Nino Selimaj

Stritch is a veteran Broadway performer with the outsized personality to match.

A former theater director, Daldry directed the movies Billy Elliot and The Hours.

The city's most contentious Broadway commentator, Riedel has managed to offend nearly everyone in the business with his twice-weekly Post column.

Producers Barry and Fran Weissler are one of Broadway's most formidable power couples. They're responsible for hit musical revivals like Chicago</em, Annie Get Your Gun</em, and Sweet Charity>.

Fran Weissler

The bubbly, self-proclaimed real estate queen founded the Corcoran Group in 1978 and sold her stake in 2001. These days she bops around as a columnist, pundit, and star on Shark Tank.

William Mack

Daniel Rose

The hard-charging news executive has been the president of CNN's U.S. operations since 2004.

Alter is a senior editor and columnist at Newsweek and covers politics and the media. He's known for moderate liberal stances and for popping up on habitually on NBC programs.

Monk has been an avant-garde musical icon for decades thanks to her unusual vocal style and creative compositions.

The head of political strategy firm Knickerbocker SKD, Isay is a (primarily) Democratic political consultant who has worked for a long list of elected officials.

Karen Brooks Hopkins is the president of Brooklyn Academy of Music, an institution that provides one of the few reasons for culture-obsessed Manhattanites to take the subway across the East River.

Col Allan

Kaufman is the founder of Kaufman Realty, a real estate management company, as well as Kaufman Astoria Studios, the city's biggest film and TV production center.

The pouty Brazilian supermodel is known for her Victoria's Secret ads and a string of famous ex-boyfriends, like Derek Jeter and Lenny Kravitz.

Friedman served as the CEO of HarperCollins, the book publishing arm of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, for more than a decade before stepping down in 2008. She's since founded Open Road Integrated Media, a digital publishing company.

Julavits is an author and editor of the alt-literary magazine The Believer. She's also the wife of novelist Ben Marcus.

The son of a PR exec and an antitrust researcher, the extremely cloying and incredibly precious lit star grew up in what turned out to be an intellectually fertile split-level in the D.C. suburbs. His early literary efforts at Princeton (he won the creative writing prize four years running) were nurtured by his thesis advisor, Joyce Carol Oates. Following post-graduation stints as a receptionist, morgue assistant, ghostwriter, jewelry salesman, farm sitter(?), archivist and math tutor—or so he claims—he burst onto the scene at 25 with 2002's Everything is Illuminated, which he'd been drafting since he was 20. (Agent Nicole Aragi finagled him a $500,000 advance for it.) The book garnered rapturous blurbs from Salman Rushdie, Francine Prose, and John Updike. His second novel, 2005's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, narrated by a nine-year-old autistic boy who loses his father on Sept. 11th, was also a commercial success—and was released as a movie starring none other than Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock around the holidays, 2011.