Insiders looking out and outsiders looking in from the world of boxing
Cian O'Clery is a director and producer of unscripted television. He is the co-creator and series director/producer of 'Love On The Spectrum'. His series have won numerous awards both in Australia and internationally, including several Emmy Awards.
David Gessner is the author of thirteen books that blend a love of nature, humor, memoir, and environmentalism, including the New York Times bestselling, All the Wild That Remains, Return of the Osprey, Sick of Nature and Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt's American Wilderness. His latest book is titled The Book of Flaco: The World's Most Famous Bird.
David Nasaw is an American author, biographer and historian who specializes in the cultural, social and business history of early 20th Century America. Nasaw is on the faculty of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is the Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Professor of History. His most recent biography, The Patriarch (2012), based on unrestricted and exclusive access to the papers of his subject Joseph Patrick Kennedy, was named one of the five best nonfiction books of 2012 by the New York Times.
Ada Ferrer is a Cuban-American historian. She is a professor of history and Caribbean Studies at Princeton University. She won the 2015 Frederick Douglass Prize for her book Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. She was also awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book Cuba: An American History.
Rodney Ascher is an American film director, best known for Room 237 (2012), A Glitch in the Matrix (2021) and The Nightmare (2015).
Spencer Kornhaber is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Before joining The Atlantic as an editor in 2011, he was a staff writer at OC Weekly, an editor at Patch, and a freelancer for Spin and The A.V. Club. In 2019, he won the Excellence in Column Writing Award from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists. At The Atlantic, he covers pop culture and music. He is the author of On Divas: Persona, Pleasure, Power.
A. L. Kennedy is a Scots writer, academic and stand-up comedian. She writes novels, short stories and non-fiction, and is known for her dark tone and her blending of realism and fantasy. She contributes columns and reviews to European newspapers.
Ben Johnson is a Canadian former sprinter. During the 1987–88 season he held the title of the world's fastest man, breaking both the 100m and the 60m indoor World Records. He won the 100 metres at the 1987 World Championships in Athletics; and at the 1988 Summer Olympics, but was disqualified for doping and stripped of the gold medal.
Michael Azerrad is an American author, music journalist, editor, and musician. A graduate of Columbia University, he has written for publications such as Spin, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. Azerrad's 1993 biography Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana was named by Q as one of the 50 greatest rock books ever written.
Andrew Hammel holds law degrees from the University of Houston and Harvard Law School and was admitted to the bar of the State of Texas in 1996. He is a former death-row defense lawyer and law professor. He is the author of Ending the Death Penalty: The European Experience in Global Perspective (2010) and many scholarly articles. He is fluent in English and German. His long-form journalism on famous true crime cases has appeared in Quillette, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Berliner Zeitung, and other outlets.
Ric Burns is an American documentary filmmaker and writer. He has written, directed and produced historical documentaries since the 1990s, beginning with his collaboration on the celebrated PBS series The Civil War (1990), which he produced with his older brother Ken Burns and wrote with Geoffrey Ward.
Robert Nicholas McDonell is an American writer who has worked as a journalist, screenwriter, producer, novelist and researcher.
Kim Cross is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist known for meticulously reported narrative nonfiction. A full-time freelance writer, she has bylines in the New York Times, Nieman Storyboard, Outside, Bicycling, Garden & Gun, CNN.com, ESPN.com, and USA Today.
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy.
Christopher L. Miller is retired professor in the Department of French and the Department of African American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French, published by the University of Chicago Press. His new book "Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity" examines a series of literary hoaxes, deceptions that involved flagrant acts of cultural appropriation.
Charles Leerhsen is a former executive editor at Sports Illustrated. He has written for Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times. His books include Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty; Crazy Good: The Story of Dan Patch, the Most Famous Horse in America; Blood and Smoke: A True Tale of Mystery, Mayhem, and the Birth of the Indy 500; and Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Sarah Saffian. Visit him at Leerhsen.com
Lori Grinker is an American documentary art photographer and filmmaker from New York City. She is best known for her self-directed, long-term documentary projects, and has conducted these projects through photography, video and multimedia.
Rachel Monroe is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, where she covers Texas and the Southwest.
Gary Smith is an American sportswriter. He is best known for his lengthy human interest stories in Sports Illustrated, where he worked from 1983 to 2013.
Alexander Wolff spent thirty-six years on staff at Sports Illustrated. He is author or editor of nine books, including the New York Times bestseller Raw Recruits and Big Game, Small World, which was named a New York Times Notable Book. A former Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton, he lives with his family in Vermont.
Dan Reed is a British documentary director and producer, known for Leaving Neverland (2019), The Valley (2000) and Terror in Mumbai (2009).
Paul Cantor is a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, New YorkMagazine, Rolling Stone, XXL, Esquire, Billboard, MTV News, Vice, FADER, Complex, and elsewhere. Born and raised in New York City, he began his career as a music producer and is now among the most authoritative voices in music journalism.
Joanna Rakoff is the author of the international bestselling memoir My Salinger Year and the novel A Fortunate Age, winner of the Goldberg Prize for Fiction, the Elle Readers' Prize, and a San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller.
Ron Sexsmith is a Canadian singer-songwriter from St. Catharines, Ontario. He was the songwriter of the year at the 2005 Juno Awards. He began releasing recordings of his own material in 1985 at age 21, and has since recorded fifteen albums.
