Ayad Akhtar - The Radiance

Daphna Renan is the Peter B. Munroe and Mary J. Munroe Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She is a leading scholar of constitutional democracy and presidential power. She is the author with Nikolas Bowie of the forthcoming book Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People (W.W. Norton 2026). Her academic work has appeared in numerous publications including the Harvard Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal, and it has been cited around the world. She is a sought-after media commentator whose writing has appeared in the New York Times and the Atlantic among other outlets. She clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and served in the U.S. Department of Justice under President Obama.

Peter Sagal is or has been an author, journalist, playwright, columnist, foreign correspondent, podcaster, and, for the last 28 years, the host of the NPR news quiz Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, produced here in Chicago in collaboration with WBEZ. In 2013, he hosted Constitution USA with Peter Sagal, a four-part PBS documentary exploring how Americans live with and under the Constitution today. In the documentary, he traveled around the country on a patriotically painted motorcycle, talking to lawyers, plaintiffs, academics, immigrants and citizens, both born and newly minted, exploring how this nearly 250-year-old document still steers our nation and our democracy. Since then, Constitution USA has become a standard part of civics education in schools around the country, and Sagal has regularly lectured on the Constitution as an amateur Constitutional scholar and student. In 2008, Sagal accepted a Peabody Award on behalf of the panelists, crew, and producers of Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me! He's also won the Kurt Vonnegut Award for Humor from the Kurt Vonnegut Library. He's the author of The Book of Vice: Naughty Things and How To Do Them and The Incomplete Book of Running, a memoir about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and other adventures while running long distances. He's also contributed essays and reporting to The Atlantic, The New York Times, Chicago Magazine, Opera News, Saveur, Finesse, and for a decade was the "Road Scholar" columnist for Runner's World.

Alex Kotlowitz is the author of four books, including his most recent, An American Summer, which received the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. His first book, the national bestseller There Are No Children Here, was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the 150 most important books of the twentieth century. The Other Side of the River received The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Nonfiction. Alex’s work has regularly appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and on This American Life. His honors include an Emmy, two Peabodys, and a George Polk Award. The American Academy of Arts and Letters honored him with the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for his body of work which “illuminates astonishing national inequities through the lens of individual experience.” He and his wife, Maria, live in Chicago.