Robert Thurman, author of books and articles about Tibet, Buddhism, art, politics and culture, including Essential Tibetan Buddhism, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet.

Thurman has become one of America’s leading voices of sanity and peace in the new millennium. TIME magazine, which chose him as one of its 25 most influential Americans in 1997, described him as a “larger than life scholar-activist destined to convey the precious teachings of Siddartha, from Asia to America.”

Kyle Maynard personifies the phrase “no excuses.” Born with a congenital defect that robbed him of his arms below the elbow and his legs below the knee, it hasn’t stopped him from becoming a winning high school wrestler, weightlifter, and gifted student.

With little more than just his shoulders he can type fifty words per minute, eat and write without any adaptations. In this moving and eloquent presentation, full of examples from his life, Maynard outlines how his “No Excuses” philosophy can apply to the lives of all people.

Bakari Kitwana is the author of several books on hip-hop culture, including his latest, The Hip-Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture.

Widely acknowledged as an expert on hip-hop politics by The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, CNN, The O’Reilly Factor, and other leading news outlets, his writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Savoy, The Village Voice, Black Book, and other publications.

Laurie Garrett is one of America’s premier authorities on healthcare and disease prevention, and a powerful advocate for a more forceful response to threats to human health.

She is the author of the best-selling books The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, both of which have received wide-spread critical and popular acclaim.

She is the only person ever to have been awarded all three of the Big “Ps” of journalism: The Peabody, The Polk (twice), and The Pulitzer.