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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.

Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University. She is the author of *Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy*. She lives in New York City.

Jon Entine is an internationally renowned journalist, TV commentator, executive consultant and public speaker, on the DNA of human behavior. An Emmy winning television producer and author, Jon has been described as a "public intellectual", the rare individual in touch with business, political, and scientific trends and adept at translating the ideas of the future into the transformative practices of today. Jon is the author of four books, including the best-sellers *Abraham's Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People* and *Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It*. Jon has been profiled around the world, including on 20/20 (John Stossel profile), HBO, BBC, ABC Nightly News, CNN, MSNBC, FOX TV, CBC, and Dubai TV, and his work has been featured in hundreds of the top newspapers and magazines in 19 countries.

Taylor Branch is best known for his prizewinning trilogy chronicling the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. The first volume, *Parting the Waters: America in the King Years*, 1954-63, won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Non-Fiction in 1988. The subesquent two volumes, and *Pillar of Fire and At Canaan's Edge* also went on to win numerous awards. The author of two other nonfiction books and a novel, Branch is a former staff member of *The Washington Monthly*, *Harper's*, and *Esquire*. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

John Lawrence Seigenthaler is an American journalist, writer, and political figure. He founded the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. Seigenthaler joined *The Tennessean* in 1949, resigning in 1960 to act as Robert F. Kennedy's administrative assistant. He rejoined *The Tennessean* as editor in 1962, publisher in 1973, and chairman in 1982 before retiring as chairman emeritus in 1991. Seigenthaler was also founding editorial director of *USA Today* from 1982 to 1991. During this period, he served on the board of directors for the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and from 1988 to 1989 was its president.

Larry Hugick is Chairman of Princeton Survey Research Associates International and is a nationally recognized expert in public opinion, pre election polling, and policy research. Hugick conducts the regular Newsweek poll and advises the magazine on social trends and politics. Since 2000, he has served as a regular exit poll analyst for NBC News. For the past decade at PSRA International, Hugick has conducted surveys on a wide range of health and health care topics for the Kaiser Family Foundation, Harvard School of Public Health, Prevention magazine and other clients. Before joining PSRA International in 1993, Hugick spent 15 years at The Gallup Organization, where he was Managing Editor of The Gallup Poll and led polling efforts for major newspapers, including Newsday and The Chicago Sun Times. He has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and NPR as a commentator about polling and public opinion.