Jennifer Rudolph Walsh has sat at the nexus of entertainment and media for nearly thirty years. She was WME’s sole female board member and global head of its literary, lectures, and conference divisions, and she represented such luminous clients as Oprah Winfrey, Brené Brown, Alice Munro, and Sue Monk Kidd. In 2016, she co-founded Together Live, a traveling intersectional women’s tour driven by the mission of finding purpose and community through authentic and heartfelt storytelling. Over four years, the tour visited thirty-five cities, lit more than fifty thousand souls on fire, and produced three seasons of a widely streamed podcast. She serves as a board advisor to SeeHer, the National Book Foundation, and her alma mater, Kenyon College. After a lifetime in New York City, Jennifer relocated to San Francisco to walk beneath the redwoods with her family and three dogs.
Luvvie Ajayi Jones, a sought-after speaker who thrives at the intersection of culture, comedy, and justice, is the New York Times bestselling author of I’m Judging You: The Do-Better Manual and Professional Troublemaker: The Fear-Fighter Manual. The inspiration for Professional Troublemaker came from her wildly popular TED Talk, which has been viewed more than five million times. A seventeen-year blogging veteran, Luvvie writes on her site, AwesomelyLuvvie.com, covering all things culture with a critical yet humorous lens. She is host of the Rants & Randomness podcast and runs a social network called LuvvNation.
Luvvie was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as part of her inaugural SuperSoul100 list, honored with the Outstanding Young Alumni Award by her alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and awarded the Breakthrough Award by the Council of Urban Professionals. Ajayi Jones’s work has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, NPR, Forbes, Inc., Fortune, Essence, the Chicago Tribune, and more. Born in Nigeria, bred in Chicago, and comfortable everywhere, Luvvie is clear that her love language is shoes.
Amena Brown is a spoken word poet, author, and performing artist whose work interweaves keep-it-real storytelling, rhyme, and humor. Through her weekly podcast, HER with Amena Brown, Amena centers and elevates the voices, stories, and experiences of Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latinx women. She wrote and collaborated with award-winning actress, producer, and activist Tracee Ellis Ross as the poetic partner for Ross’s natural hair care line, PATTERN Beauty. Amena takes arenas, theaters, and performance venues and turns them into living rooms, where performance becomes conversation and builds community. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband, DJ Opdiggy.
Austin Channing Brown is a writer, speaker, and media producer providing inspired leadership on racial justice in America. She is the New York Times bestselling author of I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness and the executive producer of the web series The Next Question.
Cameron Esposito is a Los Angeles–based comic, actor, and bestselling author. Cameron’s career has spanned everything from big-budget films to Sundance indies to animation. She co-starred in and co-created the much-lauded Take My Wife, now on Starz, has written for The New York Times, and has appeared as herself on TV, on podcasts, and in web series alike. Cameron hosts a popular interview podcast, Queery with Cameron Esposito, and her recent hit comedy special, Rape Jokes, raised almost $100,000 for rape crisis intervention. Her first book, Save Yourself, was released during the pandemic and was still a bestseller. Go, Cam!
Ashley C. Ford is a writer, host, and educator who lives in Brooklyn by way of Indiana. Her forthcoming memoir, Somebody’s Daughter, will be published by Flatiron Books under the imprint An Oprah Book.
Ford is the writer and host of The Chronicles of Now podcast. She has written or guest-edited for The Guardian, ELLE, BuzzFeed, OUT Magazine, Slate, Teen Vogue, New York Magazine, Allure, Marie Claire, The New York Times, Netflix Queue, Cup of Jo, and various other web and print publications. She’s taught creative nonfiction writing at the New School and Catapult.Co, and had her work listed among Longform & Longread’s Best of 2017.
Natalie Guerrero is a writer and activist from New York who currently resides in Los Angeles, California. All her work, written or otherwise, aims to uplift people of color through highlighting their humanity. She works in film development at MACRO, a POC-run production company whose mission is much like her own, and she is the co-founder of Know My Story, a digital movement on a mission to share true stories from Black people and intersectional voices.
Sue Monk Kidd’s debut novel, The Secret Life of Bees, spent more than one hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, has sold more than six million copies in the United States, was turned into both an award-winning major motion picture and a musical, and has been translated into thirty-six languages. Her second novel, The Mermaid Chair, was a number one New York Times bestseller and was adapted into a television movie. Her third novel, The Invention of Wings, an Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 pick, was also a number one New York Times bestseller. The Book of Longings, her fourth novel, was published to rave reviews and spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. She is the author of several acclaimed memoirs, including The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, her groundbreaking work on religion and feminism, as well as the New York Times bestseller Traveling with Pomegranates, written with her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor. She lives in North Carolina.
Connie Lim aka MILCK is a recording artist who performs under the moniker MILCK. In 2017, her song “(I Can’t Keep) Quiet”—her reclamation of her voice from sexism, racism, and abuse—became the unofficial global anthem for the Women’s March movement and was listed as the number one protest song of the year by Billboard. MILCK had the honor of performing “Quiet” at the ESPYs as survivors of Larry Nassar walked the stage to receive the Arthur Ashe Courage Award, a moment that aligned with Connie’s belief that inner healing can ripple out to global healing. As a way to express gratitude for the blessing of being able to create music, she created the #ICANTKEEPQUIET Fund and the Somebody’s Beloved Fund.
In 2020 MILCK released her second EP, Into Gold, executive-produced by Malay, as an ode to the journey of going from survivor to thriver, with Time magazine listing her leading single “If I Ruled the World” as song of the week. She continues to share her songs and speeches about finding one’s voice onstage with the likes of Yoko Ono, Michelle Obama, Oprah, Cheryl Strayed, Glennon Doyle, Michelle Williams, Dionne Warwick, Jason Mraz, and Ani DiFranco.
