Leann Shamash is both an educator and photographer. She worked in many capacities in the field of both formal and informal Jewish education. She is currently working on bringing attention to the wisdom and beauty of the elderly through her photographs and anticipates creating a book or a blog on the stories she is collecting.

Miranda Cooper (she/her) is a NYC-based writer, editor, and literary translator. Her literary criticism, essays, and translations of Yiddish fiction and poetry have appeared in a number of publications including Jewish Currents, Kirkus Reviews, the Los Angeles Review, Pakn Treger, and more. In 2019, she was named an Emerging Critic by the National Book Critics Circle. She is also an editor at In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies.

Jeannie Appleman is Senior Trainer and Organizer for JOIN for Justice. Jeannie has been organizing and training in different models since 1987. She, and colleagues Meir Lakein, and Rabbis Stephanie Kolin and Noah Farkas, co-founded the first organizing and leadership training for Rabbis, Cantors, and Religious educators in the seminaries of all four movements of Judaism in 2005. She has trained thousands of lay leaders, and hundreds of Rabbis. She is a co-author with Meir Lakein of Creating Covenantal Communities: Building Relationships, Developing leaders and Taking Action, in the Journal of American Jewish University's Ziegler School of Rabbinics. They have an upcoming article this summer in the Reform movement's Journal of CCAR (Central Conference of American Rabbis). Jeannie also published Developing Rabbinic Leadership: New Measures for Success in Sh'ma: A Journal of Jewish Ideas.

Ken Krimstein’s recently published graphic novel/biography of Hannah Arendt, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth (Bloomsbury 2018) has been named one of the best graphic novels of the year by Forbes, made the top ten lists of The Comics Journal and is a finalist for the Jewish Book Council’s 2018 National Jewish Book Awards and the Midland Author’s Award. In addition, he has published cartoons in The New Yorker, Punch, The Wall Street Journal, and has written for New York Observer’s “New Yorker’s Diary” and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Yankee Pot Roast, and Mr. Beller's Neighborhood. He is the author of Kvetch as Kvetch Can, and teaches at De Paul University. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

His website is Kenkrimstein.com.

Patrick Egwu is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Nigeria who reports on global health, education, religion, conflict, and other development issues in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa. He has been published in African Arguments, FT's This is Africa, Ozy, BRIGHT Magazine, Global Sisters Report, and IJNet, among others.

Sondra Helene is a board member and writer at GrubStreet, Boston’s center for literary arts. She is the former president of Friends of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and is a member of Hadassah and Combined Jewish Philanthropies. Her debut novel, Appearances, was published in April, 2019. Appearances was listed by PopSugar as one of the 10 books by debut authors to watch in 2019 and by Parade as one of 10 books to read when family drama is consuming your life. She Reads listed Appearances as a novel to read if you like the show, This is Us. You can visit her at www.sondrahelene.com. She is on Facebook and on Instagram and Twitter as @sondrahelene. Sondra is a graduate of Ithaca College and Columbia University. She loves skiing, yoga, pilates, and Nantucket. She has two grown children and lives in Boston with her husband and two poodles.