Peter Abrahams

Peter Abrahams is the author of twenty-seven novels for young adults and adults, including Shamus Prize finalist Oblivion and The Fan, which was made into a film starring Robert DeNiro. His newest mystery series is Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood St.

M. T. Anderson

M.T. Anderson is the author of adult short stories, children's books, and young adult novels, including National Book Award-winning Octavian Nothing and Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning Feed.

Tom Ashbrook

Tom Ashbrook is an award-winning journalist and host of NPR and WBUR's On Point. Ashbrook received the Livingston Prize for National Reporting and later chronicled his experience with Internet entrepreneurship in The Leap.

William Banfield

Author, composer, and recording artist William Banfield's most recent book is Representing Black Music Culture. His music has been performed by numerous orchestras. He directs the Center for Africana Studies at Berklee College of Music.

Matthew Battles

Matthew Battles is a blogger and the author of the nonfiction book Library: An Unquiet History and the short story collection The Sovereignties of Invention. He is a senior researcher with metaLAB at Harvard University.

Deni Béchard

Commonwealth Writer's Prize-winning Deni Béchard is the author of Vandal Love, Cures for Hunger, and the upcoming Empty Hands, Open Arms. His  articles and stories have appeared in the National Post and the Chicago Quarterly Review, among others.

Gabrielle Bell

Gabrielle Bell is the cartoonist and filmmaker behind graphic novels Lucky, Cecil and Jordan in New York, and The Voyeurs. She has been featured in Best American Comics, McSweeneys, Bookforum, The Believer, and Vice Magazine.

Barbara Berke

Barbara Berke has served Boston's Mayor Menino as a Senior Policy Advisor since 2005, where she supported the Mayor and fellow cabinet members in coordinating policies to achieve cross-departmental goals.

Emily Bernard

Emily Bernard is the author of, most recently, Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White. She teaches at the University of Vermont.

David Bernstein

David Bernstein is a staff writer for the Boston Phoenix who covers local, state and national politics. He regularly contributes to the Phoenix's blog Talking Politics.

Buzz Bissinger

Buzz Bissinger is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism and author of the highly acclaimed books Friday Night Lights, Three Days in August, and A Prayer for the City. His latest book is Father's Day.

Kevin Bleyer

Emmy Award-winning writer and producer Kevin Bleyer has worked on the Daily Show, Dennis Miller, and Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher. Most recently he is the author of Me The People.

Harry Bliss

Harry Bliss is a cartoonist and illustrator who is most recently the author of Bailey at the Museum. He previously illustrated Doreen Cronin's Diary of a Worm, Diary of a Spider, and Diary of a Fly, as well as Sharon Creech's A Fine, Fine School.

David Boeri

David Boeri is an award-winning journalist for WBUR whose work has also been published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Boston Globe, and Boston Magazine. Boeri is the author of Tell it Good-bye Kiddo and People of the Ice Whale.

Anthony Brooks

Anthony Brooks has worked as a producer, editor, reporter and host for WBUR and NPR for more than 25 years. He is currently the co-host of WBUR's Radio Boston.

Leonard Brown

Leonard Brown is a professional saxophonist, composer and arranger, and editor of John Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music. He teaches at Northeastern University.

Rachel Brownstein

Rachel Brownstein, professor of English at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, is the author of Why Jane Austen?

Kathryn Burak

Kathyrn Burak is a writer, poet, and professor at Boston University. Her publications include short fiction, the writing textbook Writing in the Works, and the YA novel Emily's Dress and Other Missing Things.

Charles Burns

Charles Burns is an artist and graphic novelist who has created covers for magazines Time, the New Yorker, and the Believer. His graphic novels include Black Hole and more recently, X'd Out.

Christopher Castellani

Christopher Castellani is the artistic director of Grub Street and the author of three novels: All This Talk of Love, The Saint of Lost Things, and A Kiss From Maddalena.

Meghna Chakrabarti

Meghna Chakrabarti is the award-winning co-host of Radio Boston on WBUR. Previously, she was a reporter for WBUR's news department and produced and directed WBUR's On Point.

