Naomi R Williams is associate professor of labor studies at Rutgers University and a historian of working people in the United States. They received their PhD from the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2014. Naomi’s research examines the ways working people impact local and national political economies, and the ways workers participate in collaborative social justice movements. Naomi is committed to economic justice to help make the world a better place. Research, teaching and service all center on building inclusive communities through centering the voices of working people in their struggles for equity and a just economy and building and sustaining institutions to meet those goals. Their book, A Blueprint for Worker Solidarity: Class Politics and Community in Wisconsin, was published in 2025 in the Working Class in American History series of the University of Illinois Press.
Heather Ann Thompson is a native Detroiter and historian on faculty of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the departments of Afro-American and African Studies, History, and the Residential College. Her book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History, has been profiled on television and radio programs across the country. Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage, her latest work, documents the infamous 1984 New York subway shooting that would unveil simmering racial resentments that led to a new era of violence.