Writer of poetry, drama, essays and music criticism, Amiri Baraka is best known as the Father of the Black Arts Movement. Amiri Baraka is committed to social justice like no other American writer. He has taught at Yale, Columbia, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Author of Rapid Transformation, Behnam Tabrizi is an expert on organizational transformation, sales excellence, benchmarking, and product life cycle. Professor Tabrizi has held seminars and advised over 300 CEOs of the largest private and public Chinese companies on their corporate transformation.

Author of From Rage to Hope: Strategies for Reclaiming Black and Hispanic Students, Dr. Crystal Kuykendall is a analyst, motivator, engaging educator, human relations expert and legal analyst/litigator. Dr. Kuykendall is the former Executive Director of the National Alliance of Black School Educators.

Edmund S. Phelps joined the Department of Economics at Columbia in 1971 after several years at Pennsylvania and earlier Yale. He was named McVickar Professor of Political Economy in 1982 and director of the Earth Institute's Center on Capitalism and Society in 2001. In 2000 he was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. Phelps won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2006.

First Director of the Center on Aging, Health and Humanities at George Washington University, Dr. Cohen has authored more than 150 publications in the field of aging, including numerous text books and the bestseller The Brain In Human Aging. Dr. Cohen is currently conducting research on creativity and aging, retirement, assisted living and other residential settings for older adults, as well as on innovative intergenerational interventions for Alzheimer's disease.

Bestselling author of Pakistan's Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army and America's War on Terror, Dr. Hassan Abbas is a former Pakistani government official who served in the administrations of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (1995-1996) and President Pervez Musharraf (1999-2000).