Michael Eric Dyson

Michael Eric Dyson is the author of many books including the bestselling Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?; Come Hell or High Water, Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves, and Demons of Marvin Gaye; Holler if You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur; Why I Love Black Women; and I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. Dyson is the Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in Philadelphia.

Gregory Rodriguez is an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation. He has written widely on issues of race, immigration, ethnicity, politics and America's changing demographics in such leading publications as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, where he is a Sunday Op-Ed columnist. The Economist has praised him for "decisively changing the understanding of the Latino experience in the United States," and Esquire magazine recently listed him among the "Best and Brightest" Americans under 40 who will revolutionize the way we think. His essay "Mongrel America," which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, was included in The Best American Political Writing of 2003. The author of two groundbreaking studies, "The Emerging Latino Middle Class" (1996), and "From Newcomers to New Americans: The Successful Integration of Immigrants into American Society" (1999), Rodriguez is currently at work on a major book on how contemporary Mexican immigration will change the way Americans view race. It is scheduled to be published simultaneously in English by Pantheon and in Spanish by Editorial Planeta Mexico in 2007.