Through years of balancing his job as an airline pilot with community work, Strickland developed the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, an alternative learning center in Pittsburgh that provides arts education for inner-city youth and young adults. In an area where fewer than half of all high school students go on to college, 80 percent of the Guild’s students do so. Strickland also is the executive director of the Bidwell Training Center, which provides specialized job training for inner-city youth. An appointee to the National Council on the Arts, he is the author of Across the Spectrum, a primer for developing arts education.

Strickland, who was named a MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1996, received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh.

Berube’s work pays close attention to the experiences of working-class people and to the intersection of politics, cultural expectations, work conditions and gender roles in their lives. His current project is an oral history and analysis of the Marine Cooks’ and Stewards’ Union, which organized the service workers on the passenger liners and freighters in the Pacific from the 1930s to the 1950s and was among the most racially integrated unions in the U.S.

He has received several honors, including a Rockefeller Residency Fellowship and the Community Service Award from the Bay Area Physicians for Human Rights. Berube, who studied at the University of Chicago, was named a MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1996. The Creative Approach to Public Policy lecture series invites four MacArthur Fellows to share insight and perspective on current public policy issues.

In complex federal civil rights lawsuits, Avila has sought enforcement of the special Section 5 preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which prevent any voting changes adopted with a discriminatory purpose or that have a discriminatory effect on minority voting strength. His articles and opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

Avila, who was named a MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1996, received a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a law degree from Harvard Law School.