Joel Dreyfuss brings more than 35 years of experience as a journalist, editor and news executive to The Root. He has been editor-in-chief of Red Herring and Information Week, editor of PC Magazine, executive editor of Black Enterprise, a senior writer at Bloomberg Markets and editor-in-chief of Urban Box Office, an Internet startup.

He also served two stints at Fortune, first as an associate editor and Tokyo bureau chief, and later as a senior editor and personal technology columnist. Earlier he worked at USA Today and The Washington Post. He was also a news producer at KPIX in San Francisco and on-air reporter for KQED's Newsroom and WNET's 51st State.

He is co-author of The Bakke Case: The Politics of Inequality (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989). Many of his articles and essays have been included in anthologies.

A native of Haiti, Dreyfuss grew up in Paris, France; Monrovia, Liberia, and New York City. He earned a B.S. degree at the City College of the City University of New York and was an Urban Journalism Fellow at the University of Chicago. He is a founder of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Teresa Wiltz, The Root's senior editor, was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Atlanta and Staten Island, N.Y. After graduating from Dartmouth College, Wiltz pursued a career in dance, performing with several modern dance companies. After she retired at the ripe old age of 26, she received a master's degree from Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. She was a columnist at the Chicago Tribune, where she also was part of the reporting team that was the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for public service for its series, "Killing Our Children." She was a Livingston Awards finalist and won the Peter Lisagor Award for feature writing. Her writing also has won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists. As the arts writer for the Washington Post's Style section, she covered arts, entertainment and popular culture and traveled to Afghanistan, where she spent a month reporting on life in post-Taliban Kabul. She has lived in Guatemala and Mexico, and, in 2010, traveled to Liberia on an editing fellowship with the International Reporting Project. Her essays are featured in Souls of My Sisters, Chicago 2000 and in the literary journal Konch, edited by poet Ishmael Reed.

Cynthia Gordy is the Washington reporter for The Root, writing on national policy and politics from both the White House and Congress. She previously served as Washington correspondent and news editor for Essence magazine. As a reporter, Gordy has told the stories at the intersection of race, politics and social justice, including the 2008 presidential campaign, the Sean Bell trial in New York and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Her feature on a small Tennessee town's battle against environmental racism won the 2008 National Association of Black Journalists Award for Specialty Reporting. Gordy has interviewed President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and other senior officials. She was named one of the NAACP's "40 Under 40" in 2010, and the National Association of Black Journalists' 2009 Emerging Journalist of the Year. Gordy holds a B.A. in creative nonfiction writing and Africana studies from the University of Pittsburgh. She resides in Washington, D.C.