Jon W. Tuttle is Distinguished Professor of English at Francis Marion University, specializing in Modern and American Drama. He is also Director of University Honors, the Nellie Cooke Sparrow Writer-in-Residence, and an FMU Trustees Research Scholar. He has received the South Carolina Governor’s Award in the Humanities and both the Founders Award and Lifetime Service Award from South Carolina Theater Association. He has served on the boards of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, the Florence Regional Arts Alliance, and the Jasper Project. For over a decade, he was Playwright-in-Residence and Literary Manager at Trustus Theater in Columbia, South Carolina. He is the editor of David Kranes: Selected Plays.

Peter Martins was the Ballet Master in Chief of New York City Ballet for 35 years, the only person to preside over the company as long as its founder, George Balanchine. Born in Denmark, Martins began his association with NYCB in 1967, when he was invited to dance the title role in George Balanchine’s Apollo during the company’s appearance at the Edinburgh Festival. He then performed as a guest artist for three years before joining the company as a principal dancer in 1970. Prior to his retirement from dancing in 1983, Martins performed a wide variety of roles and was lauded for his outstanding partnering skills and noble stage presence. In 1981, Martins was named Ballet Master, a title he shared with Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and John Taras. From 1983 to 1989, he served as Co-Ballet Master in Chief with Robbins, running day-to-day operations. He assumed sole directorship of the company in 1990 and was also Chairman of the Faculty of the School of American Ballet, NYCB’s official school. In 2000, founded the New York Choreographic Institute.
Martins began his career as a choreographer in 1977. He has created nearly 90 ballets set to music by composers as diverse as Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Wynton Marsalis, and John Adams. His full-length productions for New York City Ballet include The Sleeping Beauty (1991), Swan Lake (1999), Romeo + Juliet (2007), and La Sylphide (2015). Martins’ autobiography, Far From Denmark, was published in 1982. Among other awards, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark made him a Knight of Dannebrog, a Knight of the First Order, and, in 2013, a Commander of the Knights of Dannebrog, Denmark’s highest civilian honor. In 2008, the French government made him a Commander in the Order of Arts and Letter. That same year, Martins was inducted into the National Museum of Dance’s Hall of Fame, in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Jose Martinez, Ph.D. is Professor of Sociology (ret.) at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. He is the author of Inequality in American Education: The Entrenchment of a Two-Tiered System; Diversity, Funding, and Standardized Testing in American Education; Covid-19 and the Transformation of American Society; and Football in American Society. He has contributed chapters in texts such as Diversity in the Workforce. Dr. Martinez holds degrees in education, history, and psychology, and his doctorate is in sociology. He has taught for over thirty years. The media calls on him regarding social issues, and he was a regular co-host on the PBS program Hispanic Perspectives. He also has held administrative and other positions in agencies at all levels: the federal, state, county, local, and school district.

Lawrence Goldstone is the author or co-author of two dozen books of both fiction and non-fiction, six with his wife Nancy. He has written extensively on Constitutional law and equal rights. His On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravishing of African American Voting Rights won the highly prestigious Lillian Smith Book Award. Other books include Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903; Dark Bargain: Slavery Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution; and The Activist: John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, and the Myth of Judicial Review. He currently writes a weekly opinion column for The Fulcrum. Goldstone’s fiction has also been highly praised. His first novel, Rights, won a New American Writing Award, and his third, Anatomy of Deception, was a New York Times notable mystery. Goldstone has been widely interviewed on both radio and television, with appearances on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, To the Best of Our Knowledge, and The Faith Middleton Show; The Takeaway (PRI); Make It Plain with Mark Thompson (SiriusXM); Tavis Smiley (PBS); and CSPAN’s BookTV. Goldstone’s work has been profiled in The New York Times, The Toronto Star, Salon, Slate, and numerous regional newspapers. His articles, reviews, and opinion pieces have appeared in, among other periodicals, The Atlantic, New Republic, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Salon, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Hartford Courant, and Berkshire Eagle. Goldstone holds a Ph.D. in constitutional history from the New School.

