Gary Paul Nabhan is a Lebanese-American and Ecumenical Franciscan Brother who was hosted in Lebanon by American University in Beirut in 2018. A MacArthur Fellow and award-winning essayist, he is working on a novel about his family’s flight from Syria a century ago. Nabhan has authored and edited more than thirty-five books on the natural history and ecology of the American Southwest and the importance of nurturing cultural diversity to preserve biodiversity. One of the co-authors of the manifesto “An Invitation to the Radical Center” (2003), his most recent books include Mesquite (Chelsea Green, 2018) and Food from the Radical Center: Healing Our Land and Communities (Island Press, 2018). 

Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, PhD, is a curator of Asian Pacific American studies for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and director and co-founding editor-in-chief of The Asian American Literary Review. He is lead organizer for the Asian American Literature Festival and co-founder of the Center for Refugee Poetics.

Deborah Paredez is the author of the critical study Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke University Press, 2009) and of the poetry volumes Year of the Dog (BOA Editions, 2020) and This Side of Skin (Wings Press, 2002). She is currently at work on a book of essays, “American Diva,” that chronicles the impact of divas on her life and on American culture more broadly during the past fifty years. She is a professor of creative writing and ethnic studies at Columbia University and co-founder of CantoMundo, a national organization for Latinx poets.

Emily McGinn is the Head of Digital Humanities at the University of Georgia. She oversees the Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab in a role that includes digital project management and digital-humanities pedagogy. She holds a PhD in comparative literature with a focus on the impact of technology on narrative form in Latin American and Irish modernisms.

Mab Segrest, professor emeritus of gender and women’s studies at Connecticut College, is the author of the soon-forthcoming Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum  and 1994’s Memoir of a Race Traitor: Fighting Racism in the American South, reprinted in 2019 with a new introduction and afterword (both volumes from The New Press). A longtime activist in social justice movements and a past fellow at the National Humanities Center, she lives in Durham, North Carolina.