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Jane Waldfogel, professor of Social Work and Public Policy at Columbia University, is co-editor of a recent volume, Stalled Gains and Steady Progress, which tracks trends in the black-white test score gap and offers explanations for uneven patterns of progress.

Richard Nisbett, distinguished university professor at the University of Michigan, addresses how schools and culture shape intellectual development in his new book, Intelligence and How to Get It.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, a former Harvard professor and Woodrow Wilson Fellow, is the author of several *New York Times* best-sellers, including *No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt*, which was awarded the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in History and her latest book, *Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln*. She is the recipient of the Charles Frankel Prize and the Sara Josepha Hale Medal. She was the first woman journalist to enter the Red Sox locker room and has been a consultant and on air-person for PBS documentaries on Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedy family, Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham and Mary Lincoln, and Ken Burns' *The History of Baseball*. Currently an NBC News analyst, Ms. Goodwin lives in Massachusetts.

Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies, received his BA from Yale in 1970, and his D.Phil. from Oxford in 1974. He is editor of the *Journal of Palestine Studies*, and was President of the Middle East Studies Association, and an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations from October 1991 until June 1993. He is author of *Sowing Crisis: American Dominance and the Cold War in the Middle East* (2009); *The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood* (2006); *Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East* (2004); *Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness* (1996); *Under Siege: PLO Decision-Making During the 1982 War* (1986); and *British Policy Towards Syria and Palestine, 1906-1914* (1980), and was the co-editor of *Palestine and the Gulf *(1982) and The Origins of Arab Nationalism (1991).

Clayton M. Christensen is an authority on disruptive innovation, a framework which describes the process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors. Acknowledged in rankings and surveys as one of the worlds leading thinkers on innovation, Christensen is widely sought after as a speaker, advisor and board member. His research has been applied to national economies, start-up and Fortune 50 companies, as well as to early and late stage investing.

Jeremy Jackson is Director of CMBC, the William E. and Mary B. Ritter Professor of Oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and a Senior Scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in the Republic of Panama. He also served as Professor of Ecology at the Johns Hopkins University from 1971 to 1985. Dr. Jackson is the author of more than100 scientific publications and five books. His current research includes the long-term impacts of human activities on the oceans and the ecological and evolutionary consequences of the gradual formation of the Isthmus of Panama. He co-founded the Panama Paleontology Project in 1986, an international group of some 30 scientists, to help support his isthmian research. He has also worked extensively on the ecology of coral reef communities and the tempo and mode of speciation in the sea. Dr. Jackson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and received the Secretary's Gold Medal for Exceptional Service of the Smithsonian Institution in 1997 and the UCSD Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Science and Engineering in 2002. His work on overfishing was chosen by *Discover magazine* as the outstanding environmental achievement of 2001. He has also served on committees and boards of the World Wildlife Fund US, the National Research Council, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, and the Science Commission of the Smithsonian Institution.

Joyce Carol Oates has often expressed an intense nostalgia for the time and place of her childhood, and her working-class upbringing is lovingly recalled in much of her fiction. Growing up in the countryside outside of Lockport, New York, she attended a one-room schoolhouse in the elementary grades. As a small child, she told stories instinctively by way of drawing and painting before learning how to write. After receiving the gift of a typewriter at age fourteen, she began consciously training herself, "writing novel after novel" throughout high school and college. Success came early: while attending Syracuse University on scholarship, she won the coveted Mademoiselle fiction contest. After graduating as valedictorian, she earned an M.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin, where she met and married Raymond J. Smith after a three-month courtship; in 1962, the couple settled in Detroit, a city whose erupting social tensions suggested to Oates a microcosm of the violent American reality. Her finest early novel, *them*, along with a steady stream of other novels and short stories, grew out of her Detroit experience. Between 1968 and 1978, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada, just across the Detroit river. During this immensely productive decade, she published new books at the rate of two or three per year, all the while maintaining a full-time academic career. Though still in her thirties, Oates had become one of the most respected and honored writers in the United States. In 1978, Oates moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where she continues to teach in Princeton University's creative writing program; she and her husband also operate a small press and published a literary magazine, *The Ontario Review*. Shortly after arriving in Princeton, Oates began writing *Bellefleur*, the first in a series of ambitious Gothic novels that simultaneously reworked established literary genres and reimagined large swaths of American history.

Kathleen Norris is the award-winning poet, writer, and author of *The New York Times* bestsellers *The Cloister Walk*, *Dakota: A Spiritual Geography*, *Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith*, and *The Virgin of Bennington*. Exploring the spiritual life, her work has been described as at once intimate and historical, rich in poetry and meditations, brimming with exasperation and reverence, deeply grounded in both nature and spirit, sometimes funny, and often provocative. In her career Kathleen Norris has published seven books of poetry. Her first book of poems was entitled *Falling Off *and was the 1971 winner of the Big Table Younger Poets Award. Soon after, she settled down in her grandparents' home in Lemmon, South Dakota, where she lived with her husband, the poet David Dwyer, for over twenty-five years. The move was the inspiration for the first of her nonfiction books, the award-winning bestseller *Dakota: A Spiritual Geography*. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was selected as one of the best books of the year by Library Journal. Widowed in 2003, Kathleen Norris now divides her time between South Dakota and Honolulu, Hawaii, where she volunteers at her mother's retirement home, and also at an Episcopal church, where she cooks for a homeless shelter and helps teach a spirituality class for teenagers.

Nathan Englander's short fiction has appeared in *The Atlantic Monthly*, *The New Yorker*, and numerous anthologies including *The Best American Short Stories*, *The O. Henry Prize Anthology*, and the *Pushcart Prize*. Englander's story collection, *For the Relief of Unbearable Urges* (Knopf, 1999), became an international bestseller, and earned him a PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Englander was selected as one of 20 Writers for the 21st Century by *The New Yorker*. He was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2004, he was a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

In 1998, Lani Guinier became the first woman of color appointed to a tenured professorship at the Harvard Law School and is now the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law. Before her Harvard appointment, she was a tenured professor for ten years at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Educated at Radcliffe College and Yale Law School, Guinier worked in the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice and then headed the voting rights project at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the 1980s. Guinier has published many scholarly articles and books, including The Tyranny of the Majority (1994); Becoming Gentlemen: Women, Law School and Institutional Change (1997) (with co-authors Michelle Fine and Jane Balin); Lift Every Voice: Turning a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice (1998); and The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (2002) (co-authored with Gerald Torres); Meritocracy, Inc.: How Wealth Became Merit, Calss Became Race and Higher Education Became a Gift From the Poor to the Rich (forthcoming Harvard University Press 2007). In her scholarly writings and in op-ed pieces, she has addressed issues of race, gender, and democratic decision making, and sought new ways of approaching questions like affirmative action while calling for candid public discourse on these topics. Guinier's leadership on these important issues has been recognized with many awards, including the Champion of Democracy Award from the National Women's Political Caucus; the Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award from the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession; and the Rosa Parks Award from the American Association of Affirmative Action, and by ten honorary degrees, including from Smith College, Spelman College, Swarthmore College and the University of the District of Columbia. Her excellence in teaching was honored by the 1994 Harvey Levin Teaching Award from the graduating class at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the 2002 Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence from Harvard Law School.