Nancy L. Cohen

Nancy L. Cohen is an author, historian, and political commentator who has appeared on shows like Up on MSNBC, On Point, and the Bob Edwards Show. Cohen's most recent book is Delirium: How the Sexual Counterrevolution Is Polarizing America.

Rachel Cohn

Rachel Cohn is the author of young adult novels, including Beta, Gingerbread, Shrimp, and Cupcake. Her collaborations with David Levithan include Dash and Lily's Book of Dares and Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist.

Ann Collette

Ann Collette is a literary agent with the Rees Literary Agency. She began her career as a freelance writer and editor.

Jef Czekaj

Jef Czekaj is a cartoonist, children's book author and illustrator, musician, and hip hop DJ behind the longtime running children's comic strip Grandpa and Julie: Shark Hunters. Five of his books, including his newest book, Yes, Yes, Yaul, have been Junior Library Guild selections.

Robert Darnton

Robert Darnton has been a National Humanities Medal winner, a New York Times reporter, a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, a Rhodes Scholar, and a professor at Princeton. He is the Director of the University Library at Harvard.

Adam Davidson

Adam Davidson is a writer, broadcast journalist, and co-founder and co-host of Planet Money on NPR.

Jacqueline Davies

Jacqueline Davies is the author of eight children's books, including The House Takes a Vacation, Where the Ground Meets the Sky, and her latest in the Lemonade War series, The Bell Bandit. Her numerous awards include the Massachusetts Book Honor Award.

Anna Dewdney

Vermont native Anna Dewdney is the New York Times bestselling author of the Llama Llama tales. Her newest book is Llama Llama Time to Share.

Junot Diaz

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Junot Diaz is the author of Drown and The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. He has also been published in the New Yorker, African Voices, and Best American Short Stories.

Dario DiBattista

Dario DiBattista, an Iraq War veteran, holds an MA degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins. His work has appeared in the Washingtonian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere.

Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is an author, blogger, journalist, and editor at Boing Boing. His publications for teens and young adults are For the Win, Little Brother, and, most recently, Pirate Cinema.

Esther Duflo

Esther Duflo is the co-author of Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty and the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at MIT.

David Elmer

David Elmer is an assistant professor in the classics department at Harvard. Elmer currently teaches courses in Greek literature at both the undergraduate and graduate levels at Harvard and is working on a book about consensus in the Iliad.

Jennie Fields

Jennie Fields is the author of Lily Beach, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, The Middle Ages, and most recently, The Age of Desire.

Katherine Flynn

Katherine Flynn is an agent with Kneerim & Williams Literary Agency. She represents History, Biography, Current Affairs, Adventure, Nature, Pop Culture, Science, and Psychology for nonfiction and particularly loves exciting narrative nonfiction.

Nick Flynn

Nick Flynn is a writer, playwright, and poet best known for his memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which was recently adapted into the feature film Being Flynn. His most recent poetry collection is The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands.

Franklin Foer

Franklin Foer, editor at large at the New Republic, is the author of How Soccer Explains the World and editor of Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame. He has been called one of America's "most influential liberal journalists" by the Daily Beast.

Thomas J. Foley

United States Attorney General's Award-winning Thomas J. Foley is the author of Most Wanted. A former career officer of the Massachusetts State Police, Foley now teaches criminology at the University of Southern New Hampshire.

Richard Ford

Richard Ford is a Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award winner who has taught at Williams College and Princeton University. He is most noted for the Frank Bascombe series, comprised of The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land. His most recent novel is Canada.

Jeffry Frieden

Jeffry Frieden is the author of several books, including Global Capitalism:  Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century. Most recently, he is the co-author of Lost Decades: The Making of America's Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery.

Elissa Gershowitz

Elissa Gershowitz is the senior editor of the Horn Book Magazine and the online content editor for The Horn Book, inc. She writes opinion pieces and TV and book reviews for the Horn Book Magazine.

