Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned poet, performer, and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation; she served three terms as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States. Harjo is the author of ten books of poetry, several plays, children's books, and two memoirs; she has also produced seven award-winning music albums and edited several anthologies. Her many honors include the Ruth Lily Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, two NEA fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Tulsa Artist Fellowship. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation. She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence for the Bob Dylan Center. Girl Warrior was published on October 7th.

Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, memoirist, translator, opera librettist, and the author of numerous acclaimed books. In 2017, she was appointed to her first of two terms as 22nd United States Poet Laureate by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, during which time she spearheaded the American Public Media podcast The Slowdown and launched the national project "American Conversations: Celebrating Poetry in Rural Communities." Smith is a professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Fear Less was published on November 18th.

Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award–winning broadcaster, National Humanities Medalist, and New York Times bestselling author. She grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, attended Brown University, and became a journalist and diplomat in Cold War Berlin. After studying theology at Yale Divinity School in the early 1990s, she became the host of Speaking of Faith—later On Being—as a weekly national public radio show. In 2011, she created the Civil Conversations Project, and in 2013, The On Being Project. In 2014, President Obama awarded Tippett the National Humanities Medal. In other honors, she has received a Four Freedoms Medal of the Roosevelt Institute, holds honorary doctorates from Yale University and Middlebury College, and was the Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor at Stanford University. She has published three books: Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, Einstein’s God, and Speaking of Faith.