Mark Blyth is a Scottish-American political scientist. He is currently the William R. Rhodes Professor of International Economics and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He is the author of several books, including Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, The Future of the Euro, and most recently, Angrynomics in 2020.
Michael Lewis is an American author and financial journalist. He has also been a contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 2009, writing mostly on business, finance, and economics. He is the best-selling author of The Undoing Project, Liar's Poker, Flash Boys, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Home Game and The Big Short, among other books.
Laurie Woolever is a writer and editor, and spent nearly a decade assisting Anthony Bourdain, with whom she coauthored the cookbook Appetites in 2016. Her most recent book is 'Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography'
Jenny Valentish is a journalist and author. Her latest books include 'Woman of Substances' and 'Everything Harder Than Everyone Else'
Tim Hayward is a writer, broadcaster, restaurateur and unrepentant food geek. He writes a column and criticises restaurants for the Financial Times and his features have appeared in the FT, Guardian, Observer Food Monthly, Delicious, Olive, Waitrose Food Illustrated and Saveur, amongst others.
Maria Bustillos is the founding editor of Popula, an alternative news and culture magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Guardian.
Leon Gast was an American documentary film director, producer, cinematographer, and editor. His documentary, When We Were Kings depicts the iconic heavyweight boxing match: The Rumble in the Jungle between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. This film would go on to win the 1996 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Independent Spirit Award.
Tom Vitale is a producer and director, known for Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie and Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations
Kevin Draper is a sports business reporter for The New York Times, covering the leagues, federations, owners, unions, stadiums and media companies behind the games.
Randy Roberts is the distinguished professor of history at Purdue University and an award-winning author. He has written thirteen books on sports history, the most recent of which is Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X
Ken Burns is an American filmmaker, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs in documentary films. His widely known documentary series include The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009), Prohibition (2011), The Roosevelts (2014), The Vietnam War (2017), and Country Music (2019). He was also executive producer of both The West (1996), and Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies (2015). Burns's documentaries have earned two Academy Award nominations (for 1981's Brooklyn Bridge and 1985's The Statue of Liberty) and have won several Emmy Awards, among other honors.
Patrick Connor is a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America and the International Boxing Research Organization and author of 'Shot at a Brothel: The Spectacular Demise of Oscar “Ringo” Bonavena'
Lance Oppenheim is an American filmmaker, documentarian, and producer from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His debut feature Some Kind of Heaven (2020) was an Official Selection at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.
Frank Brady is an American writer, editor, biographer and educator. Chairman of the Department of Mass Communications, Journalism, Television and Film at St. John's University, New York, he is founding editor of Chess Life magazine.
Nick Broomfield is an English documentary film director. His self-reflective style has been regarded as influential to many later filmmakers.
Teddy Atlas is an American hall of fame boxing trainer and fight commentator.
Jim Lampley is an American sportscaster and news anchor. He was best known as a blow-by-blow announcer on HBO World Championship Boxing for 30 years. He also had covered a record 14 Olympic Games on U.S. television, most recently the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China.
Tris Dixon is the former editor of Boxing News and has covered the sport for nearly two decades. He has worked as a boxing broadcaster for Sky Sports, BT Sport, and CNN. He authored the books The Road to Nowhere: A Journey Through Boxing's Wastelands, Money: The Life and Fast Times of Floyd Mayweather, ghostwrote War and Peace: My Story with British boxing icon Ricky Hatton, and his latest book Damage: The Untold Story of Brain Trauma in Boxing
Maria Konnikova is a Russian-American writer , with a Ph.D in psychology from Columbia University. Konnikova has worked as a television producer, written for several magazines and online publications, and written two New York Times best-selling books. She primarily writes about psychology and its application to real life situations.
Mark Cousins is a Northern Irish director and writer based in Edinburgh. A prolific documentarian, he is best known for his 15-hour 2011 documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey.
Jon Ronson is a Welsh-American journalist, author, and filmmaker whose works include Them: Adventures with Extremists (2001), The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004), and The Psychopath Test (2011). He produces informal but skeptical investigations of controversial fringe politics and science.
Jonathan Ames is an American author who has written a number of novels and comic memoirs, and is the creator of two television series, Bored to Death (HBO) and Blunt Talk (STARZ). In the late '90s and early 2000s, he was a columnist for the New York Press for several years, and became known for self-deprecating tales of his sexual misadventures. He also has a long-time interest in boxing, appearing occasionally in the ring as "The Herring Wonder".
Chuck Klosterman is an American author and essayist whose work focuses on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote "The Ethicist" column for The New York Times Magazine. Klosterman is the author of eleven books, including two novels and the essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto.
Uncover the man behind the myth of one of America’s greatest and most complicated writers. Hemingway from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick premieres April 5, 2021 on PBS.
Jerry Izenberg is a sports journalist with The Newark Star-Ledger in Newark, New Jersey. Izenberg has covered many memorable sporting events and figures of the late twentieth century, including Sonny Werblin's ownership of the New York Jets, the boxing career of Muhammad Ali, and the Loma Prieta earthquake which interrupted the 1989 World Series.
Dan Roberts is an attorney and has written about boxing, law, violence against women and - occasionally - good champagne for Deadspin (RIP), Splinter, and others.