Kati Marton is the New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including The Chancellor: the Remarkable Odyssey of Angel Merkel, a New York Times Notable Book of 2021, Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages that Shaped Our History, True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy, and the memoir Paris: A Love Story. An award-winning former correspondent for NPR and ABC News, Marton has combined a writing life with activities to advance human rights. She is a board member of the International Rescue Committee and the American Academy in Berlin, and Central European University. Marton is the recipient of a George Foster Peabody Award for broadcast journalism, a Matrix Award for Women Who Change the World, and the United Nations Association’s Leo Nevas Human Rights Award.

Anne Nelson is an award-winning author and journalist. Early in her career, Nelson was a war correspondent in El Salvador and Guatemala, for which she won the Livingston Award for international reporting. Nelson was the director of the Committee to Protect Journalists and taught at Columbia University. She won a Guggenheim fellowship for her 2009 book Red Orchestra: The Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler, to be reissued this August. Her 2017 book Suzanne’s Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris was a finalist in the National Jewish Book Awards. Her most recent book is Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. Her 2001 play The Guys, produced as a feature film starring Sigourney Weaver won the Audie Award. Nelson, a graduate of Yale University, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the New York Institute on the Humanities. 

Max Boot is a historian, best-selling author, and foreign-policy analyst who has been called one of the “world’s leading authorities on armed conflict” by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a columnist for The Washington Post. Boot is now writing a biography of Ronald Reagan for Norton/Liveright. His previous biography, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (Norton/Liveright, 2018), was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Boot is also the author of four other widely acclaimed books: The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right (2018); the New York Times bestseller Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present (2013); War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (2006); and The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (2002), which won the 2003 General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation. Boot has been a CNN analyst and a regular guest on MSNBC, NPR, BBC, and many other radio and television programs. He was born in Moscow, grew up in Los Angeles, and now lives in New York.

Ted Widmer is Distinguished Lecturer at the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York. In 2020, he published “Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington,” which won the Lincoln Forum Book Prize and several other awards. He is also the author or editor of six other books, including a study of Herman Melville’s friendships and the many connections that linked the Berkshires and New York City in the 19th century. In 2022 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.