Signatories

Jill Lepore - New Yorker Staff Writer, David
Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American
History at Harvard, author of the bestselling
history of America These Truths 

Howard Rodman - Author, screenwriter, USC
Professor, former Writers Guild of America
West president

Philip J. Deloria - Harvard Professor, Chair,
Committee on Degrees in History and
Literature, son of pioneering Native American
scholar-activist Vine Deloria Jr.

Steve Ross - Dean's Professor of History at USC,
author of Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled
Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America

George Saunders - MacArthur-winning novelist,
short-story writer, widely beloved professor,
and mentor

Patti Smith - Songwriter, poet, painter, National
Book Award-winning author of Just Kids

Azar Nafisi - Bestselling author of Reading Lolita
in Tehran

Maxine Hong Kingston - Author of China Men,
The Woman Warrior

Lynne Thompson - Award-winning Poet
Laureate of Los Angeles

Amy Tan - Author of The Joy Luck Club

Susan Orlean - Author of Adaptation and The
Library Book

Martin Luther King III - Chairman of the Drum
Major Institute, Human Rights Advocate and
Author of My Daddy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

June Hopkins - Granddaughter of Harry Hopkins,
legendary New Deal administrator and FDR's
closest advisor

Annie Proulx - Prizewinning author of The
Shipping News and other novels and short
stories, including "Brokeback Mountain"

Joy Harjo (Muscogee (Creek) Nation) - 23rd
Poet Laureate of the United States

Douglas Brinkley - Bestselling
American historian, Katherine Tsanoff Brown
Chair in Humanities at Rice University, author of
books on Hunter S. Thompson, Jack
Kerouac, and Ronald Reagan

John Sayles - MacArthur-winning novelist
and twice-Oscar nominated filmmaker (Return
of the Secaucus 7, Eight Men Out, Matewan,
Piranha, Alligator, The Howling)

Billy Ray - Writer-director (Captain Phillips, The
Comey Rule, Breach, The Hunger Games,
Shattered Glass), Democratic activist,
fundraiser, speech ghostwriter

Rick West - Founding Director of the
Smithsonian National Museum of the American
Indian, former CEO of the Autry Museum of the
American West

James Roosevelt - Grandson of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt

Arndrea Waters King - President of the Drum
Major Institute and Champion of Women's
Rights

Maryemma Graham - Author of The House
Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret
Walker, editor of The Cambridge History of
African American Literature

Peggy A. Bulger - Former Director of the
American Folklife Center at the Library of
Congress

Jonathan Lethem - MacArthur-winning novelist
(The Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn)

William Ames - The Emerson Collective

Richard Powers - National Book Award, Pulitzer,
and MacArthur winning novelist of The
Overstory and many others

Ruth Dickey - Executive Director of the National
Book Foundation

Dagoberto Gilb - PEN/Hemingway Award-
winning author of The Magic of Blood

Natasha Trethewey - Former Poet Laureate of
the United States