Ani DiFranco is a Grammy Award–winning singer-songwriter and musician who has released twenty-three albums, traversing genres and addressing a range of autobiographical, political, and social issues. She is widely considered a feminist icon, and created her own record label, Righteous Babe Records, in 1990. She regularly releases new music, and continues her decades-long career as a major touring artist. DiFranco released a collection of poems and paintings titled Verses in 2007. Her memoir, No Walls and the Recurring Dream, was a New York Times bestseller, and she is the author of two children’s books, The Knowing and Show Up and Vote. In 2024, she completed a five-month run on Broadway in the role of Persephone in Hadestown. The Spirit of Ani was published on March 3rd.

Marielle Heller is a director, writer, actor, and producer. Her directorial debut, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, premiered at Sundance in 2015 and earned the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature. Most recently, Heller wrote and directed Nightbitch (2024), starring Amy Adams and based on the novel of the same name by Rachel Yoder. Previously, Heller directed Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), both of which earned Academy Award nominations for their respective stars—Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant, and Tom Hanks. Most recently as an actor, Heller co-starred as Alma Wheatley in the Emmy-winning series The Queen’s Gambit (2020). Heller’s film and television production company, Defiant By Nature, was established in 2019. Its first project was her filmed version of Heidi Schreck’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play What the Constitution Means to Me (2020). As a producer, Heller most recently executive-produced Hasan Hadi’s directorial debut, The President’s Cake (2025).

Lauren Coyle Rosen is the co-author of The Spirit of Ani. She is an award-winning author, artist, singer-songwriter, and cultural anthropologist. Her nonfiction books include Hannibal Lokumbe (co-authored with Hannibal Lokumbe), Law in Light, and Fires of Gold. Rosen has also published eight volumes of poetry and art, including, most recently, Veils of Athena. She founded and writes for the Spiritual Muses and is a fellow at Harvard University. She was formerly a cultural anthropology professor at Princeton University, where she received the President’s Award in Distinguished Teaching, among other honors. She is currently at work on her next nonfiction book, Goddess: A Revisionist History. In 2025, Rosen released her first music album, Purify Flame.