Regie Gibson

Former National Poetry Slam Champion Regie Gibson has lectured and performed widely in the U.S., Cuba, and Europe. He's been published in Poetry magazine, Harvard's Divinity Magazine and the Iowa Review, among others.

Leslie Gilbert-Lurie

Leslie Gilbert-Lurie is a lawyer, teacher, and former NBC executive. With her mother Rita Lurie, she is the author of Bending Toward the Sun, which explores the legacy of the Holocaust on three generations of their family.

Ethan Gilsdorf

Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks. He publishes travel, arts, and pop culture stories regularly in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Christian Science Monitor, as well as Wired.com and Salon.com.

Alex Gilvarry

Alex Gilvarry is the author of From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant. He has also written for All Things Considered, Vogue, and the Paris Review, and he is the founding editor of Tottenville Review.

Edward Glaeser

Edward Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University, the director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, and the director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. His latest book is Triumph of the City.

Irene Goldman-Price

Edith Wharton scholar Irene Goldman-Price is the editor of My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann. She is currently on the editorial board of the Edith Wharton Review.

Meredith Goldstein

Entertainment reporter and advice columnist Meredith Goldstein writes "Love Letters" for the Boston Globe. Her first novel, The Singles, is about complicated relationships.

Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik has contributed nonfiction, fiction, criticism, and memoir pieces for the New Yorker since 1986. He is the author of Paris to the Moon, The King in the Window, and, most recently, The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food.

Paul Grogan

Paul Grogan is currently the President and CEO of The Boston Foundation. His book Comeback Cities, co-authored with Tony Proscio, was publised in 2000.

Jennifer Haigh

Jennifer Haigh is the author of the PEN/Hemingway Award-winning Mrs. Kimble, PEN/L.L. Winship Award-winning Baker Towers, and, most recently, Faith, which was called "Superb" by Publishers Weekly.

Colin Halloran

Colin D. Halloran is an Afghanistan combat veteran, English teacher, and poet who leads student and teacher workshops on understanding war through poetry. His book, Shortly Thereafter, won the 2012 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award.

Wayne Hammond

Wayne Hammond is a librarian at the Chapin Library of Rare Books at Williams College and co-editor of The Art of the Hobbit. He also collaborated to write J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator, Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion, and J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide.

Esmond Harmsworth

Esmond Harmsworth is one of the founders of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth literary agency based in Boston and New York City. He advises organizations such as Grub Street and the Southern New Hampshire MFA program and is the treasurer of PEN/New England.

Patricia Ellis Herr

Patricia Ellis Herr is the author of Up: A Mother and Daughter's Peakbagging Adventure, which details Herr's journey to climb all 48 of New Hampshire's highest mountains with her young daughter.

Anita Hill

Anita Hill is a professor of social policy, law, and women's studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of Speaking Truth to Power and, most recently, Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home.

Michelle Hoover

Michelle Hoover teaches writing at Grub Street and at Boston University. Her short fiction has been published in numerous collections and literary journals, including Confrontation, the Massachusetts Review, and Best New American Voices. Her lateest novel is The Quickening.

Joan Houlihan

Joan Houlihan is the author of four books: Hand-Held Executions: Poems & Essays; The Mending Worm; The Us; and Ay, which will be released in 2013. She is the founding director of the Concord Poetry Center in Concord, Massachusetts, where she also teaches.

Margo Howard

Margo Howard is the advice columnist behind Women on the Web's "Dear Margo." She has also published in the Chicago Tribune, the New Republic, People, the Nation, and Boston Magazine. In 2003, she compiled her mother's letters in A Life in Letters: Ann Landers' Letters to Her Only Child.

Philip Howard

Philip Howard is an author, lawyer, and advisor to political leaders on legal and regulatory reform. His newest book is Life without Lawyers.

Shonna Milliken Humphrey

Shonna Milliken Humphrey is the author of Show Me Good Land, which Richard Russo likened to Winesburg, Ohio. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, Salon, Down East,and Maine magazine.

