Ruddy Roye is a Jamaican born photographer based in Brooklyn. His subjects have included Jamaican dancehall musicians and fans, the J’Ouvert Carnival, political protests in Ferguson, New York and Dallas. He has amassed over 280,000 followers on Instagram where the images he portrayed in his ‘Black Portraiture’ or ‘I Can’t Breathe’ series have been the talking point of numerous forums. His photography has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Ebony, Vogue, BET, ESPN among others. Roye is a part of the Kamoinge black photographers collective and was featured in the 2014 documentary Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People. He has taught at New York University, the School of Visual Arts, and Columbia University.

Dread Scott is an interdisciplinary artist whose art encourages viewers to re-examine ideals of American society. In 1989, the US Senate outlawed his artwork and President Bush declared it “disgraceful” because of its transgressive use of the American flag. His work has been exhibited at The Whitney Museum, MoMA/PS1, The Walker Art Center, and in galleries and on street corners.  He is a 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and has also received fellowships form Open Society Foundations and United States Artists. In 2019 he presented Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a community engaged project that reenacted the largest rebellion of enslaved people in US history. The project was featured in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, by Christiane Amanpour on CNN, and highlighted by artnet.com as one of the most important artworks of the decade.

Jesse McCarthy is Assistant Professor in the departments of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His articles and reviews are published or forthcoming in Transposition, African American Review, and NOVEL and he is a contributor to Richard Wright in Context, Ralph Ellison in Context (forthcoming), and The Cambridge Companion to the Essay as well as a new introduction for the Norton Library edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and an introduction for a new edition of Vincent O. Carter’s The Bern Book. He is the author of the collection of essays Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? and a novel The Fugitivities.