Eve Ensler is an internationally bestselling author and an award-winning playwright whose theatrical works include The Vagina Monologues, Necessary Targets, and The Good Body. She is the author of Insecure at Last, a political memoir, and I Am an Emotional Creature. Ensler is the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised over $90 million for local groups and activists and inspired the global action "One Billion Rising."

Jody Williams, who received the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for her work to ban landmines, is the founding chair of the Nobel Women’s Initiative, launched in January 2006. She is the recipient of fifteen honorary degrees and was named one of the hundred most powerful women in the world in 2004 by Forbes. She is a Campaign Ambassador for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which she helped found in 1992. Williams holds the Sam and Cele Keeper Endowed Professorship in Peace and Social Justice at the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston. In 2012–13, she became the inaugural Jane Addams Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Social Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Pat Mitchell is one of media's most accomplished professionals. From network correspondent to producing award-winning documentaries as an executive in charge of original productions for Ted Turner’s cable networks, she was named Newsweek's 150 Women Who Shake the World and has been recognized with 44 Emmy awards, five Peabody’s, and two Academy Award nominations. Mitchell became the first women President/CEO of PBS and is currently President/CEO of The Paley Center for Media, whose mission is to optimize the power of media to inform, inspire, entertain, and empower. Mitchell is a sought-after speaker and has been honored numerous times for her achievements. She serves on many non-profit and corporate boards

Temple Grandin is the author of several best-selling books, which have sold more than a million copies, and one of the world’s most accomplished and well-known adults with autism. The HBO movie based on her life, starring Claire Danes, received seven Emmy Awards. Grandin is a professor at Colorado State University. Her new book is The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum.

Frank M. Hansen is a cartoonist, artist  and writer. He creates humorous cartoons for various print and digital publications around the globe and short educational animations to help make learning more fun.  He is currently working on a new strip based on a washed-up Hollywood mogul. In between the cartooning, he produces original abstract art designs using ink, paint, and markers on anything from canvas to cardboard. His work has been shown at Gallery Nucleus, WWA Gallery, and the Red Gate Gallery in London.

Milton Knight started drawing, painting, and animation at the age of two. His work has appeared in Graphic Classics, Heavy Metal, High Times, National Lampoon, and Nickelodeon Magazine. His comic titles include Hugo, Midnite the Rebel Skunk, and Slug and Ginger. Knight is currently exhibiting and teaching at The Colonnade Art Gallery and Studio in Pasadena, CA.

Cartoonist Sharon Rudahl began drawing comics for underground newspapers and the first Wimmen's Comix. Her work has been exhibited in museums in San Francisco, New York, and Europe. Recent projects include Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman, and major contributions to Paul Buhle and Harvey Pekar's Yiddishkeit, Studs Terkel's Working, and the upcoming Bohemians, to be published in 2013. She is currently drawing comics for a Lincoln For Beginners book, which will be published this year.

Zak Smith's paintings and drawings are held in major public and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Other than Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow, his books include the monograph Pictures of Girls, and We Did Porn—a book, including drawings and stories, about his experiences working in the adult film industry.

Russ Kick is the editor of the three-volume, 1,600-page set The Graphic Canon: The World's Great Literature as Comics and Visuals, which NPR called "easily the most ambitious and successfully realized literary project in recent memory."  Russ' earlier books for The Disinformation Company (such as You Are Being Lied To) have sold over half-a-million copies. He has written regularly for the Village Voice, and Utne Reader named him one of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World." He's currently working on a Walt Whitman volume of The Graphic Canon, as well as editing the first comprehensive anthology of classic and contemporary poetry about death and dying.

Caroline Kennedy is the author and editor of ten bestselling books on American history, politics, and poetry. She is active in the efforts to improve New York City's public schools and serves as president of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.

Eloise Klein Healy is the author of seven books of poetry and three spoken word recordings. She was the founding chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles, where she is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing Emerita.  Healy is the founding editor of ARKTOI Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press. Her most recent collection of poems is A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings. In December 2012, Healy was appointed the first poet laureate of The City of Los Angeles.

Marisa Silver is the author of the short story collections Babe in Paradise, named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and Alone With You. She has written three novels, No Direction Home, The God of War, and most recently, Mary Coin. Silver made her fiction debut in The New Yorker has won the O. Henry Prize. Her work has been included in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as other anthologies.

Meghan O'Rourke is the author of the best-selling memoir The Long Goodbye and the poetry collections Once and Halflife. She is an award-winning cultural critic and a former editor at The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Slate.

Dr. Bernie Krause is both a musician and a naturalist. During the 1950s and 60s, he devoted himself to music and replaced Pete Seeger as the guitarist for the Weavers. For more than forty years, Krause has traveled the world, recording and archiving the sounds of creatures and environments large and small. He has recorded more than fifteen thousand species and four thousand hours of wild soundscapes, over half of which no longer exist in nature, due to encroaching noise and human activity.

Tom Wolfe is the author of more than a dozen books, among them The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his B.A. at Washington and Lee University and a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale. He received the National Book Foundation’s 2010 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in New York City.

Howard A. Rodman is a professor of screenwriting at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, Vice President of the Writers Guild of America, West, and has served as Artistic Director of the Sundance Screenwriting Labs. He wrote Savage Grace, August, and Joe Gould’s Secret. Rodman is on the executive committee of the Writers Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and is a Fellow of the Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities.

