Ryan Carr is a lecturer at Columbia, where he teaches classes in American studies, English, and the Core Curriculum. He is the author of Samson Occom: Radical Hospitality in the Native Northeast (Columbia, 2023) and co-editor of the forthcoming Writings...
Ulrike Wagner received her PhD in German and comparative literature from Columbia University and is director of German Studies at Bard College Berlin. Her research focuses on European Romanticism and American Transcendentalism.
She recently completed Trans...
Mona Simpson is the author of the novels Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, Off Keck Road, My Hollywood, Casebook, and Commitment. Born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, she moved to Los Angeles as a teenager. She studied poetry with Seamus Heaney...
Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, cultural critic, and MacArthur Fellow whose work explores the public life of the imagination, artistic practice, and the cultural commons. He is the author of The Gift (Random House, 1983), a landmark work that...
Alice de Galzain is a postdoctoral researcher and former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Seal of Excellence Fellow at Sorbonne Université (2024–2026). She is a Visiting Scholar with the Transcendentalism Initiative at the Center for the Study of World Religions at...
Lydia Moland is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Philosophy at Colby College. She is the author of Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life (2022), a biography of abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. Her writing has appeared in The Wall...
Ileene Smith is Editor at Large at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Editorial Director of Jewish Lives, published by Yale University Press. She is the recipient of the PEN/Roger Klein Award and BIO International Award for Editorial Excellence, and a fellow...
Peter Catapano is an author and editor who has worked at The New York Times since 1998. He is the founding editor of the Times’ philosophy series The Stone, which ran for eleven years, and co-editor of four essay collections. His writing has appeared in T...
Alda Balthrop-Lewis is Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University. She studies ethics—the norms, principles, relationships, and practices people use in their efforts to live well. In Thoreau's Religion (Cambridge University Press, 2021)...
Rochelle L. Johnson received the 2026 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award and the 2025 Georgia Review Prose Prize for her “Phantom Pains,” which also was aggregated by Long Reads, Memoirland, and the international scientific magazine Nature in its “Nature...