Dr. Laura Nash is an associate professor of music at Fairfield University. She is an award-winning teacher, an innovative pedagogue whose research focuses on the development and implementation of arts-centered, content-rich, interdisciplinary curricular materials. She demonstrated the power of this approach in two very successful NEH Landmark workshops (with Dr. Williams) on Duke Ellington in 2011 and 2014.

Mr. Virdin is an English teacher in the rural district of Saguache, Colorado. He participated in two NEH Landmark workshops, including the 2014 Duke Ellington Landmark workshop, collaborates with a national group through NOAA on interdisciplinary environmental education, and works with the Colorado Department of Education to develop innovative and culturally relevant pedagogy.

Dr. Williams, an education activist and professor of history at Fairfield University, is the author of several books, including Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement (2015), Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights Black Power and Black Panthers in New Haven (2008) and Teaching Beyond the Textbook: Six Investigative Strategies (2008). Dr. Williams was Chief Historian and Vice President for Public Education and Research for the Jackie Robinson Foundation, consulted on Ken Burns’ film on Jackie Robinson (April 2016), and was featured in PBS’ The Black Panthers: Vanguard of a Revolution (February 2016).

Dr. James Smethurst is an associate professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His primary research areas are African American literature, culture, and intellectual history from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries, with a particular emphasis on black cultural and political radicalism. He is currently working on a history of the Black Arts Movement in the southern United States. He is author or co-author of six books, including The African American Roots of Modernism: Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance (2011) and The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005).

Dr. Tricia Rose is a professor of Africana Studies at Brown University and an internationally respected scholar of post civil rights era black U.S. culture, popular music, social issues, gender and sexuality. She is most well known for her groundbreaking book on the emergence of hip-hop culture. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, which is considered a foundational text for the study of hip-hop, one that has defined what is now an entire field of study. Rose published a rare oral narrative history of black women’s sexual life stories, called Longing To Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy (2003) and returned to hip-hop with: The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop-And Why It Matters (2008). In it, Rose argues that hip-hop artists and the commercialization of black popular culture more generally has more power than ever to shape racial and gender images, perceptions and policies.

Prof. MK Asante is a professor of creative writing and film in the Department of English and Language Arts at Morgan State University. He is a best-selling author, award-winning filmmaker, rapper who CNN calls “a master storyteller and major creative force.” He is the author of four books, including Buck: A Memoir, which was praised by Maya Angelou as “A story of surviving and thriving with passion, compassion, wit, and style.” Buck made the Washington Post bestseller list in 2014 and 2015 and is a NAACP Image Award finalist. Described by Vibe magazine as “brilliantly complex,” Asante is a rap artist who has performed on stages in four continents. He is featured on the song “Bangers” on the album Indie 500 by Talib Kweli and 9th Wonder. Asante has given distinguished lectures at many universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford.