People

Burton L. Visotzky serves as the Nathan and Janet Appleman Professor of Midrash and Interreligious Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he joined the faculty upon his ordination as rabbi in 1977. He has also served as a dean of The Graduate School, as the founding rabbi of the egalitarian worship service of the Seminary Synagogue, and as the director of the Louis Finkelstein Institute for Religious and Social Studies at JTS. Dr. Visotzky has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and a life member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, as well as a visiting faculty member at, among others, Union Theological Seminary, Princeton University, and the Russian State University of the Humanities in Moscow. Rabbi Visotzky served as the Master Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome during the spring of 2007.

In 1966 on the Gemini 12 orbital mission, Buzz performed the world’s first successful spacewalk. He founded Starcraft Boosters, Inc., a rocket design company, and the ShareSpace Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to advancing space education, exploration and affordable space flight experiences for all. Buzz also promotes his Rocket Hero brand launched in 2008 through his newest entity, StarBuzz LLC. Dr. Aldrin is author of his autobiography,* Magnificent Desolation*,*The Return and Encounter with Tiber, Men from Earth, Return to Earth* and children’s books: *Reaching for the Moon* and *Look to the Stars* both New York Times bestsellers.

**Byron Auguste** is CEO of Opportunity@Work, a social enterprise that aims to re-wire the U.S. labor market by creating pathways for overlooked and underrepresented job seekers in the innovation economy.  Before co-founding Opportunity@Work, Byron served as Deputy Director of the National Economic Council in the Obama administration. His portfolio included job creation, labor markets, research and development, innovation, capital investment, infrastructure, transportation, and goods movement. As a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, he led McKinsey's High Tech Services sector from 2002 to 2006, and its global Social Sector from 2007 to 2012. Over his 20 years at McKinsey, Byron worked primarily in technology and communications, information and media, services-based businesses, education, economic development and innovation. Byron has served as board chairman of Hope Street Group, and on the boards of trustees of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Yale University.

Byron Bland is associate director of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation. An ordained Presbyterian minister and former Stanford campus chaplain, he has served as an ombudsman and conflict resolution consultant for various community and church groups. His more recent work concerns the politics of reconciliation in divided societies. After serving the Stanford campus for 18 years as a chaplain, Bland left that post in 1994 to concentrate on peacemaking efforts in Northern Ireland. He is currently involved in a research project exploring the social and political dynamics of reconciliation with Community Dialogue, a grassroots dialogue organization in Northern Ireland. He is also working with community groups and civil leaders in Israel and the West Bank. Before coming to Stanford University in 1976, Bland was the pastor of a multiracial, urban church in San Francisco. While at Stanford, he was appointed an associate fellow at the Program for Interdisciplinary Studies during 1993‐1994. He is a founding member of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion. For the past 20 years, he has taught an interdisciplinary course on peace at Stanford. He has also served as a lecturer in the Stanford Law School, the School of Education, and the International Relations program. He received an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech, an MA in social ethics and a master of divinity degree from the San Francisco Theological Seminary.

Byron Hurt is an award winning documentary filmmaker, a published writer, and an anti sexism activist. His most recent documentary, Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. It was later broadcast nationally on the Emmy award winning PBS series Independent Lens, drawing an audience of more than 1.3 million viewers. As an activist, Byron has served as a long-time gender violence prevention educator. The former Northeastern University football quarterback was also a founding member of the Mentors in Violence Prevention program, the leading college based rape and domestic violence prevention initiative for college and professional athletics. Hurt is also the former Associate Director of the first gender violence prevention program in the US Marine Corps.

Best known for Synecdoche (1991), a grid of hundreds of monochrome “self-portraits”—the colors corresponding to their sitters’ skin tone—Byron Kim explored identity politics with his early abstract paintings. More recent works have included untitled paintings of cloudy night skies that Kim paints from memory, their subtle variations of purple and gray only visible with close inspection. Speaking of the figurative aspect of works that largely appear abstract, Kim has said, “I love a good abstract painting, but I’m often not interested in what people talk about when they talk about abstraction, so I prefer to apply my own content.” Image: [National Gallery of Art](https://www.nga.gov/audio-video/audio/conversations-with-artists-kim.html)

US Senator Byron Dorgan was raised in the southwestern North Dakota town of Regent, where his family worked in the farm equipment and petroleum business and raised cattle and horses. At age 26, he became North Dakota's youngest ever constitutional officer when he was appointed State Tax Commissioner. First elected to Congress in 1980, Dorgan has devoted his career to fighting for the interests of rural America. Senator Dorgan served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992. He is a senior member of the Appropriations, Commerce and Energy committees. He also serves as Chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and the Democratic Policy Committee. As Chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, he has worked to fund development of renewable energy sources like wind, solar and biofuels, as well as clean coal research that will help us find better ways to use the resource that fulfill 50 percent of our nation's energy needs.

Byron Pitts is a multiple Emmy award winning reporter. As chief national correspondent for the *CBS Evening News With Katie Couric*, Pitts was an embedded reporter covering the Iraq war and was recognized for his work under fire. Pitts was also CBS' lead correspondent at Ground Zero immediately following the September 11th attacks. A news veteran with more than 20 years of experience, other major stories he covered include the war in Afghanistan, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the military buildup in Kuwait and the refugee crisis in Kosovo. Pitts realized a life-long goal when he was named a contributing correspondent to CBS' *60 Minutes* in 2009.

Born in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas in 1949, C.D. Wright has developed a style of poetry all her own—both experimental and Southern, implicit in its lyrical utterance and yet grounded in an inherent sense of the unutterable. As Joel Brouwer recently wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "Wright belongs to a school of exactly one." Her poem "Lake Echo, Dear" showcases the explorative and image-based character of her work. She has published numerous books of poetry, including Steal Away: New and Selected Poems (2002); One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2003), with photographer Deborah Luster; and, most recently, Rising Hovering Falling (2008). "Poetry is a necessity of life," Wright has said. "It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so." Her various awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Robert Creeley Award. She and her husband, the poet Forrest Gander, edit Lost Roads Publishers. Wright teaches at Brown University near Providence, Rhode Island.

**C.S.E. Cooney** is the author of the World Fantasy Award-winning _Bone Swans: Stories_. She is also an audiobook narrator and the singer/songwriter Brimstone Rhine. Her work includes Tor.com novella Desdemona and the Deep, three albums: Alecto! Alecto!, The Headless Bride, and Corbeau Blanc, Corbeau Noir, and a poetry collection: How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes, which features her Rhysling Award-winning “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” Her short fiction can be found in Ellen Datlow’s Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the Sword and Sonnet anthology, Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, and elsewhere.