Christine Allison is Editor-in-Chief and CEO of D Magazine Partners. She founded D Home in 2000 and has been leading digital properties since 2005. When time allows, she writes about remarkable people, civic issues, politics, and the joys of ordinary life

Sheryl Adkins-Green, Mary Kay’s Chief Marketing Officer, leads the global brand marketing strategy,  advertising, digital marketing, social media, and customer insights that keep the Mary Kay brand and business opportunity relevant and competitive around the world. Prior to Mary Kay, Sheryl held executive positions with Alberto-Culver, Cadbury-Schweppes, Citigroup, and Kraft Foods. Sheryl is a @Forbes Top 50 CMO influencer who received the 2021 Top 100 Women in Marketing Award by Brand Innovators. She received the CMO Leadership Award in 2020, and in 2019, Sheryl was named to BLACK ENTERPRISE’s 2019 Most Powerful Women in Corporate America List. Sheryl was recognized as one of the Most Influential Women in Direct Selling (2017) and in August 2012, Sheryl was the first recipient of the Global Marketer Award from the Academy of Marketing Science. Sheryl serves on the Texas Christian University Board of Trustees, in addition to being a board member of the Dallas Museum of Art and of the AT &T Performing Arts Center. Sheryl was honored to be featured in the best-selling book, “Successful Women Think Differently” by Valorie Burton. Sheryl received a Bachelor of Science in retailing, cum laude, from the University of Wisconsin and holds a Master of Business Administration degree from Harvard Business School.

Samantha Dodd is the curator for the Archives of Women of the Southwest at the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her work entails collecting, appraising, processing, and making accessible archival collections in women’s history to document the historical experience of women in the Southwest, with special emphasis on Dallas and North Texas, as well as Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and the Spanish Borderlands.

Samantha was most recently the special collections archivist at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she had been working since 2016. From 2011-2015, she was the archivist at the Dallas Historical Society. She holds a BA in history from UTA, an MA in history from UTD, and an MLIS from the University of North Texas. She is a Certified Archivist and has professional certificates in Advanced Management in Libraries (UNT) and Archival Arrangement and Description (SAA).

Norma Adams Wade is a proud Dallas native, University of Texas at Austin journalism graduate and retired Dallas Morning News senior staff writer. She is a founder of the National Association of Black Journalists and was its first southwest regional director. She became The News’ first Black full-time reporter in 1974.

Patrick Washington is the Publisher and CEO of the Dallas Weekly.  Continuously published without missing a single issue for more than 65 years, DW has emerged as one of the most trusted voices of the African-American community in north Texas. DW has been recognized and awarded for its impactful journalism locally, statewide, regionally and nationally; more than any other Black-owned media enterprise of its kind in the area.

Robert Moore Co-founded the 'Dallas Voice,’ the weekly LGBTQ-focused newspaper in 1984.  After working for 2 years at the Dallas Gay News Moore founded the paper with Don Ritz and William Marberry.  They each invested $250 and began the paper out of a small office in Oak Lawn.  The paper continues to thrive  and provides news, life and style information to LGBTQ Texas.

Dr. Melita Garza is an associate professor at Texas Christian University’s Bob Schieffer College of Communication.  She teaches courses on media literacy, journalism history and diversity and the media.  Prior to earning her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012, she was an award winning journalist at the Chicago Tribune, Bloomberg News and the Los Angeles Times where she wrote about immigrant, refugee, and ethnic communities.  She is the author of ‘They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression,’ which examines the way English-and Spanish-language newspapers framed immigration in a time of deep economic crises.    She is considered a leading expert on Spanish-language media in the United States.