Ralph G. Giordano is a professional architect born in New York. Recently retired to New Jersey, he has authored nine books on American culture and served as a series editor for six other innovative publications. Giordano is a member of the Authors Guild. He earned a master’s degree from the City University of New York and a bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the New York Institute of Technology. Giordano’s work has been featured in The New York Times and New York Daily News, among other publications. In 2007, he was honored with the prestigious Council of the Arts Humanities Award on Staten Island (COAHSI), recognizing his long commitment to the arts and humanities within New York City. Inducted into the College of Staten Island Alumni Hall of Fame, an additional honor came with the President’s Dolphin Award for Outstanding Service and Contribution to the College of Staten Island. Faculty Appreciation Awards for excellence in teaching came from Student/Athletes of Kean University in New Jersey and the Student/Athletes at the College of Staten Island (CUNY). He has taught as an adjunct professor in various disciplines of World History, American Studies, and Architecture at the College of Staten Island, Wagner College, Kean University, and Union County College. In 2011, he was featured in a BBC Radio documentary and has been guest on many other radio programs.

Dr. Juliana Geran Pilon is Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. Among her books are The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom, The Art of Peace: Engaging a Complex World, Soulmates: Resurrecting Eve, Why America is Such a Hard Sell, and Notes from the Other Side of Night. The author of over 250 articles and reviews on international affairs, human rights, literature, and philosophy, her writings have recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Liberty, the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS), Academic Questions, InFocus, Starting Points, Doc Emet Productions, the American Mind, and the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, among others. Born in Romania, she emigrated with her family and arrived in the U.S. as a teenager. In the 1990s she was Vice President for Programs at the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), where she designed, conducted, and managed projects related to a wide variety of democratization projects.

Leslie Gruis served at the National Security Agency for 30 years. Originally recruited as a mathematician with a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, Dr. Gruis was talent-spotted for her people and policy-setting skills and rapidly became a rising star. She ascended through the ranks, became the head of an organization that funded start-ups for classified applications, and then entered the high-level policy arena just as the intelligence community began to face unprecedented privacy challenges. These included the role of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court in targeting Americans and major changes to the intelligence community forced by the privacy revelations of whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Dr. Gruis’s long-standing interests in the rights of Americans and the American dream coalesced in a deep interest in privacy as a concept. She influenced intelligence community policy on privacy for the rights of Americans and wrote a number of classified policy documents on that subject. Upon retirement, Dr. Gruis began a second career writing about the privacy rights of the American public. She focused on what Americans are entitled to know and what can be done to protect them from exploitation by giant commercial organizations. Dr. Gruis is the author of Privacy: Past, Present, and Future. She also writes for traditional and online media, appears on radio and television, and gives frequent public appearances. Dr. Gruis lives in Maryland with her family.

Ann G. Simonds is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Oregon, Eugene. She has published articles in various anthropological journals and extensively studied Franz Boas’s works on the Northwest Coast.

Richard L. Bland is a retired Arctic archaeologist and translator. He has translated over 250 articles and books, primarily from Russian and German, into English. Recent examples with Academica Press include The Peoples of Ancient Siberia: An Archeological History (by A. P. Okladnikov) and Warfare in the Russian Arctic (A. K. Nefedkin).

Don Dumond served as Director of the Museum of Natural History at the University of Oregon. He has more than 100 substantive publications in journals, plus fourteen authored or co-authored books.

Thomas E. Meurer is a retired business executive whose good fortune has allowed for careers and experiences in nearly all of his areas of interest: competitive sports, the military, teaching, politics, diplomacy, agriculture, venture capital, natural history, science, oil, gas, and dozens of practical jokes. Over the last 55 years, He has done business in 47 countries, several of which no longer exist.

Robert Hauptman is Professor Emeritus of Information Science at St. Cloud State University. His nearly 700 publications include 18 books (the 19th, The Desert Encyclopedia, is forthcoming in 2024) and cover innumerable topics. At 81, he still walks many miles almost every day and climbs mountains. He has stood on the highest point of 45 American states.