Jefferson Cowie is a distinguished historian specializing in social and political history, with a focus on how class, inequality, and labor have shaped American politics and culture. He holds the James G. Stahlman Chair in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University, having previously taught at Cornell University for nearly two decades. Cowie’s scholarship has earned widespread acclaim, including the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for History for Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (2022). His influential works also include The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (2016), Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010), and Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy Year Quest for Cheap Labor (1999). A prolific writer, Cowie’s essays have appeared in major outlets like the New York Times, TIME, and The Nation, and he has received numerous fellowships throughout his career. As an educator, he has earned several teaching awards and served as Dean of William Keeton House at Cornell University.
Rivers Solomon is a writer, a lecturer, and a refugee of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. Their home is in the realm of the imaginary, where Blackness, queerness, and disability become sites of insurgency.
In addition to appearing on the Stonewall Honor List and winning a Firecracker Award, Solomon’s debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts was a finalist for a Lambda, a Hurston/Wright, and a Locus Award, among others. Solomon’s second book, a novella, The Deep, was the winner of the 2020 Lambda Award and was on the shortlist for a Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Hugo Award. Emerging out of a collaboration with experimental hip-hop group clipping, fronted by Daveed Diggs, The Deep investigates Toni Morrison’s incantation in the novel Beloved: ‘this is not a story to pass on.’ Solomon’s third novel, Sorrowland, the story of a young woman’s godlike metamorphosis, won the Stonewall an Otherwise Award and was shortlisted for an Ignyte Award, and Model Home, Solomon’s latest novel, has recently released to critical acclaim.
Solomon also writes essays, poems, and short stories, which can be found in such places as the New York Times, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. Born on Turtle Island, they currently live in London with their family.