Tom Wolfe’s words are performed by René Auberjonois, the esteemed Tony-winning actor whose career has spanned film, television, Broadway, and regional stages, as well as many audio recordings and broadcasts. Audiences best know him from his years on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Boston Legal, and innumerable film and television appearances.

Diego Luna is a renowned film, television, and stage actor who has participated in over 30 films, including the award-winning Y Tu Mamá También. Luna has been a professional actor since he was seven years old and recently made his directorial debut with the documentary J.C. Chávez, followed by the fictional film Abel. His latest feature as a director is Chavez, based on the life of legendary farm worker and union leader, Cesar E. Chavez.

NPR correspondent Mandalit del Barco has reported and produced radio stories and photographed everything from street gangs to Hollywood, police and prisons, marijuana, immigration, natural disasters, arts, and urban street culture (including hip hop dance, music, and art). Every year, she covers the Oscars and the Grammy awards for NPR. Her news reports, feature stories, and photos filed from Los Angeles and abroad can be heard on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, alt.latino and npr.org

Nick Flynn is the author of three memoirs, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, The Ticking Is The Bomb, and most recently, The Reenactments. Flynn has worked as a ship’s captain, electrician, and caseworker for the working poor. His film credits include work as a field poet and artistic collaborator on Darwin’s Nightmare, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and executive producer/collaborator on Being Flynn. Each spring, he teaches poetry, nonfiction, and collaboration at the University of Houston, and the rest of the year, he is in, or near, Brooklyn.

Elvis Mitchell is the host of the pop culture radio show The Treatment on KCRW 89.9 FM and film curator of the Film Independent at LACMA film series. Previously, he hosted the TCM interview program Under the Influence and was also the chief film critic for “Movieline” and a visiting lecturer at Harvard in Visual and Environmental Studies and African American Studies. Prior to this, Mitchell served as the film critic at the New York Times and was the entertainment critic for NPR’s Weekend Edition. He produced and co-created The Black List, Volume One, a documentary focusing on achievement in the African American community, and was nominated by the WGA for his work on The AFI Lifetime Achievement Award on Sidney Poitier.

Born to Scottish and Israeli parents of Eastern-European descent, chef/owner Ilan Hall was exposed to international food from an early age. At seventeen, Ilan studied at the Lorenzo de Medici School’s Apicius program and cooked at the Al Lume di Candela restaurant. He graduated from the Culinary Institute of America and subsequently got his certification in Baking and Pastry Arts. In New York, Ilan cooked for Tom Collicchio at Craft, then for Mario Batali at Casa Mono under chef/co-owner Andy Nusser, originally of Batali’s acclaimed Babbo. At 24, he won Bravo TV’s reality competition, Top Chef. Ilan has been traveling the world all his life; his restless nature and tradition-shattering style have now spawned his indefinable first restaurant – The Gorbals Los Angeles.

Like many great chefs, Judy Han’s earliest memory is helping her parents in the kitchen of their family restaurant in Chicago. She moved to Los Angeles to become classically trained at culinary school; her first job was at Lucques, under Suzanne Goin, a protégé of the legendary Alice Waters of Chez Panisse. There she learned the virtues of working with local farmers who produced organically grown sustainable foods. Her culinary education continued in the kitchens of Sona, Grace and Koi, before becoming Sous Chef of Literati II. At Literati II, Chef Judy established herself as one of the largest proponents of the eating local movement, cooking almost entirely local seasonal ingredients at the boutique restaurant. At Mendocino Farms, Chef Judy is dedicated to applying her culinary philosophy to this “Fine Fast” concept by working with the best local farmers. She is also Chef Partner at one of downtown’s newest restaurants, Blue Cow.

A native of New Mexico, John Rivera Sedlar gained a following as a chef in the South Bay region of Southern California—which led him to further his culinary education through an apprenticeship to legendary French chef Jean Bertranou of L'Ermitage in Los Angeles. He opened St. Estephe restaurant in Manhattan Beach, where he won renown as the Father of Modern Southwest Cuisine—also the title of his acclaimed first cookbook. Sedlar's awards and recognitions include selection among the Top Ten Chefs in America and the First Annual Culinary Arts Hall of Fame Awards. Having traveled extensively throughout Mexico, Latin America, and Spain to study Latin food traditions first-hand, he is also the creator and founder of the first Latino food museum in the United States, Museo 26. Sedlar opened downtown’s Rivera and is executive chef at Beverly Hills’ Playa.

Mexican-born Patricia Zarate left her homeland at the age of twenty-three and within little time found herself involved in fighting for justice within marginalized communities of Los Angeles, particularly that of Boyle Heights in the Dolores Mission community. She worked as the Secretary for Father Greg Boyle when he was pastor of Dolores Mission and when Homeboy Industries began to bloom. She began catering events out of her own small kitchen before opening El Zarape in Boyle Heights. In 2005, in collaboration with Father Boyle Patricia employed and worked with a dozen young women teaching them the basics of the food service industry through Homegirl Café. A new state of the art facility was completed in October 2007, and specializes in the serving of light, healthy Mexican food with thirty homegirls undergoing training at a given time.

Evan Kleiman has been the host of Good Food on KCRW for 15 years. The show reflects her wide-ranging interest in food and how humans interact with it. Evan’s food policy interest is expressed through her participation on the Los Angeles Food Policy Council and as a member of the Stewardship Council of the statewide organization Roots of Change. Evan Kleiman was chef-owner of Angeli Caffe on Melrose for 27 years. A cookbook author of six titles, she teaches and gives food tours of her native Los Angeles. Her latest project is Easy As Pie an app for the iphone/ipad.