Ibram X. Kendi is a National Book Award-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author. His books include Antiracist Baby; Goodnight Racism; How to Be an Antiracist; and How to Raise an Antiracist. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and the director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. In 2020, Time magazine named Kendi one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He has also been awarded a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship.

Jazzmen Lee-Johnson is a visual artist, scholar, composer, and curator. She received her BFA in film, animation, and video at Rhode Island School of Design, her MA in public humanities at Brown University, and a heavy dose of education working with youth in Baltimore, South Africa, New York, and Providence. Jazzmen was the 2019 inaugural Artist in Residence at the Rhode Island Department of Health, the 2020 Artist Fellow at the RISD Museum, and a 2021 Fitt Artist-in-Residence at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote four novels (Jonah's Gourd Vine; Their Eyes Were Watching God; Moses, Man of the Mountains; and Seraph on the Suwanee) and was still working on her fifth novel, The Life of Herod the Great, when she died; three books of folklore (Mules and Men and the posthumously published Go Gator and Muddy the Water and Every Tongue Got to Confess); a work of anthropological research (Tell My Horse); an autobiography (Dust Tracks on a Road); an international bestselling ethnographic work (Barracoon); and over fifty short stories, essays, and plays. She was born in Notasulga, Alabama, grew up in Eatonville, Florida, and lived her last years in Fort Pierce, Florida.