Ruth Ades - Ms. Ades is the founder and Executive Director of Learning is Fundamental, an independent learning center for children and adults and a producer of educational media programs for private and nonprofit sectors since 1988.   For ten years, Ms. Ades worked as a teacher for New York City's Board of Education, where she also mentored new teachers.

Denise Bell - Ms. Bell is Behind the Book's Director of Development.   Previously, she worked at PEN American Center as the coordinator of Readers & Writers, a national reading promotion program serving more than 3,000 low-income children and adults.   Ms. Bell is also an activist with Amnesty International, where she serves as a Sudan Country Specialist.

Beatriz Franco - Ms. Franco is Vice President of JPMorgan Securities Inc.   Prior to JPMorgan, she worked as a lawyer at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York,   Wilson Sonsini in California, and Pinheiro Neto in Brazil.   She received an LLM (Masters in Law) from New York University, an MBA from Instituto Brasileiro de Mercado de Capitais, and a Bachelor's degree from PUC - Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Brazil.

Wenhsin Lee - Ms. Lee is a Manager of Channel Strategy and Development at American Express.     Prior to American Express, she worked in credit research in the Health Care group at Standard & Poor's and investment banking at Deutsche Bank.   She received an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and a BA in Public Policy from Stanford University.

David E. McCraw - Mr. McCraw is Vice President and Assistant General Counsel of The New York Times Company, which he joined in May 2002.   From 2006, he had been Senior Counsel there.   His principal areas of responsibilities are litigation, libel, and reporter access issues.   Mr. McCraw previously was Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of the New York Daily News .   Prior to that, he was a litigation associate at Clifford Chance Rogers & Wells and a clerk to Judge Richard Simons of the New York State Court of Appeals.   Before becoming a lawyer, he worked as journalist and was a professor of journalism at Marist College.

Muffie Meyer - A co-founder of Middlemarch Films, Ms. Meyer has produced and directed more than 100 films, including Benjamin Franklin , which won the 2003 Emmy Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Special.   She has produced Liberty! , a major series on PBS, and Behind the Scenes , a ten-part PBS series on the arts for eight- to twelve-year-old children.

Aliya J. Newkirk – Partner of a Manhattan private-practice law firm specializing in business transactions and commercial litigation, Ms. Newkirk also serves as an Adjunct Professor of Logic and Argumentation at the College of New Rochelle School of New Resources.  The recipient of a BA degree in Political Science and Art History from Rutgers College, Ms. Newkirk subsequently earned her JD degree from Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

Brette Popper - Ms. Popper has worked in the media and magazine business for over 25 years.   Currently, she consults for both publishing companies and companies that service the industry, and is developing a new magazine brand and concept. Prior to consulting, she was President and Chief Operating Officer of Individual Investor Group, President of Quest Magazine , and President and Publisher of USA Weekend , a division of Gannett.

Francine Prose - Ms. Prose is the author of the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer , as well as fourteen books of fiction, including A Changed Man , winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel , a finalist for the National Book Award.   A film of her novel, Household Saints (1981), was released in 1993.   Her stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in publications such as The New York Times , The New Yorker , The Wall Street Journal , Die Zeit , and Harper's , where she is a contributing editor.   She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, and was a Director's Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.   In addition, she has taught literature and writing for more than 20 years at major universities.

Jo Umans, Executive Director - Ms. Umans founded Behind the Book in April 2003 with a vision: To create opportunity for lifelong success for youth through creative reading experiences.   Using a school-based visiting-author program model, she saw she could get kids excited about reading as a means to promote literacy.   From 2000-2002, Ms. Umans had volunteered as director of a school's visiting-author program, Everybody Reads, and from that experience, she observed that a series of classroom-based author visits linking the reading of a book to meeting the author excited students' interest in reading.   Determined to bring the transformative experience of literature to disadvantaged students in New York City public schools, she left her career of more than 25 years in television production to found Behind the Book.   In addition, Ms. Umans has held numerous leadership positions within her son's school's parent board association, volunteered for nonprofits working on HIV/AIDS, and worked part-time as a school librarian.