Tom Piazza is a celebrated writer on American music. His twelve books include the novels A Free State and City of Refuge, the post-Katrina manifesto Why New Orleans Matters, and Devil Sent the Rain, a collection of his essays and journalism. He was a principal writer for the innovative HBO drama series Treme, and winner of a Grammy Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey.
Christopher Lebron is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice in Our Time, winner of the American Political Science Association Foundations of Political Theory First Book Award, as well as numerous academic articles and book reviews on race and political ethics. Lebron has also written for the New York Times’s The Stone column and Boston Review. He has just completed “The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea,” forthcoming in 2017.
Magda Zaborowska is a professor in the Departments of American Culture and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.
Rich Blint is the 2016–2017 Scholar-in-Residence in the MFA Program in Performance and Performance Studies in the Department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. His teaching and research interests include American, African American, and Anglophone Caribbean literature and culture; the life and work of James Baldwin; racial visuality and US popular culture; post-colonialism and diaspora; as well as urban form and politics in the context of the global.
