Keith O’Brien is the New York Times bestselling author of Heartland, Charlie Hustle, Paradise Falls, Fly Girls, and Outside Shot. He has won the 2025 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld award for biography; has been a finalist for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports writing; and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, TheAtlantic, Rolling Stone, NPR, and This American Life. A native of Ohio, he lives in New Hampshire.

*photo by Liz Keenum

Bronson Arroyo is a former 16-year, major league baseball player -- with a tenure including his 2004 run with the Boston Red Sox World Series championship. He finished his career in Cincinnati by being inducted into the Reds Hall Of Fame in 2023. Post career, Bronson has created and released three albums filled with stories about - what some might describe as - life lessons, and raw confessions. 

*photo by Nikki Forte

Charles P. Pierce is a writer at large for Esquire, where he has been the lead voice of the Politics Blog since 2011 — one of the longest-running and most-read political columns in American digital media. A Worcester, Massachusetts native and Marquette University journalism graduate, Pierce has been a working journalist for nearly five decades, with bylines in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic, the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and many others. He is the author of four books, including Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free and Moving the Chains: Tom Brady and the Pursuit of Everything. Pierce is a 1996 National Magazine Award finalist, winner of the National Headliners Award, and the winner of a Sigma Delta Chi National Award. Pierce is also a longtime regular on NPR's Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me! and Only a Game. He lives outside Boston.

*photo by The Cosmos

Rising from the ashes of 90's Boston pop phenoms The Barnies, Gompson delivers songs that are by turns lush, angular, hopeful and bleak. Principal songwriter Avram Gleitsman collaborated with Blue Man Group on their album "The Complex," and has contributed music to Everett Bradley's "Holidelic." Bassist Pete Sutton is a veteran of numerous Somerville-based bands, and along with guitarist Ken Lafler and drummer Nathan Logus, is a founding member of Hillbilly Holiday.  In February of 2026, Gompson released "Dwell On," a six-song EP.

*photo by Katrin Schnippering