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  • Marvin Kalb, Edward R. Murrow Professor of Practice, Emeritus, and Senior Fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, was the Shorenstein Centers Founding Director and Edward R. Murrow Professor of Press and Public Policy (1987 to 1999). He was also recipient of the 2006 National Press Club Fourth Estate Award. His distinguished journalism career encompasses 30 years of award-winning reporting for CBS and *NBC News*, as Chief Diplomatic Correspondent, Moscow Bureau Chief, and host of *Meet the Press*. Kalb has authored or coauthored 10 nonfiction books and two best-selling novels. His most recent book, *The Media and the War on Terrorism* (coedited with Stephen Hess), explores the interaction between the government and the media during times of war and national emergency. Kalb is currently writing a history of the impact of the Vietnam War on American presidential politics. He hosts *the Kalb Report*, a discussion of media ethics and responsibility at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, and he is a regular contributor to Fox television and National Public Radio.
  • Donahue, vice chairman of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, has maintained a private law practice since 2001. Prior to establishing his private practice, Mr. Donahue was partner in Donahue & Donahue Attorneys from 1951 to 2001. Mr. Donahue was an assistant to President John F. Kennedy in the White House from 1960 to 1963. He was president and chief operating officer for NIKE, Inc. from 1990 to 1994. He currently serves as vice chairman of the Board for NIKE where he has been a director since 1977. Mr. Donahue is a former president of the New England Bar Association and of the Massachusetts Bar Association from which he received the Gold Medal in 1979. He is the recipient of several honorary degrees. Mr. Donahue is a graduate of Dartmouth College and of Boston University Law School, which honored him with the Silver Shingle Award in 1991. Mr. Donahue is an original member of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award Committee, which he served and chaired from its inception in 1989.
  • Cecil W. Stoughton, who was President John F. Kennedy's White House photographer, whose photographs of JFK and his wife and children shared their personal lives with the American public, and who took the iconic photograph of Lyndon B. Johnson being sworn in as president aboard Air Force One in Texas after JFK's 1963 assassination, died at him home in Merritt Island, Florida. Stoughton was 88 and had been ill for some time, according to his family and friends. He struggled with a heart problem after having hip replacement surgery several years ago, according to his family. He was the personal photographer to presidents Kennedy and Johnson before the position had a formal name.
  • Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Pinker is one of the world's leading authorities on language and the mind, and the the author of seven books, including *The Language Instinct*, *How the Mind Works*, *Words and Rules*, *The Blank Slate*, and *The Stuff of Thought*.
  • Billy Collins distinguishes himself through his clear, accessible poetry–and by reinterpreting many traditional poetic forms. His poem "Sonnet" begins "All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now." Collins speaks out against the over-interpretation of poetry, as well as the writing of poetry strictly for an academic audience. As United States Poet Laureate (2001-03), he created a poetry collection called "Poetry 180," a project whose aim was to increase poetry's popularity among teens by exposing them to a meaningful contemporary poem each day of the school year. Although its accessibility is in part responsible for the popularity of Collins's work, humor, irony, and ambiguity also play an important role. The poet Stephen Dunn once wrote of Collins's appeal, "We seem to always know where we are in a Billy Collins poem, but not necessarily where he is going."
  • Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of the prize-winning books *Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression *(1990); *Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class* (1994); *Yo Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America* (1997), which was selected one of the top ten books of 1998 by *the Village Voice*; *Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century*, written collaboratively with Dana Frank and Howard Zinn (2001); and *Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination* (2002). He also edited (with Earl Lewis), *To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans* (2000), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and a History Book Club Selection. *To Make Our World Anew* was an outgrowth of an earlier collaboration with Lewis, the eleven volume Young Oxford History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 1995-1998), of which he authored volume 10, titled *Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970* (1996). Kelley also co-edited (with Sidney J. Lemelle) *Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora* (1994). Kelley's essays have appeared in several anthologies and journals, including *The Nation*, *Monthly Review*, *The Voice Literary Supplement*, *New York Times*, *New York Times Magazine*, *Rolling Stone*, *Color Lines*, *Code Magazine*, *Utne Reader*, *Lenox Avenue*, and *African Studies Review*.