Speakers

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.

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. 




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.

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.