Jack White is a twelve-time Grammy-winning musician, producer, and actor. He is best known for his work in the bands The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, The Dead Weather, and as a solo artist. In 2009 he also founded his own record label, Third Man Records.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Ben Blackwell is the The White Stripes official historian. Also a co-founder, co-owner of Third Man Records, he's directly overseen the release of over 950 different titles and the pressing of over seven million pieces of vinyl.
Caroline Randall Williams is a multi-genre writer, educator, performance artist in Nashville Tennessee, where she is a Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University. Host of the Viola Davis produced series Hungry For Answers, she is also co-author of the NAACP Image Award-winning cookbook Soul Food Love. Her debut poetry collection, Lucy Negro, Redux was published by Third Man Books, and turned into a ballet by Nashville Ballet, with an original score by Grammy award winner Rhiannon Giddens. She performs her poetry as a member of the cast. The production made its television debut last year as part of PBS's Great Performances series. Named by Southern Living as "One of the 50 People changing the South," and ranked by The Root as one of the 100 most influential African Americans of 2020, the Cave Canem fellow has been published and featured in multiple journals, essay collections and news outlets, including The Atlantic, The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, CherryBombe, Garden and Gun, Essence, and the New York Times.
