Katherine Boo is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her writing focuses on issues of poverty, opportunity, social and economic policy, and education. Her article “The Marriage Cure,” on marriage seminars for the poor in Oklahoma City, received a National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2004. Before joining The New Yorker, Katherine was a writer and editor for the Washington Post. In 2000, she received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and in 2002, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, in recognition of her body of work on the disadvantaged. For the last decade, she has divided her time between the United States and India. Her first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, is a finalist for the National Book Award.

Louise Steinman is curator of the award-winning ALOUD series and Co-Director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of three books: The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War; The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance; and The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Jewish-Polish Reconciliation (forthcoming). She was a judge for the 2011 Story Prize and her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and on her Crooked Mirror blog.