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  • 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.
  • Bruce Schulman is the author of *From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980*; *Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism*; and *The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics*. In 1989-90 he was director of the History Project in California, a joint effort of the University of California and the California State Department of Education to improve history education in the public schools. In 1993, as associate professor at UCLA, Schulman received the Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award and the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching. From 1997 to 2002 he was director of the American and New England Studies Program at Boston University.
  • Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 and attended the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. He is the author of seven novels, including *Vox* and *The Mezzanine*, and three previous works of nonfiction, including *Double Fold*, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001. He currently lives in Maine with his family.
  • A nationally known speaker on higher education policy issues, Wilson served as the first president and chief executive officer of the Nellie Mae Education Foundation from 1999 to 2006. The foundation, established in 1998, is New Englands largest public charity dedicated to improving academic achievement for underserved communities. During Wilson's seven-year tenure, the foundation distributed more than $80 million in grants to educational institutions and non-profit organizations to improve access to college. She is also a former chair of the American Association of Higher Education and was the first woman to chair the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, where she served on the board of directors from 2003 to 2006. Wilson currently serves on the boards of trustees of Boston College and Union Theological Seminary, the board of directors of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, the board of directors of Higher Education Resource Services, and the boards of Boston After School and Beyond, Boston College and Federated Dorchester Neighborhood Houses. She is a director of Medco Health Solutions. Wilson earned a bachelor's degree in English and secondary education at Cedar Crest College, a master's in education at Seton Hall University, and a Ph.D. in higher education administration at Boston College.
  • Eve LaPlante's award-winning *Salem Witch Judge (HarperOne, 2007, 2008)* follows *the Boston Globe bestseller American Jezebel (HarperOne, 2004, 2005)* and *Seized (HarperCollins, 1993, 2000)*. She contributed to the essay collection *Why I'm Still Married (Penguin, 2006, 2007)* and has written for *The Atlantic and The New York Times*.