Writer, professor, and photographer, Ocean Vuong is the author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, winner of the American Book Award, The Mark Twain Award, and The New England Book Award. The novel debuted for six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and has since sold more than a million copies in 40 languages. A nominee for the National Book Award and a recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, he is also the author of the poetry collections Time is a Mother, a finalist for the Griffin prize, and Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award. 

Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a B.A. in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his M.F.A. in Poetry from NYU.

He currently splits his time between Northampton, Massachusetts and New York City, where he serves as a Professor in Modern Poetry and Poetics in the M.F.A. Program at NYU.

Ronan Harrington is an international keynote speaker on resilience and leadership, working with impact driven organizations to create healthy, high performance cultures. His background is in politics and activism. Ronan coordinated the political strategy for Extinction Rebellion, was a futurist for the British Foreign Office, and is the Founder of Alter Ego, a network of system change leaders advancing spirituality to cultivate deep civilizational change. 

He holds a Masters in Public Policy from Balliol College and the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University.

Uvinie Lubecki is the founder and CEO of Leading Through Connection, where she helps leaders integrate compassion and mindfulness into organizational life. After a decade in corporate leadership at Deloitte, Aetna, and McKesson, she joined Dalai Lama Fellows, where she translated secular values — such as compassion — and meditation practices into a leadership curriculum.

She has worked with teams at Google, Volvo, Johnson & Johnson, and more, and is a certified teacher of Cultivating Emotional Balance, an emotional intelligence training developed in collaboration with the Dalai Lama. Uvinie holds a B.A. in Neurobiology and Behavior from Cornell University and a Master of Public Health from Harvard University. Her work has been featured in Forbes and GQ Magazine.