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State Representative Linda Dorcena Forry is a native Bostonian who has dedicated her professional life to a career as a public servant. Rep. Forry was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in a special election in spring 2005, becoming the second Haitian American elected to Massachusetts office. She represents the Commonwealth’s 12th Suffolk district, a diverse and vibrant cross-section that includes parts of the town of Milton and the city of Boston, including Dorchester, Hyde Park and Mattapan. In 2009, Forry served as Chair of the Black and Latino Caucus. That same year, she was appointed Chairman of the Joint Committee on Community Development and Small Business. Rep. Forry draws upon her roots in civic activism and government as committee chair. Rep. Forry grew up in Dorchester’s Uphams Corner neighborhood, where her parents, Andre and Annie Dorcena, settled after emigrating to the United States from Haiti in the early 1970s. The Dorcena family – which includes Linda’s siblings and large extended family throughout Greater Boston – has deep roots in the neighborhoods of Boston. Both of Linda’s parents worked long hours to ensure that all of their eight children would have access to an excellent education. They accomplished their mission. For Linda, Annie and Andre’s hard work and sacrifice gave her the opportunity to attend very good schools. She went to elementary school in Dorchester’s Uphams Corner, attending St. Kevin’s Grammar School. She graduated with honors from Monsignor Ryan Memorial High School, where she was elected President of her class. Linda holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Management from the Boston College Carroll School of Management and is currently a Masters Degree Candidate in Public Administration at Suffolk University.

Louis Cameron Gossett, Jr. is an Emmy, Golden Globe, and Academy Award winning American actor. Louis Gossett, Jr. was born May 27, 1936, in Sheepshead Bay, Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York. He was raised by his mother Hellen Rebecca Wray Gossett and his father, Louis Gossett, Sr. A sports injury left Gossett, Jr. with no choice but to take an acting class, and at 16 he made his stage debut in the school's production of You Can't Take It with You. After graduating high school, he attended New York University, on an athletic scholarship, where he was a star basketball player. The New York Knicks were so impressed with Gossett's athletic ability, that they made him an offer of a professional contract upon graduation. He played with them briefly in 1958, before choosing to focus completely on his acting career. After leaving the New York Knicks, Gossett took a big step into the world of cinema in the Sidney Poitier vehicle A Raisin in the Sun in 1961. Gossett's Broadway theatre credits include A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Golden Boy (1964), and Chicago (2002). He also has performed in other media, including television productions. In fact, it was his Emmy award-winning role of "Fiddler" in the 1977 groundbreaking television miniseries Roots that first gave Gossett audience's attention. In 1983, Gossett was cast in the title role in Sadat, a miniseries which chronicled the life and assassination of Anwar Sadat. While filming An Officer and a Gentleman, Gossett was also starring in the 1982–1983 science fiction series, The Powers of Matthew Star. Gossett is the voice of the Vortigaunts in the video game Half-Life 2 (although he did not return for it's sequel Episode Two) and is also the Free Jaffa Leader (Gerak) in Season 9 of Stargate SG-1. In 2007, Lou Gossett, Jr., was the honored guest and keynote speaker for the alumni hall of fame gala benefiting Boys & Girls Clubs of the Suncoast, St. Petersburg, Florida. Mr. Gossett has appeared every year supporting the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. He is an alumnus himself and has continued to work for and with the organization.

Phyllis Karas is the co-author of “The Onassis Women: An Eyewitness Account,” (Putnam, 1998), which she wrote with Aristotle Onassis’ private secretary, Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos. Her published works also include “A Life Worth Living” (St. Martin’s Press, 1980), and the young adult novels, “The Hate Crime” (Avon, 1996), “Cry Baby” (Avon, 1997), “For Lucky’s Sake” (Avon, 1998), and “Spellbound” (Avon, 1999). She has co-authored two books dealing with Whitey Bulger and the South Boston Irish Mob: “Street Soldier: My Life as an Enforcer for Whitey Bulger and the Boston Irish Mob” (Steerforth Press, 2003) and “Brutal: The Untold Story of my Life Inside Whitey Bulger’s Irish Mob” (HarperCollins, 2006), which was on the NYT Best Seller List. “An Actor and a Gentleman” (John Wiley & Sons) is her ninth book. She is a stringer for People magazine and an adjunct professor at Boston University School of Journalism.

