William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke University and the founding director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap.

 A. Kirsten Mullen is a folklorist and the founder of Artefactual, an arts-consulting practice, and Carolina Circuit Writers, a literary consortium that brings expressive writers of color to the Carolinas. She was a member of the Freelon Adjaye Bond concept development team that was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s commission to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Under the auspices of the North Carolina Arts Council she worked to expand the Coastal Folklife Survey. As a faculty member with the Community Folklife Documentation Institute, she trained students to research and record the state’s African American music heritage. Kirsten was a consultant on the North Carolina Museum of History’s “North Carolina Legends” and “Civil Rights” exhibition projects. Her writing in museum catalogs, journals, and in commercial media includes “Black Culture and History Matter” (The American Prospect), which examines the politics of funding black cultural institutions, “American Needs a Better Reparations Plan” (Bloomberg News), and “The Queen Mother,” a look at the life and legacy of black nationalist and reparations advocate Audley Moore (Vanity Fair magazine). She and William A. Darity, Jr. are the authors of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-first Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

Lucas Hubbard is an associate in research at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity, where he writes articles and press releases to help illuminate and broadcast the Cook Center’s research, in addition to helping edit reports produced by the Center. His first book, co-edited with and featuring many contributions from Cook Center colleagues, was The Pandemic Divide: How COVID Increased Inequality in America (Duke University Press, October 2022).

A writer, editor, and researcher, Lucas has published work in Defector, Microfiction Monday Magazine, INDY Week, Paste, and other outlets, and his academic writing has been published in Springer Reference and the Duke Journal of Economics. His forthcoming book, co-edited with William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, is The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice (University of California Press, May 2023).