Tsitsi Jaji

Tsitsi Jaji teaches English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her courses concentrate on African and Caribbean literature, music, and poetry.

Lauren Johnson

Lauren K. Johnson, an Afghanistan veteran and former military public affairs officer, has won regional and national-level Department of Defense journalism awards. Her blog, UNcamouflaged, is read by military personnel around the world.

Tayari Jones

Tayari Jones is the author of three novels, including multi-award winning Leaving Atlanta and Silver Sparrow, which was named one of the best novels of 2011 according to Library Journal, Slate, and Salon.

Sep Kamvar

Sep Kamvar is the LG Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and director of the Social Computing group at the MIT Media Lab. He is a co-author of We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion, and his artwork has been exhibited at MOMA and the V&A in London. 

Eric Kandel

Nobel Prize-winner Eric Kandel is the author of The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present. He currently teaches biochemistry and biophysics at Columbia University.

Robert Kane

Robert Kane is an associate judge of the Superior Court of Massachusetts. He is the co-founder, along with Robert Waxler, of Changing Lives Through Literature (CLTL). 

Jessica Keener

Jessica Keener is a fiction editor at Agni magazine and author of Night Swim, a novel eighteen years in the making. Her short fiction has earned her a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Fiction and a listing in The Pushcart Prize under "100 Outstanding Writers."

Randall Kennedy

Randall Kennedy's most recent book is The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency. His previous publications include Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption and Race, Crime, and the Law.

X. J. Kennedy

X.J. Kennedy is well known as the author of poems for adults and children as well as of writing textbooks for college students. He is a former poetry editor of the Paris Review.

Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd is an author, editor, and graphic designer who is currently the associate art director of Alfred A. Knopf. His books include The Cheese Monkeys, The Learners, and the graphic novel Batman: Death by Design.

Jo Knowles

Jo Knowles is the author of three novels for young people: Lessons from a Dead Girl, Jumping off Swings, and See You at Harry's. She has won several awards for her work, including the PEN New England Children's Book Discovery Award.

Michael Krupa

Michael Krupa is the founder and CEO of Health Partners New England and the current board chair of Concord Prison Outreach. He and his teaching partner, Dick Shohet, have led weekly book discussion groups at MCI Concord and at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley.

Madeline Kunin

Madeleine Kunin is a former Vermont state legislator, lieutenant governor, and governor of Vermont. Most recently she is the Marsh Scholar Professor-at-Large at the University of Vermont in Burlington and author of The New Feminist Agenda.

Ray Kurzweil

National Inventor Hall of Fame inductee Ray Kurzweil is an author, innovator, entrepreneur, and engineer. His latest publication, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, will be released in November.

Nicole Lamy

Nicole Lamy is the books editor of the Boston Globe. She has worked as an editor for the Harvard Review, Transition Magazine, and the Boston Book Review.

Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane is the New York Times bestselling author of Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River; Shutter Island; The Given Day; and, most recently, Live By Night.

Dick Lehr

Dick Lehr is the co-author of Black Mass: The Irish Mob, The FBI, and a Devil's Deal and author of The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston's Racial Divide. He is a professor of journalism at Boston University and worked as a reporter for the Boston Globe for almost two decades.

Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig is the author of Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School and the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard.

Alan Lightman

Alan Lightman is the author of several novels, including most recently Mr g: A Novel About the Creation. He is also the founder of the Harpswell Foundation, which aims to empower new generations of Cambodian women through housing, leadership, and educational training.

Bill Littlefield

Bill Littlefield is the host of WBUR and National Public Radio's Only A Game. His books include Fall Classics, The Circus in the Woods, Baseball Days, Champions, Keepers, and the novel Prospect.

Michael Lowenthal

Michael Lowenthal is the author of, most recently, The Paternity Test, one of the first novels to feature gay men using surrogacy to become parents. He is currently a core faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University.

Barry Lyga

Barry Lyga is the author of nine novels across several genres. His latest young adult novel, I Hunt Killers, has been optioned for television by Warner Bros./Silver Pictures.

