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  • Dr. Peter Nien-chu Kiang is Professor of Education and Director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston where he has taught since 1987. Under his leadership, UMass Boston has developed the most Asian American Studies courses, faculty, and community linkages of any university in New England. Peter currently serves as co-president of the Chinese Historical Society of New England and chair of the Massachusetts Advisory Committee for the US Commission on Civil Rights.
  • Justin Kaplan received his bachelor of science degree from Harvard University in 1944. After pursuing a post-graduate degree for two years, he left graduate school to work for a publishing house, where he eventually became senior editor. Kaplan left publishing for writing in 1959 and began work on his first biography, *Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain*, a study of the famous author that was published in 1966. The book was a tremendous critical success, winning both the Pulitzer Prize for biography and a National Book Award in 1967. He followed this up with two more well-received biographies, *Lincoln Steffens, A Biography* (1974) and *Walt Whitman, A Life* (1980), which won an American Book Award, He also edited several anthologies and the 16th edition of Bartlett
  • Nam Van Pham has been a community activist for more than 20 years. He has traveled to many states and countries to inform the American and international public about human right abuses in Vietnam by the current Vietnamese government. In 2002 he co-founded the Massachusetts Commission for Human Rights in Vietnam, a coalition of Vietnamese American organizations and leading activists to advocate for respect of religious freedom and other individual rights for Vietnam. He has established the Next Vietnam Foundation, whose goal is to advocate for a democratic Vietnamese society.
  • Jack Cinquegrana is chair of the firm's Government Enforcement & Compliance Group. He is also a member of the firms Executive Committee. He is a veteran trial lawyer with over 25 years experience in litigation and state and federal government enforcement matters. Jack is one of Bostons most recognized lawyers. He is a past President of the Boston Bar Association and one of 10 Boston lawyers included in Best Lawyers in Americas Annual Guide to Bet-The-Company Litigation. He has been elected a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and the International Academy of Trial Lawyers, and he is listed in Massachusetts Super Lawyers Top 100, Best Lawyers in America, Chambers USA and The International Whos Who of Business Crime Lawyers. In 2009 he was appointed by the Supreme Judicial Court to serve on the Committee for Public Counsel Services, which oversees the provision of legal representation to indigent persons in criminal and civil cases in Massachusetts.
  • Rita Poussaint Nethersole is the Assistant Dean of Graduate Studies for Academic and Student and Student Affairs at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
  • For his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, and has also won virtually every other major literary honor. To create his first book, *The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York*, Caro spent seven years tracing and talking with hundreds of men and women who worked with, for, or against Robert Moses, including a score of his top aides. The book was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Caro graduated from Princeton University and later became a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He lives in New York City with his wife, Ina, an historian and writer.
  • Lewis was born in New York City on March 27, 1927. He attended the Horace Mann School in New York and received his BA degree from Harvard College in 1948. Lewis won his first Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1955 as a reporter for *the Washington Daily News* before joining *The New York Times* in 1955. After joining the *The Times*, he won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1963 for his coverage of the US Supreme Court. Lewis has written three books: *Gideon's Trumpet*, about a landmark Supreme Court case that compelled states to provide attorneys for indigent defendants; *Portrait of a Decade*, about the seismic changes in American race relations; and *Make No Law*, about Times v. Sullivan, a Supreme Court case that changed the course of First Amendment litigation in America. For 15 years, Lewis taught a course on the Constitution and the press at Harvard Law School. Last year, he was named Visiting Lombard Lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
  • As president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Jack Valenti is a leading figure in the American film and television industry's efforts to fight digital piracy. A former journalist, Valenti has written three non-fiction books - *The Bitter Taste of Glory*, *A Very Human Presiden*t, and *Speak Up With Confidence* - and the political novel, *Protect and Defend*. He earned a B.A. from the University of Houston and an M.B.A. from Harvard.
  • Mitchell Zuckoff is a professor of journalism at Boston University. He is the author of *Ponzi's Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend*, and *Choosing Naia: A Family's Journey*, and co-author with Dick Lehr of *Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders*. His magazine work has appeared in *The New Yorker*, *Fortune* and elsewhere. As a reporter at *The Boston Globe*, Zuckoff was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for investigative reporting. He received the Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Livingston Award for International Reporting, the Heywood Broun Award, and the Associated Press Managing Editors' Public Service Award. Zuckoff received a master's degree from the University of Missouri and was a Batten Fellow at the Darden School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia.
  • The son of an insurance company executive, Harris Wofford grew up in New York and, after a spell of military service, attended Chicago, Yale, and the overwhelmingly black Howard University, specifically chosen to broaden his understanding of civil rights issues first-hand. Wofford published two books on world government while an undergraduate and spent a brief period as an aide to Chester Bowles before devoting himself to law practice. He joined John Kennedy's presidential campaign and, together with Bowles, drafted the Democratic platform statement on civil rights. Wofford was appointed special civil rights assistant in the Kennedy administration but became disillusioned by the pace of change and in 1962 moved to Ethiopia to head the operations of the Peace Corps. From 1966 until 1978 Wofford was primarily engaged in academic life, first as president of SUNY's progressive Old Westbury campus and then as president of Bryn Mawr. He published his memoirs *Of Kennedys and Kings*. After a brief return to private practice in Philadelphia, Wofford served as chair of the Pennsylvania state Democratic Party and was then appointed by Governor Casey to be the state Secretary of Labor and Industry. In April 1991, when Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz was killed in an air crash, Casey appointed Wofford to fill the post until a special election could be held in November. In that election Wofford emphasized the health care issue and against the odds beat Richard Thornburgh, Bush's former Attorney-General. The result was widely interpreted as an early indication of the Bush administration's weakness on domestic policy and the electoral salience of the health care issue. Democratic presidential candidates then addressed the theme of health care and for a time Wofford was spoken of as vice-presidential material for Clinton. However, Wofford himself was not able to entrench his position and in 1994 he lost the Senate seat to the young Republican candidate Rich Santorum.