Speakers

Gina Barton
Gina Barton is a veteran investigative criminal justice reporter for USA Today. Her reporting on lax oversight of police officers and deaths in police custody helped prompt a first-of-its-kind state law that requires independent investigations of all officer-involved deaths. She is the reporter, producer and host of the national Edward R. Murrow Award-winning podcast Unsolved and the author of the true crime book Fatal Identity. Barton has received numerous national journalism awards, including the George A. Polk Award, an IRE certificate and a Casey Medal. 


Constance Hale
Constance Hale is a journalist, poet, and fiend about the craft of writing. She has written five cheeky writing manuals, including Sin and Syntax—as well as a book on hula, and children's picture books set in Hawai‘i. Her freelance writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Smithsonian, National Geographic Adventure, The Los Angeles Times, and Honolulu, among many other publications, and her series on the sentence launched the “Draft” series on The New York Times Opinionator. She has been a staff editor at the Oakland Tribune, the San Francisco Examiner, Wired, and Health magazines and she has edited more than three dozen books, turning narratives about serious subjects into serious page-turners. She directed the program in narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, and has led conferences on narrative journalism there and at UC Berkeley.

Wendy Johnson
Dr. Wendy Johnson is an activist, clinician, and writer whose career includes stints scaling up HIV treatment in Mozambique, overseeing an urban public health department in Cleveland, and directing a community clinic in Santa Fe. She currently practices family and addiction medicine for El Centro Family Health and consults with community clinics in Appalachian Ohio. Johnson’s first book, Kinship Medicine: Cultivating Interdependence to Heal the Earth and Ourselves, is out now from North Atlantic Books. 


Benjamin Moser
Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, including through publishing her complete works in English, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. For Sontag: Her Life and Work, he won the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters was published in 2023, and his next book, a global history of anti-Zionist Jews, is to be published in 2026.

J.K. Nickell
J.K. Nickell is the story director at Texas Monthly, where he shepherds the ambitious narratives for which the magazine is renowned. Several of his projects have been honored by the National Magazine Awards, optioned for television and film, and anthologized in various book collections. He has also edited and co-produced Texas Monthly’s critically acclaimed, chart-topping podcasts and is an executive producer of Landman. His own writing has won the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award and been recognized by The Best American Sports Writing and the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards.

Steve Padilla
Steve Padilla is editor of Column One, the front-page showcase for storytelling at the Los Angeles Times. He also supervises reporters in Mexico and the Middle East and helps guide the Times' immigration coverage. He serves as a writing coach and devotes his X feed, @StevePadilla2, to writing. 




Mike Piellucci
Mike Piellucci is the sports editor at D Magazine. He was previously a staffer at The Athletic and VICE, and his writing has also been featured in The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Los Angeles Magazine and The Ringer. A Dallas native, his work has been honored by The City and Regional Magazine Association and The Year’s Best Sportswriting. 




Andrea Pitzer
Andrea Pitzer is the author of Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World and One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, which was named a best history book of 2017 by Smithsonian Magazine. She’s currently working on Snowblind: Death on the Polar Ice, the story of the Saint Anna, a Russian ship that set out a century ago on an expedition that went catastrophically wrong. Host of the podcast “Next Comes What,” which looks at the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S., Andrea also writes the Degenerate Art newsletter. She’s been a freelance contributor to The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Outside, MSNBC, GQ, Slate, and elsewhere. Her reporting has taken her to four continents and on multiple expeditions to the Norwegian and Russian Arctic. 

Jason Roberts
Jason Roberts revives forgotten figures into compelling “human-scale history.” He received the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award for Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, which tells the story of 18th-century rivals Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, whose competing worldviews shape biological classification, evolutionary ideas, and our understanding of life’s complexity. Roberts’ previous book, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Prior to his career as a best-selling author, he was a counterculture nomad, day laborer, dishwasher, late-night disc jockey, and a tech CEO.

Janique L. Robillard
Janique L. Robillard is an Oscar-nominated documentary producer and independent filmmaker. Recent credits include producing two films with Peabody Award-winning Director Kim A. Snyder – Death By Numbers, nominated for the 2025 Academy® Awards: Best Documentary Short Film, and The Librarians (PBS/Independent Lens). The Librarians has garnered numerous Jury and Audience Awards at festivals after its 2025 Sundance world premiere. Robillard is committed to storytelling that elevates marginalized voices and creates meaningful impact for the communities who collaborate in the filmmaking process. . 


Edgar Sandoval
Edgar Sandoval is a reporter for The New York Times covering Texas, with a focus on the border with Mexico. He is based in San Antonio. Sandoval began his career writing obituaries for The Monitor in McAllen, Texas. He went on to write for several newspapers around the nation, including The Tennessean in Nashville, The Los Angeles Times, The Morning Call in Allentown, Penn., The South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the New York Daily News. A collection of his news stories about immigrants in Pennsylvania was reprinted in the book The New Face of Small Town America, by Penn State Press.


Anna Malaika Tubbs
Anna Malaika Tubbs is a 2x New York Times bestselling author and multidisciplinary expert on current and historical understandings of race, gender, and equity. With a Ph.D. in Sociology and a Master’s in Multidisciplinary Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge in addition to a Bachelor’s in Medical Anthropology from Stanford University, Tubbs translates her academic knowledge into clear and engaging stories. Her articles have been published by TIME Magazine, The Guardian, and others. Her first book The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of MLK Jr, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation came out in 2021, her second book Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us came out May of this year