Tim Wu is a writer, professor at Columbia Law School and the chairman of media reform organization Free Press. Wu's best known work is the development of Net Neutrality theory, but he has also written about copyright, international trade, and the study of law-breaking. He previously worked for Riverstone Networks in the telecommunications industry in Silicon Valley, and was a law clerk for Judge Richard Posner and Justice Stephen Breyer. Wu has written for *The New Yorker*,* The Washington Post*, *Forbes*, *Slate* magazine, and others.

Ian Frazier is the author of *Great Plains*, *On the Rez*, and *Dating Your Mom*, and is a frequent contributor to *The New Yorker*.

Paul Auster is the bestselling author of *Oracle Night*, *The Book of Illusions* and *TimbuktuI Thought My Father Was God*. The NPR National Story Project anthology which he edited, was also a national bestseller.

Ilana Halperin (b. 1973, New York) lives and works between Glasgow and New York. She received a MFA from Glasgow School of Art; Glasgow, Scotland and a BA from Brown University; Providence, RI. Upcoming projects include a solo exhibition entitled Physical Geology, a Field Guide to Body Mineralogy and Other New Landmass at the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité and Hand Held Lava, a collaborative performative lecture at Triple Canopy in Brooklyn. Previous solo exhibitions include Physical Geology (slow time) at Artists Space, New York; Physical Geology (part one) at the Manchester Museum and Nomadic Landmass at doggerfisher in Edinburgh. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions including Volcano - the first comprehensive retrospective of the history of volcanoes in art - at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, Polar Dispatches at the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Estratos, PAC Murcia, Spain; the Sharjah Biennial 8 and Experimental Geography, ICI, currently touring. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Creative Scotland Artist Award, a British Council Darwin Now Award and an Alchemy Fellowship at the Manchester Museum. She has undertaken artist residencies at the Camden Arts Centre, Cove Park and aboard the Professor Molchanov, an ecotourism vessel that travels into the far North. Ilana was an Earthwatch fieldwork participant in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, where she helped map and document subterranean artefacts located in the longest cave in the world. Her subsequent work with Earthwatch featured in the project Nomadic Landmass, and focused on the Eldfell eruption. More on Ilana Halperin and her practice For the most part, humanity rests comfortable in the thought that geological inquiry interrogates passages of time which are almost unfathomably of the 'not now'. Our experience of the geological 'now' is too apocalyptic to be confronted more closely than through the newsman's telescopic lens; earthquake, volcano and landslide all put before us challenges to our sense that geology is something that happened in the mists of time and humanity, by contrast, is what is happening now. There are, however, places on the planet where the relationship between the human and the geological undergoes a seismic shift; geologist or not, to take a journey through the landscape of Iceland is to realise that geological time is indefatigably 'now'. For an artist to make such a journey is to realise that cataclysmic human events, even at the most personal level, conceal and manifest themselves no less enigmatically in the individual than do the processes of geology in the shard, collected by Halperin, from the crest of the Eldfell volcano. The very encounter with a living landmass confounds our daily assumptions about relationships with our pasts, our presents and our futures. Once among the lava flows and steaming craters, geological process manifests itself as less cataclysmic entropy than creative energy - past catching up with future, the forces of entropy fusing with those of creativity. -- Mungo Campbell, extracts from 'Journey through the surface of the Earth', published to accompany Ilana Halperin's art/science research residency, Nomadic Landmass (London), Camden Arts Centre, 2005.

John Flynn’s artistic journey has taken him from Temple University, where he earned a degree in Political Science, to Nashville’s Music Row as a songwriter, to award-winning children’s recording artist and performer, to social justice activist. John is truly an American troubadour.

Frederick Emerson Small, known publicly as Fred Small, is an American singer-songwriter. He began his career as a lawyer and later became a Unitarian Universalist minister. Small was formerly a Senior Minister of First Parish in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Unitarian Universalist) and co-chair of Religious Witness for the Earth, a national interfaith network dedicated to public witness on critical environmental issues, especially global climate change. Follow him on Twitter at [@revfredsmall](https://twitter.com/revfredsmall?lang=en "")

Originally from Richmond, VA, Greg GReenway moved to Boston for its rich Folk Music tradition and has become one of its most unique and superlative emissaries. He draws his musical inspiration from gospel, rock, blues, Jazz, and world music. But his center is in the singer/songwriter tradition that traces it roots all the way back to the social awareness of Woody Guthrie.

Steeped in American "roots" music, Pat Wictor is a contemporary songwriter and interpreter drawing on the rural country, gospel, and blues traditions of our nation. He is also a music educator of note, teaching workshops on writing, interpreting, and rearranging songs, on slide guitar and other guitar techniques, and various topics of music history.