Stephen Marc is a documentary/street photographer and digital montage artist, who was raised on the South Side of Chicago. He is Professor of Art at Arizona State University, where he began teaching in 1998, after twenty years on the faculty of the Department of Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Marc has received grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, and his awards include the Society for Photographic Education’s Insight Award. In 2021, Marc was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography. Marc has published three photography books: Passage on the Underground Railroad (University Press of Mississippi, 2009); The Black Trans-Atlantic Experience: Street Life and Culture in Ghana, Jamaica, England, and the United States (Columbia College Chicago, 1992); and Urban Notions (Ataraxia Press, 1983). Since 2008, Passage on the Underground Railroad has been listed as an Interpretative Program of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, a division of the National Park Service.
Carla D. Hayden is the 14th Librarian of Congress, the first woman and first African American to hold the post since 1802. From 1993 until 2016, she was the CEO of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore and served as President of the American Library Association from 2003 to 2004. In 1995, Dr. Hayden was honored with the National Librarian of the Year Award by Library Journal, the first African American to receive this prestigious honor, and in 2020 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. She received her B.S. in political science and African history from Roosevelt University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in library science from the University of Chicago. Her books include A Frontier of Librarianship: Services for Children in Museums (Chicago, 1987) and, as editor, Venture into Cultures: A Resource Book of Multicultural Materials and Programs (American Library Association, 1992).