Steve Macone

Steve Macone, a regular at comedy clubs throughout Boston, is a contributor for The Onion. His humor writing and essays have also been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Boston Globe Magazine.

Leslie Maitland

Leslie Maitland is a former investigative reporter and national correspondent for the New York Times, covering the Justice Department. She is the author of Crossing the Borders of Time: A True Story of War, Exile, and Love Reclaimed.

Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus is the author of The Flame Alphabet as well as Notable American Women, The Father Costume, and The Age of Wire and String. His awards include an NEA Fellowship in fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Leonard Marcus

Leonard Marcus is an author, historian, and critic of children's literautre with a history degree from Yale and poetry degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Marcus's most recent book is Show Me a Story: Why Picture Books Matter. 

Andrew McAfee

Andrew McAfee is the co-author of the ebook Race Against the Machine and a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith has written more than sixty books, but is best known for his Ladies' Detective Agency series. He has also taught medical law at the University of Edinburgh and established a law school at the University of Botswana.

Claire Messud

Claire Messud is the author of four books. Her most recent novel, The Emperor's Children, was on the best books of the year list in the Los Angeles Times, the Economist, the Chicago Tribune, and People magazine. Her next novel, The Woman Upstairs, will be published in the spring of 2013.

Madeline Miller

Madeline Miller is the author of The Song of Achilles, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction. In the last decade, Miller has taught and tutored high school Latin, Greek, and Shakespeare.

Edson Monteiro

Edson Monteiro has started his own IT company since his release from prison, where he read many books that would help him expand his knowledge and excel in life. He continues to read regularly.

Vahram Muratyan

Vahram Muratyan is a French graphic artist, designer, and artistic director whose blog, Paris versus New York: A Tally of Two Cities, has had millions of views, led to exhibitions at Collete and The Standard, and has recently been published as a book by the same name.

Nicholas Negroponte

Nicholas Negroponte is the founder and chairman of the One Laptop per Child nonprofit association and co-founder and former director of the MIT Media Laboratory.

Kadir Nelson

Kadir Nelson is an award-winning American artist. His work on children’s books has earned him two Caldecott Honors and four Coretta Scott King Awards. His newest book, I Have a Dream, combines his artwork with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous speech.

Elisa New

Elisa New is the author of the family memoir Jacob's Cane: A Jewish Family's Journey from the Four Lands of Lithuania to the Ports of London and Baltimore. She currently teaches in the department of English at Harvard.

Bob Oakes

Bob Oakes has been 90.9 WBUR's Morning Edition anchor since 1992. He is one of the most well-known and respected news people in New England, with a twenty-year career in radio broadcasting.

Maryanne O’Hara

Maryanne O’Hara is the author of the novel Cascade and short fiction that has appeared in Five Points, The North American Review, and Redbook, among other publications.

Corey Olsen

Corey Olsen is the author of Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, founder of the Mythgard Institute, and founder of The Tolkien Professor website and podcast.

Amy Pattee

Amy Pattee is the author of Reading the Adolescent Romance: Sweet Valley High and the Young Adult Romance Revolution. She teaches at the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

Edith Pearlman

Edith Pearlman is the author of 250 works of short fiction and nonfiction, which have been published in literary journals, anthologies, and online publications. Her latest collection, Binocular Vision, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Tom Perrotta

Tom Perrotta is the author of, most recently, The Leftovers, as well as the 2010 One City One Story selection "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face."

Sacha Pfeiffer

Sacha Pfeiffer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the host of WBUR's All Things Considered. Pfeiffer's numerous awards for radio reporting include two Associated Press Awards and three Edward R. Murrow Awards.

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is a Harvard University professor and author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. His new book, which has been called "supremely important" by the New York Times, is The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Michael Porter

Michael E. Porter is the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School. He has published numerous articles and nineteen books, including Redefining Health Care.

