Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1947, and grew up, from age four, in California. He received a B.A. from Princeton University in 1969 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1975. He is the author of ongoing prose work, eleven chapbooks of poetry, and a three-volume boxed set collection of poetry, Double Trio: Tej Bet, So’s Notice, Nerve Church (New Directions, 2021). He is editor of the literary magazine Hambone, co-editor of the anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993), and co-editor of the anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017).
 
His awards and honors include the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University in 2015, the William B. Hart Residency in Poetry at the American Academy in Rome in 2016, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress in 2017, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University, where he is the Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing.

Margaret Sartor's eight books include: Where We Find Ourselves: The Photographs of Hugh Mangum 1897–1922 (2019), William Gedney: Only the Lonely, 1955-1984 (2017), What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney (1999), and the New York Times best-selling memoir Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets, and Growing up in the 1970s (2006). Sartor’s photographs have been exhibited widely and appeared in numerous publications, including: In Their Mother’s Eyes: Women Photographers and Their Children (2001), A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South (1996), Aperture, DoubleTake, Esquire, and The New Yorker. Her work is in permanent collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Ogden Museum of Art, and the North Carolina Museum of Art. She lives with her husband, Duke Professor Emeritus Alex Harris, in Durham, NC.

Kerry L. Haynie is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science, Professor of African and African American Studies, and a former Chair of the Academic Council. On July 1, 2022, he will begin a 3-year term as Dean of the Social Sciences for Duke's Trinity Colleges of Arts and Sciences.

Haynie’s research examines how the underlying theories, structures, and practices of American political institutions affect African Americans’ and women’s efforts to organize and influence the political system. His publications include African American Legislators in the American States; New Race Politics in America: Understanding Minority and Immigrant Voting (co-edited with Jane Junn), The Encyclopedia of Minorities in American Politics, Volume I: African Americans and Asian Americans; The Encyclopedia of Minorities in American Politics, Volume II: Hispanic Americans and Native Americans; and Race, Gender, and Legislative Representation: Toward a More Intersectional Approach (with Beth Reingold and Kirsten Widner), winner of the 2021 Richard F. Fenno, Jr. Prize from the American Political Science Association for the best book in legislative studies.

Susan J Dunlap, Ph.D. is a Consulting Professor of Pastoral Theology at Duke Divinity School. In addition, she is the coordinator of the M.Div./M.S.W. dual degree program that the Divinity School shares with the University of North Carolina. Her teaching has been in the area of care of the sick and care for the bereaved. She also teaches two courses that integrate ministry and social work along with a colleague from UNC School of Social Work. She is an ordained Presbyterian (PCUSA) pastor and has served churches in both the Triangle area and Baltimore, MD. In Baltimore she was the pastor of a small church for four years before returning to school for a Th.M. from Duke and a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary. She has been on the Strategy Team of a community organizing group, Durham CAN, and serves on the board of the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham, where she also co-leads a grief group for family members of people who have died violently. She also serves as a volunteer chaplain at Urban Ministries of Durham. She is the author of three books, Counseling Depressed Women (1997), Caring Cultures: How Congregations Respond to the Sick (2009), and Shelter Theology: The Religious Lives of People Without Homes (2021). She lives in Durham with her husband, Dr. Prasad Kasibhatla, who teaches in the Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

Frank Bruni has been a prominent journalist for more than three decades, including more than twenty-five years at The New York Times, the last ten of them as a nationally renowned op-ed columnist who appeared frequently as a television commentator. He was also a White House correspondent for the Times, its Rome bureau chief, and, for five years, its chief restaurant critic. He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers. In July 2021, he became a full professor at Duke University, teaching media-oriented classes in the school of public policy. He continues to write his popular weekly newsletter for the Times and to produce occasional essays as one of the newspaper’s official Contributing Opinion Writers

Stanley Hauerwas has sought to recover the significance of the virtues for understanding the nature of the Christian life. This search has led him to emphasize the importance of the church, as well as narrative for understanding Christian existence. His work cuts across disciplinary lines as he is in conversation with systematic theology, philosophical theology and ethics, political theory, as well as the philosophy of social science and medical ethics. He was named "America’s Best Theologian" by Time magazine in 2001. Dr. Hauerwas, who holds a joint appointment in Duke Law School, delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectureship at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland in 2001.

Alex has been a member of the Duke philosophy department for over 20 years. The author of hundreds of academic papers and a dozen books about the philosophy of science, he began writing more accessible works for general audiences ten years ago, including "The Atheist's Guide to Reality" and "How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of our Addiction to Stories." More unusually he is the author of 4 historical novels, including the best seller, "The Girl From Krakow" and its sequel, "In the Shadow of Enigma." Like "The Intrigues of Jennie Lee," all of his novels connect the real dots of history into narratives about strong, resourceful, smart women.

Sanyin’s mission in life is to enable greatness in others. She is the founding executive director of Duke University’s Fuqua/Coach K Leadership & Ethics Center, a professor with Pratt School of Engineering and a Faculty Fellow with its Divinity School. She was recognized by Thinkers50 (the premier global ranking of management thinkers) in 2019 as the World’s #1 Executive Coach & Mentor. In 2021, Thinkers50 named her as one of the 50 most influential thought-leaders in the world.

An Influencer with more than 1 million LinkedIn followers, she was recognized on LinkedIn’s Top Global Influencer Voices (2017, 2018) Her insights have been featured in New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, HBR, Economic Times of India, Maria Shriver’s The Sunday Paper, and The Wall Street Journal. Sanyin pens The Last Word Column in Dialogue Review, and the Ask Sanyin column for MIT Sloan Management Review. She authored The Launch Book: Motivational Stories for Launching Your Idea, Business, or Next Career which inspires readers through stories of different leaders and gives them an action plan for leveraging change using behavioral science principles Her biweekly substack newsletter - Leadership Playbook: Unleashing Your Superpowers, helps readers discover their innate and instinctive strengths and build super teams.

She helps CEOs, friends, students, mentees and teams discover and use their superpowers to make the biggest difference. She is also a mom of 3 and married to the love of her life, Chad Miller (Duke Medicine ’99).

Adam Hollowell teaches ethics and inequality studies at Duke University, where he directs the Global Inequality Research Initiative at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Jamie McGhee is a novelist, playwright, and essayist. For her fiction, she was named a James Baldwin Fellow in Saint-Paul de Vence, France, and a Sacatar Fellow in Itaparica, Brazil. She graduated from Duke University in 2016, where she was a Reginaldo Howard Scholar. She lives in Berlin, Germany.