WSuroosh Alvi is a Pakistani-Canadian journalist and filmmaker. He is the co-founder of Vice Media, a youth media brand operating in more than 50 countries. Alvi is a travelled journalist and an executive producer of film, covering global youth culture, news, and music. He has hosted and produced award-winning documentaries investigating controversial issues, movements, and subcultures, including conflict minerals in the Congo, the Iraq War, and the rise of the Pakistani Taliban and global terrorism.
WMaxim Albertovich Amelin is a Russian poet, critic, essayist, editor, and translator. He was born in Kursk, Russia, where he graduated from the Kursk Commercial College and did his military service in the Soviet Army. He studied in the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow from 1991 to 1994, where he worked with Olesya Nikolayeva. He was commercial director and director of the St. Petersburg publishing house Symposium from 1995 to 2007 and has been the Editor-in-Chief of the Moscow publishing house OGI since 2008. He is married to the poet Anna Zolotaryova and lives in Moscow.
WRoxane Gay is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), as well as the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017).
WNamita Gokhale is an Indian writer, publisher and festival director, and the author of twenty books including ten works of fiction. Her recent novel Jaipur Journals was set against the backdrop of the vibrant Jaipur Literature Festival, of which Gokhale is a founder-director. Her forthcoming books include Betrayed by Hope: A Play on the Life of Michael Madhusudan Dutt and a new novel The Blind Matriarch.
WIsmene Shakuntal Debi Krishnadath is a Surinamese writer.
WPeter Kurze is a German publisher and author. He became known through his book series on the history of the automobile.
WPhilip Pavia (1911-2005), the pioneering first-generation son of an Italian stone carver, "turned rocks into art." The Times of London called Pavia "arguably more of an original than some of his better-known contemporaries." He was rare among his peers for sculpting abstract and figurative art, and he took full advantage of a lengthy 74-year career to develop his reach. Although he started his career as a draftsman and watercolorist, Pavia ultimately made his mark with a body of work that spanned all-abstract bronzes, black-and-white abstractions in Carrara marble and, just prior to his death in 2005, at aged 94, a dozen monumental terracotta heads.
WJose Manuel "Babe" del Gallego Romualdez is a Filipino journalist, publisher and business executive who is the current Ambassador of the Philippines to the United States. He previously served as Special Envoy of President Rodrigo Duterte to the United States.
WShane Smith is a Canadian journalist and media executive. He is Executive Chairman of the international media company Vice Media—originally joining a year after its founding—operating an international network of digital channels, a television production studio, a record label, an in-house creative services agency, a book-publishing house, and a feature film division. Smith served as CEO of Vice from its founding until March 2018. Former A+E Networks CEO Nancy Dubuc was named CEO 13 March 2018. In his role as Executive Chairman, "Smith will now be focused on creating content and strategic deals and partnerships to help grow the company."
WRudolf Stämpfli is a Swiss entrepreneur of the graphic arts industry and publisher. Together with his brother Peter Stämpfli since 1988, he has run the sixth generation of the family business Stämpfli AG in Bern.