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  • Prioleau Alexander attended College at Auburn University. He served as a lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps 3rd Assault Amphibian Battalion, 1st Marine Division and 1st Armored Assault Battalion, 3rd Marine Division. Alexander is the author of *You Want Fries with That? A White-Collar Burnout Experiences Life at Minimum Wage*.
  • Dr. Daniel S. Papp became the third president of Kennesaw State University July 1, 2006. Prior to being named president by the Board of Regents, Papp served as senior vice chancellor for academics and fiscal affairs of the University System of Georgia. Senior vice chancellor since 2000, Papp was responsible for system-wide academic, faculty and student issues and concerns; business and financial affairs; academic and business information-technology systems; and strategic planning affecting all of the university systems 35 institutions. Before becoming senior vice chancellor, Papp directed educational programs for Yamacraw, Georgia's initiative to become the global leader in broadband technologies and components. Papp served as interim president of Southern Polytechnic State University from 1997 to 1998 and as executive assistant to the president at Georgia Tech from 1994 to 1997. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Dartmouth College, Papp received his doctorate in international affairs from the University of Miami. His academic specialties include international security policy, U.S. and Russian foreign and defense policies, and international system change. He is the author or editor of 10 books on these topics, including the biography of former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk. He also has published more than 60 journal articles and chapters in edited books.
  • David Poythress is a Georgia politician. He has served terms as Secretary of State and Commissioner of Labor of the state of Georgia. Poythress also served as the Adjutant General of the Georgia National Guard from 1999 until 2007, initially appointed by Governor Roy Barnes and subsequently reappointed by Governor Sonny Perdue. He retired as a Lieutenant General. In 1998, Poythress made an unsuccessful bid for Governor of Georgia.
  • Joel Cowan holds Georgia Tech's William B. Turner Chair in Servant Leadership and is an adjunct professor for the College of Management and the Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship. Owner of the investment company Habersham & Cowan, Inc., he founded Georgia's Peachtree City, serving as the town's first mayor from 1959 to 1963. He served as CEO of Peachtree City's development company through 1976. Cowan also has developed such projects as Phipps Plaza, Snapfinger Woods, and Palmetto Dunes. A member of the Society of International Business Fellows and the Carter Center's Board of Councilors, Cowan has shifted his focus in recent years from real-estate development to international activities. He does trade, technology transfer and merchant banking in the Netherlands and the emerging economies of Central Asia, Eastern Europe, Russia and China. His nonprofit contributions in these same regions include education and leadership training. Cowan is currently a director of World Airways Holdings, Inc. He also directs the EastWest Institute in New York and the Center for International Leadership in Washington, DC. He has held leadership positions with the Atlanta and Georgia Chambers of Commerce, and was the founding chairman of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority and the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District.
  • Jennet Conant is the author of *The 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer*, * The Secret City of Los Alamos* and *Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II*. A former journalist, she has written for *Vanity Fair*, *Esquire*, *GQ*, *Newsweek*, and *The New York Times*. She lives in New York City and Sag Harbor, New York.
  • Jonathan Mahler is the author of *The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)*, which grew out of an article he wrote in June 2004 for *The New York Times Magazine*. He is also the author of the best-selling book *Ladies and Gentlemen*, *The Bronx Is Burning*, a 2004 *New York Times* *Notable Book* that was adapted as an eight-part dramatic miniseries for ESPN starring John Turturro. Mahler is a contributing writer for *The Times Magazine*, where he has written about everything from baseball to politics to religion. His work has appeared in a variety of other publications, including *The New York Times Book Review*, *New York magazine*, *The New Republic and Slate*. A 1990 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northwestern University, Mahler lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife Danielle Mattoon and their children, Gus and Nora.
  • Napoleon Jones-Henderson attended the Sorbonne in Paris, received a BA of Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Chicago and completed his graduate studies at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. He is a founding member of Africobra, one of the most important visual arts collectives to come out of the Chicago Black Arts Movement. He received the Mayor of Boston Award of Recognition for Outdoor Sculpture Exhibit; the Massachusetts State Senate Omical Citation for Cultural Excellence, and an Award of Excellence from the National Conference of Artists.
  • Hiram Mann is one of fewer than 500 black pilots who flew combat missions in World War II as a Tuskegee Airman. He was originally rejected from the army for two reasons: he was married (pilots at the time were required to be single) and he only had 1 year of college (flight trainees needed a minimum of 2 years). By 1942, however, the military needed pilots more than it needed to uphold strict academic and marital standards. The Army granted Mann's request. Mann graduated from the TAAF flight program as a single-engine combat fighter pilot in June 1944. He went on to fly several aircrafts, including the P-51 Mustang, P-40 Warhawk and P-47 Thunderbolt fighter planes and a C-45 Expediter cargo plane. He retired from the U.S. Air Force as a lieutenant colonel with more than 21 years of service. He also eventually earned bachelor's and master's degrees.
  • Houston-based artist Jamal Cyrus's work examines the spaces between radical socio-political movements and untold histories, both real and imagined. For his first New York solo exhibition, Cyrus presents a new series of drawings, sculptures and videos that use Palmer Hayden's seminal social realist painting *The Janitor Who Paints* (1937) as a point of departure. Echoing this narrative scene, Cyrus creates an interrelated series of videos and drawings wherein the janitor's persona and his immediate tools become a metaphor for recovering the creative production of the overlooked and unnamed. Evocatively reworking the symbolic and political traditions in Hayden's painting, Cyrus explores slippages between the metaphysical and the ordinary, overlapping ideas of labor and creativity and the retelling of historical narratives.
  • Rob Pruitt is an internationally renowned contemporary artist who came to fame in the late 1980's as half of the art team Pruitt Early. Their celebrated bodies of work, "Artwork for Teenage Boys" and "Artwork for Teenage Girls," took art about gender politics into a radical new pop arena. In 1998, Pruitt created "Cocaine Buffet," "101 Art Ideas You Can Do Yourself," and his popular glitter paintings of panda bears. Abrams Publishing will be releasing a comprehensive career monograph entitled Low and Behold: the Art of Rob Pruitt.