Henriette Lazaridis Power

Henriette Power is the founding editor of The Drum, an online literary magazine publishing short fiction and essays in audio form. Her first novel, The Clover House, will be published in 2013.

Ayanna Pressley

Councillor Ayanna Pressley is the first woman of color to be elected into the Boston City Council. She has been an active leader in the nonprofit community on issues involving women, girls, and diversity.

Alan Price

Alan Price, an emeritus faculty member at Penn State, is the author of The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War.

Leah Price

Leah Price is professor of English and the chair of the History and Literature program at Harvard University and the Humanities Program Director at the Radcliffe Institute. Price's newest book is How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain.

Ladette Randolph

Ladette Randolph is the director of the nationally-renowned journal Ploughshares and a Distinguished Publisher-in-Residence in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing program at Emerson College in Boston. She is the author of the novel A Sandhills Ballad.

Carmen Reinhart

Carmen M. Reinhart is the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and co-author of the bestselling book This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.

Lisa Rodensky

Lisa Rodensky is the Barbara Morris Caspersen Associate Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College and the author of The Crime In Mind: Criminal Responsibility and the Victorian Novel.

Aidan Rooney

Aidan Rooney was born in Monaghan, Ireland. Since 1988, he has taught at Thayer Academy and lived in Hingham, Massachusetts. He was awarded the Hennessy Literary Award for New Irish Poet in 1997.

 

Hanna Rosin

Hanna Rosin is a senior editor at the Atlantic, co-founder of Slate's DoubleX, and author of controversial articles "The End of Men" and "The Case Against Breastfeeding." Her latest book, The End of Men and the Rise of Women, sparked by her article, will be released in September 2012.

Ilie Ruby

Ilie Ruby is the author of The Language of Trees and The Salt God's Daughter. She is the recipient of the Edwin L. Moses Award for Fiction, a Kerr Foundation Scholarship, the Phi Kappa Phi Award for Creative Achievement in Fiction, and the Wesleyan Writer's Conference Davidoff Scholarship.

Hank Phillippi Ryan

Hank Phillippi Ryan is the investigative reporter for WHDH, 7News Boston. She is also the author of award-winning crime novels such as Prime Time, Face Time, Air Time, and Drive Time. Her newest novel is The Other Woman.

Michael Sandel

Michael Sandel is the author of Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? and, most recently, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets.He teaches political philosophy at Harvard and has served on the President's Council on Bioethics.

Christina Scull

Christina Scull is the co-editor of The Art of the Hobbit and the author of The Soan Hogarths, as well as four-time winner of Mythopoeic Society scholarship awards.

Francesca Segal

Francesca Segal is a novelist and journalist whose work has appeared in Granta and the Guardian. Her debut novel, The Innocents, re-casts Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence in present-day London's Jewish community.

B. A. Shapiro

Suspense novelist B. A. Shapiro is the author of, most recently, The Art Forger, a literary thriller about the Gardner Museum heist that spans three centuries of forgers, art thieves, and obsessive collectors.

Adeline Sire

Adeline Sire is a producer for PRI's The World, producing news stories and art features, including the daily music segment "The Global Hit." Before working at The World, she produced freelance art features for WBUR's Morning Edition and Here and Now.

Lemony Snicket

Lemony Snicket is the author of A Series of Unfortunate Events, and though he has suffered horrible things in his own past, wishes his readers "nothing but the best." Snicket's representative, Daniel Handler, often appears on the author's behalf at public events.

Anna Solomon

Anna Solomon is the author of "The Lobster Mafia Story," the 2012 selection for One City One Story. Her first novel, The Little Bride, was published in 2011.

John Spooner

John Spooner is the author of novels Class and The Foursome and nonfiction books such as Confessions of a Stockbroker, Smart People, and Sex and Money. His latest book is No One Ever Told Us That: Money and Life Letters to My Grandchildren.

Phoebe Stone

Phoebe Stone is the author of novels for young people, including The Romeo and Juliet Code and All the Blue Moons at the Wallace Hotel. Her latest book, The Boy on Cinnamon Street, was chosen by independent booksellers as the Winter 2012 Indie Next Kids Pick.

