Paul Oskar Kristeller (May 22, 1905 in Berlin – June 7, 1999 in New York, United States) was a scholar of Renaissance humanism. He was awarded the Haskins Medal in 1992. He was last active as Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University in New York, where he mentored both Irving Louis Horowitz and A. James Gregor.
Daniel Alarcón (born March 5, 1977, in Lima, Peru) is a Peruvian-American novelist, journalist and radio producer. He is co-founder, host and executive producer of Radio Ambulante, an award-winning Spanish language podcast distributed by NPR. Currently, he is an assistant professor of broadcast journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and writes about Latin America for The New Yorker.
He began his career writing fiction, publishing stories in magazines like The New Yorker, Granta, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere, and his short stories have been widely anthologized. He served as Associate Editor of the Peruvian magazine Etiqueta Negra until 2015. He is a former Fulbright Scholar to Peru, and a 2011 Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. His novel At Night We Walk in Circles was published by Riverhead Books in October 2013. His most recent story collection, The King is Always Above the People, was long-listed for the National Book Award in 2018, and won the 2019 Clarke Prize in Fiction. He received the MacArthur 'Genius Grant' in 2021.
John Henry Holland (February 2, 1929 – August 9, 2015) was an American scientist and professor of psychology and electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was a pioneer in what became known as genetic algorithms.
Thomas Michael "Tim" Scanlon (; born 1940), usually cited as T. M. Scanlon, is an American philosopher. At the time of his retirement in 2016, he was the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity in Harvard University's Department of Philosophy, where he had taught since 1984. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.
Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson (February 18, 1940 – May 22, 2015) was an American artist who represented Black history through art.
Rueben Martinez (born April 26, 1940 in Miami, Arizona) is an American activist and businessman. He is active in Democratic party politics and runs a barbershop and a Latino-focused bookstore in Santa Ana, California.
Joan Snyder (born April 16, 1940) is an American painter from New York. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow (1974).Snyder first gained public attention in the early 1970s with her gestural and elegant "stroke paintings," which used the grid to deconstruct and retell the story of abstract painting. By the late seventies, Snyder had abandoned the formality of the grid. She began more explicitly incorporating symbols and text, as the paintings took on a more complex materiality. These early works were included in the 1973 and 1981 Whitney Biennials and the 1975 Corcoran Biennial.
Often referred to as an autobiographical or confessional artist, Snyder's paintings are narratives of both personal and communal experiences. Through a fiercely individual approach and persistent experimentation with technique and materials, Snyder has extended the expressive potential of abstract painting, inspiring generations of emerging artists.
Snyder currently lives and works in Brooklyn and Woodstock, New York.
Andrea Barrett (born November 16, 1954) is an American novelist and short story writer. Her collection Ship Fever won the 1996 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, and she received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001. Her book Servants of the Map was a finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Archangel and Natural History were finalists for the Story Prize.
Elaine Pagels, née Hiesey (born February 13, 1943), is an American historian of religion. She is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Pagels has conducted extensive research into early Christianity and Gnosticism.
Her best-selling book The Gnostic Gospels (1979) examines the divisions in the early Christian church, and the way that women have been viewed throughout Jewish history and Christian history. Modern Library named it as one of the 100 best books of the twentieth century.