Naomi B. Levine was a celebrated attorney, activist, and fundraiser. She graduated from Columbia Law School at a time when few women were admitted and went on to pen amici briefs that were essential to the civil rights cases Sweatt v. Painter (1950) and Brown v. The Board of Education Topeka (1954). She was the first female director of the American Jewish Congress and played an active role in the Civil Rights movement from that position. She later became an Executive Vice President of New York University, where she orchestrated the first billion-dollar capital campaign. She passed away in Florida in 2021 at the age of 97. She was a life-long New Yorker.

Sofia Ergas Groopman is a writer and editor from New York City. A graduate of Harvard College, she earned her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she received the Hopwood Award for Fiction, the Hopwood Award for Nonfiction, and the Chamberlain Award for Creative Writing. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vice, The Paris Review Daily, Joyland, and The Gettysburg Review. Before turning to writing, she worked in trade publishing for five years, most recently as an Associate Editor at Harper/HarperCollins. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, their son, and their sassy dachshund.