Howard Bryant is the author of nine books, including Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field; The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism; The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron; and Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston. He is a former Washington Post reporter and is currently a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN the Magazine. He has also served as the sports correspondent for NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday since 2006. He was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in 2016 and 2018 and earned the 2016 Salute to Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. In addition, he has appeared in several documentaries, including The Tenth Inning and Jackie Robinson, both directed by Ken Burns.
Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon are the directors and producers of the film Jackie Robinson, a production of Florentine Films and WETA, Washington, DC, in association with Major League Baseball. Sarah Burns and David McMahon also wrote the text for the documentary.
Amira Rose Davis is Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies at Penn State University, where she specializes in twentieth-century American history with an emphasis on race, gender, sports, and politics. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled “Can’t Eat a Medal”: The Lives and Labors of Black Women Athletes in the Age of Jim Crow. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Radical History Review and in edited collections, including the forthcoming It’s Our Movement Now: Black Women and the 1977 Women’s Convention. Additionally, she provides sports commentary and opinion writing for public venues such as NPR, ESPN, BBC, NBC, and others. She is also the cohost of the feminist sports podcast Burn It All Down.
Peter Dreier is the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. He writes frequently for the Nation, American Prospect, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. His books include The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame; Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century; and We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism—American Style. His next book, Baseball Rebels: The Reformers and Radicals Who Shook Up the Game on and off the Field, coauthored with Robert Elias, is forthcoming.
Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the African and African American Studies Department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he has taught since 1982. He is a noted essayist and American culture critic whose collections of essays include The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; and A Level Playing Field: African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports. He is the author of Daughters: On Family and Fatherhood (1994), and he was twice nominated for Grammy Awards for writing album liner notes. Additionally, he is a prolific anthologist. He launched the Best African American Essays 2010 with guest editor Randall Kennedy and Best African American Fiction 2010 with guest editor Nikki Giovanni. His other anthologies include The Cambridge Companion to Boxing (2019); The Muhammad Ali Reader (1998); and Body Language: Writers on Sport (1998). He has served as a consultant on several Ken Burns films—Baseball; Jazz; The Tenth Inning; Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson; The War; The Roosevelts: An Intimate History; and Jackie Robinson.
Jonathan Eig is the author of five books, three of them New York Times best sellers, including Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season. He was born in Brooklyn and graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. A former staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, he has also written for the New York Times, the New Yorker online, and the Washington Post. Prior to the Wall Street Journal, he worked as a feature writer for Chicago magazine and as a news reporter for the Dallas Morning News and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. His first book, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, won the Casey Award for best baseball book of the year, and Ali was named winner of the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting. He has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and in two Ken Burns documentaries: Prohibition and Jackie Robinson. But what really impresses people is that he was part of a Jeopardy question in 2019. He is currently working with Burns and Florentine Films on a Muhammad Ali documentary. His next book will be a biography of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Randal Maurice Jelks is Professor of African and African American Studies and American Studies at the University of Kansas. He is the author of three books: African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights Struggle in Grand Rapids; Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement: A Biography; and Faith and Struggle in the Lives of Four African Americans: Ethel Waters, Mary Lou Williams, Eldridge Cleaver and Muhammad Ali.
Mark Kurlansky is the author of thirty-three books, fiction and nonfiction, including Nonviolence: A History of a Dangerous Idea, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn’t Want to Be One; and The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macoris. He is also the author of Cod, Salt, Havana, a novel, and three collections of short stories.
Chris Lamb, Professor of Journalism at Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis, is the author of ten books, including Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring Training; Conspiracy of Silence: The Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball; From Jack Johnson to LeBron James: Essays on Race, Media, and the Color Line; and Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography (with Michael G. Long). His articles on baseball have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal and on ESPN.com.
Michael G. Long is the author or editor of numerous books on civil rights, LGBTQ rights, religion, and politics, including Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography, Beyond Home Plate: Jackie Robinson on Life after Baseball, and First Class Citizenship: The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson. He appeared in Ken Burns’s documentary about Jackie Robinson, and he has spoken at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, Fenway Park, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Library of Congress, the National Constitution Center, the National Museum of American History, the National Archives, and the Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library.
Kevin Merida is a Senior Vice President at ESPN and Editor in Chief of The Undefeated. He was formerly managing editor of the Washington Post. He is coauthor of Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas and editor of Being a Black Man: At the Corner of Progress and Peril.
David Naze is Vice President for Academic Affairs at Kankakee Community College in Kankakee, Illinois. He is the author of Reclaiming 42: Public Memory and the Reframing of Jackie Robinson’s Radical Legacy, and his research focuses on the intersection of race, sport, politics, and rhetoric.
Sridhar Pappu is the award-winning author of The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age. A former columnist with the New York Times and the New York Observer, he also served as a staff writer with Sports Illustrated and the Washington Post and as a correspondent with the Atlantic. A native of Oxford, Ohio, and graduate of Northwestern University, he currently lives in Brooklyn, where he thinks about the Cincinnati Reds every single moment of every single day.
Adam Amel Rogers is based at the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center and oversees research on how entertainment and media impact society. He has directed two conferences on sports and the LGBTQ experience, and he has conducted research on queer media representation and how sports fandom bridges political division. He has been a contributor to the NFL Network and Huffington Post, and his research has been featured in Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and the Los Angeles Times. He previously wrote about social justice issues for Change.org and worked in communications for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).
George Vecsey is a retired sports columnist at the New York Times who has written over a dozen books. He was raised a Brooklyn Dodger fan in New York City and met Jackie Robinson twice, once as a young fan and once as a young reporter.
Yohuru Williams is Professor of History, McQuinn Distinguished Chair, and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He received his PhD from Howard University and has held a variety of administrative posts both within and outside the university, including serving as Vice President for Public Education and Research at the Jackie Robinson Foundation in New York City and Chief Historian for the Jackie Robinson Foundation. He is the author of Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights Black Power and Black Panthers in New Haven; and Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement. He is also the editor or coeditor of In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement and Liberated Territory: Toward a Local History of the Black Panther Party. He was featured in the Ken Burns film Jackie Robinson and the Stanley Nelson film The Black Panthers. He is also a regular contributor to The Progressive.