Richard Hoffman is author of Half the House: a Memoir, and the poetry collections, Without Paradise and Gold Star Road, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. His work, both verse and prose, has appeared in Agni, Ascent, Harvard Review, Hudson Review,Poetry, Witness and other magazines. He has been awarded several fellowships and prizes, most recently a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in fiction, and The Literary Review's Charles Angoff Prize for the essay. He is currently Writer-in-Resident at Emerson College.

Helene Atwan has been director of Beacon Press since October 1995. She holds a Master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Virginia. She began her career in publishing at Random House in 1976, and has worked at Alfred A. Knopf, Viking Press; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and Simon and Schuster. Her acquisitions at Beacon include Gayl Jones’s *The Healing*, a National Book Award Finalist, Wendy Kaminer’s *Worst Instincts*, Danielle Ofri’s *Singular Intimacies*, Rashid Khalidi’s *Resurrecting Empire* and *The Iron Cage*, Meredith Hall’s *Without A Map*, as well as books by journalists Mitchell Zuckoff, Philip Winslow, Mark Hyman, and Beth Whitehouse, and nine volumes of poetry by Pulitzer-prize winner Mary Oliver. She served for eight years on the board of PEN-New England and is the Administrator of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

Born in Brooklyn in 1957, Martín Espada was once called by Sandra Cisneros "the Pablo Neruda of North American authors." A poet, editor, essayist, and translator, he has published more than 16 collections and has earned a reputation as a writer of passionate social and political conviction, as well as intense lyricism. When asked about his reasons for writing, he responded, "Compulsion. It feels urgent. There are ghosts that tell me to write…I'm talking about the interplay of imagination and memory and ancestors, both literal and figurative." Espada’s poetry is informed by those ancestors and by his own past self. In “Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper,” he reminds us of the countless nameless, faceless workers whose efforts go unacknowledged and uncelebrated. Edward Hirsch has written of Espada, "He stands up for what Whitman calls 'the rights of them the others are down upon' and writes a fiery, impure, earth-tinged, human-centered poetry." Espada’s awards include the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Robert Creeley Award, and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. Formerly a tenant lawyer, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda.

Marc Favreau is the editorial director of The New Press. Authors he has worked with include Ira Berlin, Eric Hobsbawm, Lloyd Gardner, Nelson Lichtenstein, Ellen Schrecker, and Patricia Sullivan. A co-editor of *Remembering Slavery*, he lives in New York City.

Dave Zirin is the sports editor at The Nation Magazine, their first sports editor in 160 years of existence. He is the author of 11 books on the politics of sport, including most recently "The Kaepernick Effect". He is the co-producer, writer and narrator of the new documentary, "Behind the Shield: The Power and Politics of the NFL". Zirin has also worked as an advisor for filmmakers and documentarians such as Ang Lee and Ken Burns. Named one of UTNE Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World,” Zirin has been a frequent guest on ESPN, MSNBC, and CNN. He also hosts The Nation’s Edge of Sports podcast and cohosts The Collison on WPFW. His new book is a biography of the historian Howard Zinn called "The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn".