Senator Bernie Sanders on the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and Committee on the Budget. Goyal has taught sociology at New York University, the University of Vermont, and Wesleyan University. He has appeared on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, and written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and other publications. Goyal earned his B.A. at Goddard College and M.Phil and Ph.D at the University of Cambridge. 

Salamishah Tillet is the Henry Rutgers Professor of Africana Studies and Creative Writing at Rutgers University, Newark, and a contributing critic-at-large at the New York Times. She is the director of Express Newark (supported by Rutgers). Tillet is the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination and In Search of the Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece, and the forthcoming, All The Rage: Nina Simone and The World She Made. Her work has been supported by the Emerson Collective, the Gordon Parks Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Lindback Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the Mellon Foundation. She is the recipient of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism