Allen Weinstein was a college professor, historian, author, and international envoy. From 1985 to 2003, he served as president of The Center for Democracy, a nonprofit foundation he created in 1985 to promote and strengthen the democratic process, based in Washington, DC. His international public service activities include chairing the Center’s election observation delegations in El Salvador (1991), Nicaragua (1989-90, 1996), Panama (1988-89), the Philippines (1985-86), and Russia (1991, 1996, 2000).

Professor Weinstein’s international awards included the United Nations Peace Medal (1986) and The Council of Europe’s Silver Medal (twice, in 1990 and 1996), presented by its Parliamentary Assembly. His other awards and fellowships included two Senior Fulbright Lectureships, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, the Commonwealth Fund Lectureship at the University of London, and a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellowship.

He was University Professor and professor of history at Boston University from 1985 to 1989, University Professor at Georgetown University from 1981 to 1984, and from 1981 to 1983, executive editor of The Washington Quarterly at Georgetown’s Center for Strategic and International Studies. He served as a member of The Washington Post editorial staff in 1981. From 1966 to 1981 he was professor of history at Smith College and chairman of its American studies program. In 1984 he served as president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. From 1982 to 1984 he directed the research study that led to creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and was acting president of the endowment. He also held visiting professorships at Brown, Columbia, and George Washington universities.

Weinstein’s books include The Story of America; The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era; Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, which received several citations including an American Book Award nomination; Freedom and Crisis: An American History; Between the Wars: American Foreign Policy from Versailles to Pearl Harbor; Prelude to Populism; and among edited collections, Conflict in America; American Negro Slavery; American Themes: Essays in Historiography; and Truman and the American Commitment to Israel.

Weinstein’s articles and essays have appeared in numerous popular and scholarly publications as well as mainstream newspapers and magazines. His television credits include that of historical consultant on two History Channel programs on Soviet espionage (1998-99) and the 1988-89 PBS series Face-to-Face: Conversations on the U.S.-Soviet Summitry (co-host, editor and writer). He was a frequent commentator on CNN, C-SPAN, and other networks. Source – United States Archive

Brendan Kennelly (b. 1936 – d.2021) was the prolific author of over twenty books of poetry as well as plays, novels and criticism. Born in Ballylongford in Co. Kerry, Kennelly was Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College, Dublin for thirty years. In his native country Kennelly is public property, both popular and controversial, not least for his collections Cromwell and The Book of Judas both of which generated many column inches on publication. Counting the rock band U2 amongst his friends and appearing in car adverts on Irish TV, Kennelly straddles both the public and private spheres in his unofficial role of “Ireland’s poetry confessor” (The Independent).

Lídia Jorge was born in Boliqueime, southern Portugal, in 1946. She studied French Literature in Lisbon and spent some years teaching in Angola and Mozambique, during the independence struggle. She now lives in Lisbon. Her first two novels placed her in the avant-garde of contemporary Portuguese literature and since then she has received numerous prestigious awards for her work. In 2013, Lídia Jorge was honoured as one of the “10 greatest literary voices” by the renowned French Magazine Littéraire, and in 2014, she was awarded the Premio Luso-Español de Arte y Cultura. She has been awarded the Vergílio Ferreira Award 2015 for her body of work.

Luisa Valenzuela Levinson is an Argentine post-‘Boom’ novelist and short story writer. Her writing is characterized by an experimental style which questions hierarchical social structures from a feminist perspective. She may be best-known for her work written in response to the dictatorship of the 1970s in Argentina.