Diane Ackerman is the author of 24 books of nonfiction and poetry, including the bestsellers A Natural History of the Senses, The Zookeeper's Wife, and most recently The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us, which received the 2015 PEN Henry David Thoreau Award for Nature Writing.

Patricia Hill Collins is Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park.  She is the author of eight books, including Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism and On Intellectual Activism. In 2008, she became the 100th President of the American Sociological Association.

John D'Agata is the author of Halls of Fame, About a Mountain, and The Lifespan of a Fact, and editor of The Next American Essay, The Lost Origins of the Essay, and the forthcoming The Making of the American Essay.  The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Howard Foundation, and Guggenheim Foundation, he teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa, where he directs the MFA in Nonfiction Writing Program.

Paul Holdengräber is founder and director of LIVE from The New York Public Library, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary. Over the past decade, Holdengräber has curated, interviewed, and hosted over 600 programs, offering cognitive theater at the Library and other venues, as well as speaking with a wide variety of thinkers and writers, including Salman Rushdie, Patti Smith, and Mike Tyson. He holds a doctorate in comparative literature from Princeton University.