Ayelet Waldman is the bestselling author of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, Daughter's Keeper, Red Hook Road, Bad Mother, and, most recently Love and Treasure. She has also written for the New York Times, Vogue, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.

Michelle Alexander is a longtime civil rights advocate and litigator, and holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Mortiz College of Law at Ohio State University. Alexander served for several years as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, and went on to direct the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor. She is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.