Hilton Als is an American writer and theatre critic. He is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University and a staff writer and theatre critic for The New Yorker magazine. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is an essayist and critic whose writing has appeared in the Paris Review, New York Times Magazine, New York Observer, Bookforum, and Rolling Stone. Ghansah has drawn particular recognition for her longform profiles of subjects like Kendrick Lamar and Toni Morrison. Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Smith has won the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and her novel White Teeth was included in Time magazine s list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. Sarah Lewis is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and African American Studies at Harvard University. Charles Gaines is highly regarded as both a leading practitioner of conceptualism and an influential educator at the California Institute of the Arts. Gaines s work has been exhibited internationally, including Museum of Contemporary Art, L.A., the Hammer Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the 56th Venice Biennale.