Thulani Davis
Thulani Davis is a journalist, playwright, and author of several books. Her most recent book, My Confederate Kinfolk, explores her black and white ancestors' lives around the time of the Civil War. Her other works include two novels, 1959 and Maker of Saints, several plays and the scripts for the films Paid in Full and Maker of Saints. She has also written several award-winning PBS documentaries. She is a past recipient of a Lila Acheson Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers Award, a PEW Foundation National Theatre Artist Residency, and a Charles H. Revson Fellowship. She is a Grammy winner and is a 2007-2008 NYU Gallatin Newington-Cropsey Foundation Fellow. Davis was educated at Barnard College, Columbia University, and New York University and taught at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Thulani Davis has begun a biography of four blues queens: Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter and Bessie Smith.

Mary Anne Weaver
Mary Anne Weaver, author of Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad and Afghanistan and A Portrait of Egypt: A Journey Through the World of Militant Islam, was at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2007. She was the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2004-2005. A longtime foreign correspondent for The New Yorker magazine, she has also published in The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Magazine. A specialist in South Asian and Middle Eastern affairs, and political and militant Islam, she has reported from some thirty countries over the last twenty-five years, based in New Delhi, Cairo, Athens, and Bangkok.

The Strange Journey of Ziad Jarrah: The Story of a Terrorist is the biography on the most improbable of the September 11th pilots. It gleans lessons on the way in which the profile of a terrorist has changed.

Molly Peacock
Molly Peacock has published six volumes of poetry, including The Second Blush and Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems, and a memoir, Paradise Piece by Piece, and is the writer/actor of a one-woman show in poems, "The Shimmering Verge." Her poems are widely anthologized, appearing in The Best of the Best American Poetry and The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She edited The Private I: Privacy in a Public World, and her essay about Mary Granville Delany, "Passion Flowers in Winter," appears in The Best American Essays 2007. She teaches in the M.F.A. program in Writing at Spalding University.

Molly Peacock's project, Passion Flowers in Winter: A Woman Begins Her Life's Work at the Age of 73, is an impressionistic biography examining the late-life artistic coming-of-age of Mrs. Mary Granville Delany, the 18th-century cut-paper botanical artist.

James Davis
James Davis is an Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College, CUNY, where he also teaches in the American Studies program. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Indiana University. His publications include essays on Henry James and Ida B. Wells and a book about the intersection of race and emergent U.S. consumer culture entitled Commerce in Color (University of Michigan Press, 2007). He is on the executive board of the Brooklyn College Center for Teaching and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Teacher.

He will continue work on a meditation on the life and work of Eric Walrond, a fiction writer and journalist born in Guyana and raised in Barbados and Panama, who rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance before moving to England.

Ilan Ehrlich
History

Ilan Ehrlich is a doctoral candidate in Latin American history. His dissertation is a biography of Eduardo R. Chibás (1907-1951), a Cuban senator, presidential candidate and popular radio personality.

Hyewon Yi
Art History

Hyewon Yi's research interests are in contemporary art and the history of photography. Her Art History dissertation, "Photographer as Participant Observer: The Photographs of Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Richard Billingham, and Nobuyoshi Araki," examines four major living proponents of the highly subjective, socially immersive "gonzo" method of photo-documentation.