Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books, including Colored People, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, In Search of Our Roots, and the American Book Award-winning The Signifying Monkey. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Hollis Robbins, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, received a Masters in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and is author of Flushing Away Sentiment: Water Politics in Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.