Scott Woods is the author or editor of two poetry collections (Urban Contemporary History Month, 2016, and We Over Here Now, 2013) and a collection of essays on Prince (Prince and Little Weird Black Boy Gods, 2017). He is the founder of Streetlight Guild, an award-winning, performing arts nonprofit. He has been featured multiple times in national press, including multiple appearances on National Public Radio. He was the president of Poetry Slam, Inc., is the co-founder of the Writers’ Block Poetry Night, and co-hosts the Race Against The Machine and The Purple Canon podcasts. In April of 2006, he became the first poet to ever complete a 24-hour solo poetry reading, a feat he bested seven more times without repeating a single poem.

Tonya Pendleton is a cultural critic, entertainment industry veteran writer, editor, broadcaster, and multimedia journalist with a two-decade history in news, sports, lifestyle, and entertainment reporting. In her current position as “Things To Do” curator for WHYY, she crafts content for a local and global audience. The Philadelphia resident was born and raised in New York City and is a graduate of The New School and host of “Reality Check on WURD Radio”.

Zachary Hoskins is the author of Dance / Music / Sex / Romance, a song-by-song blog examining the music of Prince in chronological order. His essay, “Rude Boy: Prince as Black New Waver,” was published in a special issue of Spectrum, A Journal on Black Men (2020), and his presentation from the Prince #1plus1plus1is3 virtual symposium (2021), “I Wish We All Were Nude: Controversy ‘Shower Poster’ as Aesthetic Linchpin and Artifact,” was published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies. He has also presented and appeared on roundtables at other @polishedsolid symposia, #TripleThreat40 (2023), #SexyMF30 (2022), and #DM40GB30 (2020), as well as the University of Minnesota’s Prince from Minneapolis symposium (2018). He holds an M.A. in Media Arts from the University of Arizona and B.A.’s in Film & Video Studies and Creative Writing & Literature from the University of Michigan.

Zaheer Ali is a historian and scholar of 20th century United States and African-American history. He is currently the inaugural executive director of the Lawrenceville School’s Hutchins Institute for Social Justice.  As an adjunct lecturer at New York University, he taught a Spring 2017 course titled, “Prince: Sign of the Times,” an examination of Prince’s life and legacy in American history and culture. He’s presented his scholarship on Prince at conferences at Yale, Salford University in Manchester, England, and the University of Minnesota.