Nkosingiphile Mabaso is a singer, songwriter, and storyteller who was born and raised in a township called Thokoza in the east of Johannesburg, South Africa. When she was twelve years old, she began attending the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa, after which she attended Skidmore College in New York, graduating with honors in sociology. Nkosi is passionate about telling and sharing stories of hope, healing, triumph, and love. As part of the national Together Live tour, she spoke about overcoming challenges that threatened to thwart her progress and how perseverance and love aided her in overcoming those challenges. She is currently in South Africa writing and making music, continuing in her journey to become the woman she wants to be in the world.
Jillian Mercado is a physically disabled Latinx model, an actress, and an advocate for greater representation in the fashion industry. She has appeared in campaigns for Nordstrom, Target, and Olay and on the cover of the first digital September issue of Teen Vogue. Her activism, which focuses on the intersection of gender and disability, has included working with UN secretary-general António Guterres in 2018 to reduce inequality, one of the UN’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals. She can currently be seen in a recurring role on the Showtime series The L Word: Generation Q opposite Jennifer Beals.
Priya Parker is helping us take a deeper look at how anyone can create collective meaning in modern life, one gathering at a time. She is a master facilitator, strategic advisor, acclaimed author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, and the host and executive producer of the New York Times podcast Together Apart. Trained in the field of conflict resolution, Parker has worked on race relations on American college campuses and on peace processes in the Arab world, southern Africa, and India. Parker is a founding member of the Sustained Dialogue Campus Network, a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on New Models of Leadership, and a senior expert at Mobius Executive Leadership. She studied organizational design at MIT, public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and political and social thought at the University of Virginia. She has spoken on the TED Main Stage, and her talks have been viewed more than three million times. She lives with her husband and two children in Brooklyn, New York.
Born and raised in the Philippines, Geena Rocero is an award-winning producer, model, public speaker, trans rights advocate, and television host.
On March 31, 2014, in honor of International Transgender Day of Visibility, Rocero came out as transgender at the annual TED Conference. Her viral talk has since been viewed more than four million times and translated into thirty-two languages.
Named a “Top 25 Transgender Person Who Influences Culture” by Time magazine, Geena made history as the first trans woman 2020 Playboy Playmate of the Year, and again as the first trans woman ambassador for Miss Universe Nepal. She was featured on E’s I Am Cait and has been on the cover of Candy magazine and in the Vanity Fair: Trans America special issue, Marriott’s #LoveTravels campaign, and CoverGirl Cosmetics’s #GirlsCan campaign.
Geena has spoken at the White House, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the State Department, and multiple Fortune 500 companies. She is the founder of Gender Proud, a media production company that tells stories about what it means to be trans and gender nonconforming.
Bozoma Saint John is the global chief marketing officer at Netflix, the world’s leading streaming entertainment service, with 183 million paid memberships in more than 190 countries enjoying TV series, documentaries, and feature films across a wide variety of genres and languages. Before joining Netflix, Saint John served in executive roles at Endeavor, Uber, Apple Music and iTunes, and PepsiCo. Bozoma has been inducted into Billboard’s Women in Music Hall of Fame (2018) and the American Advertising Federation Hall of Achievement (2014), and has been included in the Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment Power 100 list (2018) and Forbes’s The World’s Most Influential CMOs list (2018).
Tanya Blount-Trotter was born and raised in Washington, D.C. She attended Morgan State University, where she studied psychology while singing in the university choir. Tanya then continued with a career in both film and music; some notable works include her role in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit and her debut album Natural Thing, which charted in the top 100 on R&B/hip-hop albums charts. After retiring from her solo career, she met her now husband, Michael Trotter Jr., in 2010 after she heard him perform at the aptly titled Love Festival. Drawn by the depth and honesty in his songs, she ran across the field in high heels after his set and asked if he ever collaborated with other artists. In storybook fashion, they fell in love, got married, and three years later formed the band The War and Treaty.
Michael Trotter Jr. was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in Washington, D.C. At nineteen years old, Trotter joined the U.S. Army and was stationed in one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces in Iraq, where he taught himself how to write songs and play piano on one of Saddam’s pianos. After completing two tours, Trotter returned to the United States for good, where he struggled with PTSD and homelessness. A few years later, in an almost cinematic twist, he met his now wife and musical partner, Tanya Blount, at the Love Festival in Maryland. They quickly discovered the magic of their two voices and formed their current band, The War and Treaty.
Maysoon Zayid is an actress, comedian, writer, and disability advocate. She is a graduate of and a guest comedian in residence at Arizona State University. Maysoon is the co-founder/co–executive producer of the New York Arab American Comedy Festival and the Muslim Funny Fest. She was a full-time on-air contributor to Countdown with Keith Olbermann and is a guest writer for Vice. She has most recently appeared on CNN’s New Day, 60 Minutes, and ABC News. Maysoon had the most viewed TED Talk of 2014 and was named one of 100 Women of 2015 by the BBC.
As a professional comedian, she has performed in top New York clubs and has toured extensively at home and abroad. Maysoon was a headliner on the Arabs Gone Wild Comedy tour and the Muslims Are Coming tour. She appeared alongside Adam Sandler in You Don’t Mess with the Zohan and is a recurring character on General Hospital. Maysoon limped in New York Fashion Week and is the host of the web series Advice You Don’t Want to Hear. She is the author of the bestselling memoir Find Another Dream, and is the creator of the Book of Bay Ann children’s graphic novel series.