Cory M. Franklin was Director of Medical Intensive Care at Cook County (Illinois) Hospital for twenty-five years. Before retiring, he wrote more than eighty medical articles, chapters, abstracts, and correspondences in books and professional journals. He worked as a technical advisor to Harrison Ford and was one of the role models for the physician character Ford played in the 1993 film The Fugitive. Dr. Franklin has been a frequent freelance contributor to the Chicago Tribune op-ed page and Editorial Board. His work, medical and nonmedical pieces, has been published in the New York Times, New York Post, Dallas Morning News, and Los Angeles Times as well as being excerpted in the New York Review of Books. His freelance work has also appeared internationally in The Guardian and The Jerusalem Post. His books include Cook County ICU: 30 Years Of Unforgettable Patients and Odd Cases, Chicago Flashbulbs, The Doctor Will See You Now, and America’s State Fair Impresario: The Life and Times of Michael Barnes.
Suzanne Franklin is a college counselor and the founder and president of Franklin & Associates, a midwestern college consulting firm. Formerly a social worker, she received an advanced degree from the renowned Family Institute at Northwestern University. She has more than fifteen years of experience helping students from the United States and the United Kingdom with admission to their choice of schools (everywhere from local community colleges to the Ivy League and most of the other top one hundred schools on the US News and World Report list of best colleges). She has received the Helen Bruns Ryan Award for outstanding service from Josephinum Academy of the Sacred Heart in Chicago, Illinois.
Linda Black became interested in college consulting starting with her own children, and she joined Franklin & Associates in 2016. Linda graduated from Denison University with a degree in economics. Prior to receiving her law degree from Case Western Reserve University, she worked at a consulting firm in Washington, DC. After graduating from law school, she practiced corporate and real estate law for ten years at Calfee, Halter & Griswold LLP in Cleveland before relocating to Chicago, Illinois.
Paul Weingarten was the Chicago Tribune’s Associate Managing Editor for Metropolitan News, a prize-winning writer, and most recently served on the newspaper’s editorial board. He and his metropolitan staff won two Pulitzer Prizes during his tenure. In a stint on the Chicago Tribune Magazine, he earned several writing awards from local and national organizations. As a national correspondent based in Dallas, he traveled through a wide swath of Texas and the Southwest. On the editorial board, he specialized in a variety of subjects, including education, national security, the Middle East, and health care. He now works as a media consultant and volunteers with journalism students at New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois.