Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh is an American investigative journalist and political writer.
Patrick Oliver Cockburn is a journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent for the Financial Times since 1979 and, from 1990, The Independent. He has also worked as a correspondent in Moscow and Washington and is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books.
Joe Sacco is a Maltese-American cartoonist and journalist. He is best known for his comics journalism, in particular in the books Palestine (1996) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009), on Israeli–Palestinian relations; and Safe Area Goražde (2000) and The Fixer (2003) on the Bosnian War. In 2020, Sacco released Paying the Land, published by Henry Holt and Company.
Farnaz Fassihi is an Iranian-American journalist who has worked for The New York Times since 2019. She is the United Nations bureau chief and also writes about Iranian news. Previously she was a senior writer for The Wall Street Journal for 17 years and a conflict reporter based in the Middle East.
Arthur Nersesian is an American novelist, playwright, and poet.
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a political writer and conservative activist who was the 2012 Republican nominee for U.S. Representative for the newly redrawn Maryland's 8th congressional district, facing the incumbent Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat. Timmerman lost to Van Hollen, 33% to 63%. In 2000, Timmerman was a candidate for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senator from Maryland. Timmerman is executive director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran, an organization that works to support democratic movements in Iran. He authored Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson. Timmerman has also written on the spread of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. He is currently an Expert at Wikistrat. He ran for Lieutenant Governor of Maryland on a ticket with businessman Charles Lollar in the 2014 Maryland gubernatorial election. The Lollar/Timmerman ticket finished third in the Republican primary.
Azadeh Moaveni is an Iranian-American writer, journalist, and academic. She directs the Gender and Conflict Program at the International Crisis Group, and lectures on journalism at New York University’s London campus. She has covered women's rights and war for over two decades, and is the author of four books, including the bestselling Lipstick Jihad and Guest House for Young Widows, which was shortlisted for numerous prizes. She contributes to The New York Times, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books.
Bruce Arnold Ackerman is an American constitutional law scholar. He is a Sterling Professor at Yale Law School. In 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers. Ackerman was also among the unranked bottom 40 in the 2020 Prospect list of the top 50 thinkers for the COVID-19 era.
Richard Engel is an American journalist and author who is the chief foreign correspondent for NBC News. He was assigned to that position on April 18, 2008 after serving as the network's Middle East correspondent and Beirut bureau chief. Before joining NBC in May 2003, Engel reported on the start of the 2003 war in Iraq for ABC News as a freelance journalist in Baghdad.
Joe Meno is an American novelist, writer of short fiction, playwright, and music journalist based in Chicago.
Reza Abdoh was an Iranian-born director and playwright known for large-scale, experimental theatrical productions, often staged in unusual spaces like warehouses and abandoned buildings.
Pepe Escobar is a Brazilian journalist and geopolitical analyst. His column "The Roving Eye" for Asia Times regularly discusses the multi-national "competition for dominance over the Middle East and Central Asia."
Salar Abdoh is an Iranian novelist and essayist. He is the author of the novels The Poet Game (2000), Opium (2004), Tehran At Twilight (2014), and the editor and translator of the anthology Tehran Noir (2014). He is also a director of the graduate program in Creative Writing at the City College of New York at the City University of New York.
James Greer is an American novelist, screenwriter, musician, and critic. As a screenwriter, he is known for writing the children's comedies Max Keeble's Big Move, Just My Luck and The Spy Next Door, as well as the 2018 thriller Unsane. He lives in Los Angeles.
Shira Nayman is a novelist and short story writer best known for her collection Awake in the Dark, published in 2006. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and Highland Park, New Jersey, with her husband, the psychologist and writer, Louis Sass.
Matt Gallagher is an American author, former U.S. Army captain and veteran of the Iraq War. Gallagher has written on a variety of subjects, mainly contemporary war fiction and non-fiction. He first became known for his war memoir Kaboom (2010), which tells of his and his scout platoon's experiences during the Iraq War. He works as a writing instructor at Words After War, a literary nonprofit devoted to bringing veterans and civilians together to study conflict literature.
Elliot Ackerman is an American author and former Marine Corps Special Operations Team Leader. He is the son of businessman Peter Ackerman and author Joanne Leedom-Ackerman and the brother of mathematician and wrestler Nate Ackerman.
Owen Matthews is a British writer, historian and journalist. His first book, Stalin's Children, was shortlisted for the 2008 Guardian First Book Award, the Orwell Prize for political writing, and France's Prix Médicis Etranger. His books have been translated into 28 languages. He is a former Moscow and Istanbul Bureau Chief for Newsweek.
Atia Abawi is an American author and television journalist. While working as a foreign correspondent, she was based in Kabul, Afghanistan, for almost five years. Her first book, the critically acclaimed The Secret Sky: A Novel of Forbidden Love in Afghanistan was published by Penguin Random House in September 2014. Abawi is known for her strong support for female empowerment in both her writing and reporting. She is fluent in Dari and is a graduate of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Defeating ISIS: Who They Are, How They Fight, What They Believe is a non-fiction book about counterterrorism against ISIS. It was written by Malcolm Nance, a former cryptology analyst, with a foreword by Richard Engel. Its thesis is that ISIS is not part of Islam, instead, it functions as a separate destructive extremist group. He emphasizes the fact that the majority of those who have been harmed by ISIS are themselves Muslim. The book traces the history of the movement back to the history of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and it also discusses ISIS's combat style and recruiting tactics. Nance offers a four-point plan to defeat ISIS, including airpower and special forces, Internet tactics, strengthening the Syrian military, and engaging Arab world states.
