A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Folk Heritage Fellow, Shaka Zulu is a renowned designer of New Orleans’ Black Masking suits which is a craft rooted in the city’s Indigenous and African heritage.

Zulu has showcased his work globally, including at San Francisco’s de Young Museum and Berlin's Sounds of the City. His "Shango" suit is currently exhibited at the Netherlands' Africa Museum.

Melissa M. Martin grew up on the Louisiana coast and has lived in New Orleans for over 25 years. In 2014, she opened Mosquito Supper Club, a Cajun restaurant created to celebrate the bounty of the shrimpers, oystermen, crabbers, fin and crawfish fishermen, and farmers that define bayou cuisine.

Her first book, Mosquito Supper Club: Cajun Recipes from a Disappearing Bayou, was named a Best New Cookbook by Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, NPR, The Splendid Table, Eater, Epicurious, and more. It was awarded Cookbook of the Year and Best American Cookbook by the IACP and James Beard foundation. She has been nominated twice as Best Chef South by the Beard foundation.

She writes about food, life and love, not always in that order.

Brett Anderson joined The New York Times as a food correspondent in 2019. He was previously restaurant critic and features writer at The Times-Picayune, in New Orleans, from 2000 to 2019. He has won three James Beard awards, including the Jonathan Gold Local Voice Award, and was named Eater's Reporter of the Year in 2017 for his reporting on sexual harassment in the restaurant industry.

He was on the Times-Picayune staff awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2006, for coverage of Hurricane Katrina; a co-recipient of the Scripps Howard Edward J Meeman Award for environmental reporting, for coverage of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill; and a member of the 2013 Neiman Fellowship class at Harvard University. His stories have appeared in eight editions of Best Food Writing.

Rien Fertel is a New Orleans-based writer and university professor. He is the author of four books that meld history and journalism, including The One True Barbecue and a 33 1/3 series entry on the Drive-By Truckers' Southern Rock Opera. His most recent book, Brown Pelican, was a finalist for the Rachel Carson Environmental Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists. He co-wrote the Wildsam Field Guide to The South, and has written for a variety of publications, including Time Magazine, Audubon, The Wall Street Journal, Oxford American, and Garden & Gun.

Geographer and associate dean for research at Tulane School of Architecture, Richard Campanella has been lauded for his unparalleled knowledge of the city. He is the author of fourteen critically acclaimed books and over 250 articles on New Orleans-area history, culture, geography and architecture.

He is the only two-time winner of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities book award, and has won the Louisiana Literary Award, the Williams Prize for Louisiana history, and the Tulane Professor of the Year Award. In 2019, the State of Louisiana conferred upon him the Louisiana Writer Award.

Lavinia Spalding is the six-time series editor of The Best Women’s Travel Writing, and author of Writing Away and the 2022 and 2023 editions of Frommer’s EasyGuide to New Orleans. She has published two Modern Love essays in the New York Times, and her work has appeared in AFAR, Tin House, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian, and many other publications.

She received a gold SATW Lowell Thomas Travel Writing Award, and is co-host and co-creator of the podcast “There She Goes.”