H. Samy Alim is Professor of Education and, by courtesy, Anthropology and Linguistics at Stanford University, where he directs the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language (CREAL), the Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA), and African & African American Studies (AAAS). His most recent book, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. (2012, with Geneva Smitherman), addresses language and racial politics through an examination of President Barack Obama's language use-and America's response to it. Other books include Street Conscious Rap (1999), You Know My Steez (2004), Roc the Mic Right (2006), Tha Global Cipha (2006), Talkin Black Talk (2007), and Global Linguistic Flows (2009). His forthcoming volume, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies, will appear in 2017 (with Django Paris, Teachers College Press).

John R. Rickford is the J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor of Linguistics and the Humanities at Stanford University and the current President of the Linguistic Society of America. His most recent books include Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English (co-authored, 2000, winner of an American Book Award), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (co-edited, 2001), Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-First Century (co-edited, 2004), Language, Culture and Caribbean Identity (co-edited, 2012) and African American, Creole and Other Vernacular Englishes: A Bibliographic Resource (co-authored, 2012).

Arnetha F. Ball is a Professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education and former President of the American Educational Research Association. She is author of Multicultural Strategies for Education and Social Change: Carriers of the Torch in the U.S. and South Africa (2006) and co-editor of several volumes including Bahktinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning (2004), African American Literacies Unleashed: Vernacular English and Composition Classroom (2005), the NSSE volume With More Deliberate Speed (2006) and Studying Diversity in Teacher Education (2011).