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michelle d. commander is associate director and curator of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. A Ford Foundation and Fulbright fellowship recipient, she is the author of Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic and Avidly Reads Passages.

Kevin Young is currently the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, named a National Historic Landmark in 2017. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Brown (Knopf, 2018), as featured on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. His nonfiction book Bunk (Graywolf Press, 2017) won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was named a New York Times Notable Book. He is the editor of nine other volumes, including the anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, recently published by Library of America. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Young is the poetry editor of The New Yorker and newly named director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.