Forum Network

J. David McSwane is an investigative reporter skilled in long form narrative, data reporting and high-impact stories that effect change and expose wrongdoing.

Wendy Ruderman is an American journalist for the \_Philadelphia Inquirer\_ and \_Philadelphia Daily News\_. She won with Barbara Laker the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. She is the co-author of BUSTED (HarperCollins March 2014. Follow her on Twitter [@wendyruderman](https://twitter.com/wendyruderman "")

Daffodil Altan is a four-time Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker, investigative reporter, writer and occasional radio producer. Most recently she was a producer at the J-School’s Investigative Reporting Program, where she directed, wrote and was the correspondent for the FRONTLINE documentary, “Trafficked in America,” which tells the inside story of Guatemalan teens who were forced to work against their will on an Ohio egg farm and was recently selected as a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. Follow her on Twitter [@daffodilaltan](https://twitter.com/daffodilaltan "")

Christian Sheckler covers the local opioid crisis. He earned awards from Hoosier State Press Association for ongoing coverage in 2015 and 2016, using county death certificates to compile first comprehensive public accounting of the local opioid death toll. Sheckler broke multiple stories about use of force and alleged misconduct by South Bend police officers by obtaining data on the handling of complaints against officers. Follow him on Twitter at [@jcsheckler](https://twitter.com/jcsheckler "")

Joe Palazzolo writes about legal affairs from The Wall Street Journal's headquarters in New York. His areas of coverage include the federal judiciary, privacy, gun laws and anticorruption. Follow him on Twitter at [@joe\_palazzolo](https://twitter.com/joe\_palazzolo "")

**Stephen Hamilton** is an artist and arts educator living and working in Boston Massachusetts. Stephen’s work focuses on the aesthetics, philosophies and key symbols inherent throughout Africa and the Diaspora. He strives to create a dialogue between contemporary Black cultures and the ancient African world. Through visual comparison of shared philosophies and aesthetics ubiquitous amongst Black peoples he seeks to describe a complex and varied Black aesthetic. These visual and philosophical connections and cultural analyses form his visual language. His pieces depict African thought and culture as equal to, yet unique from its western analogue. This work stands in stark contrast to the pervasive negative associations, which have become synonymous with Black culture.

**Pedro Cruz** is the Youth Arts Program Coordinator for IBA’s Youth Development Team.

Ginger Thompson is a senior reporter at ProPublica. A Pulitzer Prize winner, she previously spent 15 years at The New York Times, including time as a Washington correspondent and as an investigative reporter whose stories revealed Washington’s secret role in Mexico’s fight against drug traffickers.

**Marylinn Johnson** is a Professor of History at Boston College. Professor Johnson's work focuses on urban social relations in late nineteenth-and twentieth-century America. She teaches courses on social movements, urban and working-class history, violence, and the American West.

**Kyrah Malika Daniels** is Assistant Professor of Art History and African & African Diaspora Studies, with a courtesy appointment in Theology. Her research interests and course topics include Africana religions, sacred arts and material culture, race, religion and visual culture, and ritual healing traditions in the Black Atlantic.

**Safi Bahcall** is a second-generation physicist (the son of two astrophysicists) and a biotech entrepreneur. He received his BA summa cum laude from Harvard and his Ph.D.in physics from Stanford, where he worked with Lenny Susskind in particle physics (the science of the small) and the Nobel laureate Bob Laughlin in condensed matter physics (the science of the many).

**Carolyn Forché** is an American poet, teacher and activist born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950 . An articulate defender of her own aims as well as the larger goals of poetry, Forché is perhaps best-known for coining the term “poetry of witness.”