Paul Kaplan is Professor of Art History at Purchase College, SUNY. He is the author of Contraband Guides: Race, Transatlantic Culture, and the Arts in the Civil War Era , also published by Penn State University Press and The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art , and a contributor to The Image of the Black in Western Art. He served as Project Scholar for Fred Wilson's Speak of Me as I Am , an installation in the American Pavilion of the 2003 Venice Biennale. Shaul Bassi is Professor of English and the Director of the Center for Humanities and Social Change at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He is the author of Shakespeare's Italy and Italy's Shakespeare: Place, "Race," Politics and coeditor of Venice and the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Guide. He is the cofounder of the Venice international literary festival Incroci di civiltà. Igiaba Scego is a Somali-Italian writer, public intellectual, and scholar. Her numerous award-winning publications include, in English translation, the novels Adua , Beyond Babylon , and The Color Line .

Maaza Mengiste's debut novel Beneath the Lion's Gaze was selected by The Guardian as one of the ten best contemporary African books. Her novel The Shadow King was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.