Jake Halpern, freelance writer, and Michael Sloan, freelance cartoonist, The New York Times

Jake Halpern is an author, journalist, and radio producer. His first book, Braving Home (2003), was a main selection for the Book of the Month Club by Bill Bryson. Jake’s most recent nonfiction book, Bad Paper (2014), was excerpted as a cover story for the New York Times Magazine. It was chosen as an Amazon "Book of the Year" and was a New York Times bestseller. As a journalist, Jake has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. In the realm of radio, Jake is a contributor to NPR's All Things Considered and This American Life. Jake's hour-long radio story, "Switched at Birth," is on This American Life's "short list" as one of its top eight shows of all time. Last, but not least, Jake is a fellow of Morse College at Yale University, where he teaches a class on journalism. He recently returned from India where he was visiting as a Fulbright Scholar.

Michael Sloan is a widely published illustrator, and a comic and graphic novel artist. His illustrations have appeared in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, and have been published in The New York Times Op-Ed Letters to the Editor column over 100 times. His artwork has been awarded three silver medals from the Society of Illustrators in NYC. Michael has shown his paintings of Hong Kong's traditional street markets in both solo and group exhibits in the USA and Hong Kong, and has lectured about his artwork at institutions such as The University of Connecticut, The Rhode Island School of Design, Hong Kong University, The Fashion Institute of Technology, and The Yale-China Association. He is the author of the Zen of Nimbus comic and related works.