Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. Tings Chak is the art director and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and lead author of the study “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China.” She is also a member of Dongsheng, an international collective of researchers interested in Chinese politics and society.

Chris Spannos has had two decades experience in media and also as a social justice activist and organizer. From 1998-2006 he participated in the Redeye collective, heard on Vancouver Co-op radio. In September 2006 he joined Z as full-time staff focusing on ZNet and ZCom web operations. Other media work during that period included helping out with Z Video productions, being the occasional light and sound tech for local theater works in Woods Hole, MA, and also, with others, hosting weekly local public screenings and discussion of political documentaries. Chris has worked as a multi-diagnosis social service worker, embroidery machine operator, cook, sailor, and bookstore clerk. He edited the volume Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century (AK Press, 2008). He has contributed chapters to books such as The Accumulation of Freedom (AK Press, 2012) and The End of the World as We Know It (AK Press, 2014), both edited by Deric Shannon. Chris founded People's Communication Inc., the parent organization for the websites The New Significance and NYT eXaminer (no longer active). He developed the latest incarnation of ZNet's web operations. From April 2014 to April 2015 Chris was Web Editor for teleSUR English in Quito, Ecuador, and host of teleSUR's online video show Imaginary Lines. Since June 2015 Chris has lived in Oxford, England, where he works as Digital Editor for New Internationalist.