Alexandra Styron

Alexandra Styron is the author of the novel All the Finest Girls and the memoir Reading My Father. Styron's work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

Larry Summers

Larry Summers is President Emeritus of Harvard University and past Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. His commentary has appeared in many publications, including Reuters, the Financial Times, and the Washington Post.

Maria Tatar

Maria Tatar teaches at Harvard University. She is the author of Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood, Secrets beyond the Door: Bluebeard in Folklore, Fiction, and Film and the editor of The Annotated Peter Pan, among others.

Christina Thompson

Christina Thompson is the editor of Harvard Review and the author of a memoir, Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All.

Baratunde Thurston

Baratunde Thurston is a politically-active, technology-loving comedian from the future. His new book, How to Be Black, is a New York Times bestseller.

Daniel Tobin

Daniel Tobin is the author of six books of poetry. His Belated Heavens won the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry in 2011. He teaches at Emerson College.

Justin Torres

Justin Torres is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a recipient of the 2009 Rolón United States Artist Fellowship in Literature, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. His debut novel, We the Animals, tells the story of three brothers growing up in Brooklyn within their mixed-race family.

Cheryl Cramer Toto

Cheryl Cramer Toto is the Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy and Planning at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Marc Tracy

Marc Tracy is a writer, editor, and blogger who currently writes for The New Republic. His most recent project is the anthology Jewish Jocks, which he co-edited with Franklin Foer.

Dawn Tripp

Dawn Tripp is the author of Massachusetts Book Award-winning The Season of Open Water, as well as Moon Tide and Game of Secrets.

Chris Ware

Chris Ware is the author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Building Stories. He was the first cartoonist chosen to regularly serialize a story in The New York Times Magazine.

Robert Waxler

Robert Waxler is a professor of English at UMass Dartmouth. Putting into action his belief that "literature is the greatest tool we have in our culture to humanize society," Waxler co-founded Changing Lives Through Literature (CLTL) in 1991.

Joan Wickersham

Joan Wickersham is the author of the memoir The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order and the novel The Paper Anniversary, as well as the collection The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story.

Eugenia Williamson

Eugenia Williamson is an award-winning journalist and the associate editor of The Baffler. She writes about books for the Boston Globe, Bookforum, the Boston Phoenix, and others.

Lizz Winstead

Lizz Winstead is the author of the memoir Lizz Free or Die. She is a co-creater and former head writer of The Daily Show and co-creator of Air America Radio, in addition to many other humorous and political satirist pursuits.

Alex Witchel

Alex Witchel is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine. She writes the popular “Feed Me” column for the Dining section. Her newest work is All Gone: A Memoir of My Mother's Dementia, with Refreshments.

Maryanne Wolf

Maryanne Wolf is the Director for Reading and Language Research and an associate professor of child development at Tufts University. She is the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain and editor of Dyslexia, Fluency, and the Brain.

Robin Young

Peabody-winning documentary filmmaker Robin Young is the host of 90.9 WBUR's Here & Now. She has previously reported for NBC, CBS, and ABC television and for several years was substitute host and correspondent for The Today Show.

Youth Literacy Theatre

The Hyde Square Task Force's Youth Literacy Theater Troupe strives to inspire a love of reading by bringing stories to life in a creative, exciting way. Throughout the school year, YLT Troupe members create plays based on children's literature and perform these plays at after-school programs.

Geary Zendejas

Geary Zendajas has been involved in the self-publishing revolution for years and has seen (and lived) the transition from print to "e" to what is now a marriage of both. Zendajas is an Apple-certified software instructor who is pleased to introduce BBF attendees to self-publishing with Blurb, Inc.

Gabrielle Zevin

Gabrielle Zevin is the author of the young adult novel All These Things I've Done and its sequel, Because It Is My Blood. Zevin is also an adult fiction author and screenwriter, and she won an Independent Spirit Award for her screenplay, Conversations with Other Women.