David Ornette Cherry, winner of the "2003 ASCAP-Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music," is composer, arranger, and band leader. The ambient music streaming through his childhood was generated by the early collaborations of his dad, Don Cherry, with Ornette Coleman and the musicians who visited his parents' Mariposa Avenue home in Los Angeles. Cherry studied music composition at Bishop College in Dallas and concentrated on world music at California Institute of the Arts. While jazz remains both the root and sustenance of his sound, he often incorporates the sounds of the world in what he calls "multi-kulti" music. His background includes performances with Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins, Nana Vasconcelos, Olatunji, Hassan Hakmoun, Carlos Ward, Jim Pepper, Collin Walcott, Wadada Leo Smith, and Justo Almario.

www.davidornettecherry.com

Danny Hoch is an actor, playwright and director whose plays "Pot Melting," "Some People," and "Jails, Hospitals, & Hip-Hop" have garnered many awards including 2 OBIES, an NEA Solo Theatre Fellowship, Sundance Writers Fellowship, CalArts/Alpert Award In Theatre, and a Tennessee Williams Fellowship. His theatre work has toured to 50 U.S. cities and 15 countries. He is a Senior Fellow at the New School's Vera List Center For Art & Politics and his writings on hip-hop, race and class have appeared in The Village Voice, New York Times, Harper's, The Nation, American Theatre, and various books: Out Of Character, Extreme Exposure, Creating Your Own Monologue and Total Chaos. Mr. Hoch founded the Hip-Hop Theater Festival in 2000 which has since presented over 100 Hip-Hop Generation plays from around the globe and now appears annually in New York, Chicago, DC and San Francisco/Oakland.

www.DannyHoch.com

Denis Dutton was born in Los Angeles and grew up in a family of bibliophiles, including brothers Dave and Doug, owners of bookstores in North Hollywood and Brentwood. For over twenty years he has been a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Beyond his many publications in philosophy and aesthetics, Denis is founder and editor of the hugely popular website "Arts & Letters Daily," named by The Guardian as the best website in the world.

Larry McMurtry received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1985 novel Lonesome Dove and an Academy Award and Golden Globe for his screen adaptation (co-written with Diana Ossana) of the film Brokeback Mountain.

Mary Roach is the author of BONK, Spook, and the New York Times bestseller Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Stiff was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick for 2003, a Northern California Book Awards finalist, and an American Library Association Alex Award (for adult books that appeal to young adults) winner. Stiff has been translated into 16 languages, including Hungarian (Hullamerev) and Lithuania(Negyveilai). Before writing Bonk, Spook and Stiff, Mary wrote columns, essays, and feature articles for Outside, Wired, GQ, Salon.com, and the New York Times Magazine, among many others. She has always gravitated toward the peculiar, covering things like Eskimo food, flatulence, killer bees, vaginal weight-lifting, carrot addiction, and amputee bowling leagues. Mary works in an office with five other writers in Oakland, California, down the hall from a cosmetology school which produces a lot of fumes and perhaps explains Mary's writing style.

Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Rick Loomis has worked for the Los Angeles Times since 1994.

William Cleveland is the founder and Director of the Center for the Study of Art and Community. Mr. Cleveland's 25 year history, producing arts programs in cultural, educational and community also includes his leadership of the Walker ArtCenter's Education and Community Programs Department, California's Arts-In-Corrections Program and the California State Summer School for the Arts. His book Art in Other Places chronicles 22 model programs developed by artists and community development service providers in 17 American communities.

Alan Ball is the creator and Executive Producer of "Six Feet Under," the critically acclaimed drama series on HBO. The series, about a family-run funeral home in Los Angeles, has garnered unprecedented ratings for the network, two Golden Globes (including Best Drama Series) and six Emmy awards. Alan was awarded an Emmy and a DGA award for directing the pilot of "Six Feet Under", his directorial debut. Alan's first produced feature film screenplay was "American Beauty," for which he received the 1999 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, the Writers Guild of America award for Best Original Screenplay, and the Golden Globe award for Best Screenplay, among others. His other television credits include "Oh Grow Up", "Cybill" and "Grace Under Fire." Prior to moving to Hollywood, he was a noted comedic playwright in New York.

Thomas Lynch is the author, most recently, of Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans, a book he describes as "an ethnography of everyday life." His book, The Undertaking, won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Bodies in Motion and at Rest won the Great Lakes Book Award. Of his three collections of poems, Still Life in Milford is the most recent. For thirty years he has been the funeral director in Milford, Michigan.

In a career spanning five decades, W.S. Merwin, poet, translator and environmental activist, has become one of the most widely read - and imitated - poets in America. Over the years, his poetic voice has moved from the more formal and medieval to a more distinctly American voice. W.S. Merwin's recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held beliefs.

His first book, A Mask for Janus, was published in 1952 in the Yale Younger Poets series -- chosen by W.H. Auden. His book of poems, The Carrier of Ladders, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1970. His other books include The Drunk in the Furnace, The Moving Target, The Lice, Flower & Hand, The Compass Flower, Feathers from the Hill, Opening the Hand, The Rain in the Trees, Travels, The Vixen, The Lost Upland, Unframed Originals, and The Folding Cliffs. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize, the Tanning Prize, the Bollingen Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, among many others. His latest works include the collections of poems The River Sound as well as a new translation of Dante's Purgatorio. In the fall of 2004, William Merwin was awarded the prestigious 2004 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. His book Migration won the 2005 National Book Award for Poetry, and was also named winner of the 2006 Ambassador Book Award for Poetry. W.S. Merwin was awarded the 2006 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for his book Present Company.

Born in 1945, August Wilson grew up in the Hill district of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His childhood experiences in this black slum community would later inform his dramatic writings, including his first produced play, Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, which was staged in 1981.

By early 1990's, Wilson had established himself as the best known and most popular African-American playwright. His second play, Fences, earned Wilson his first Pulitzer Prize. The Piano Lesson earned Wilson his 2nd Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as a Drama Desk Award.

On October 2, 2005, August Wilson passed away at the age of 60.

David Hajdu is the music critic for The New Republic and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has written for The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, BookForum, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, and other publications. Hajdu is the author of three books: Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (1996), Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña, and The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America (2008). His first two books were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and both books won the ASCAP Deems-Taylor Award. His books have also been finalists for the LAMBDA Literary Award and the Firecracker Book Award.

Fritjof Capra, Ph.D., physicist and systems theorist, is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, which promotes ecology and systems thinking in primary and secondary education. He is on the faculty of Schumacher College, an international center for ecological studies in England, and frequently gives management seminars for top executives. Dr. Capra is the author of five international bestsellers, The Tao of Physics (1975), The Turning Point (1982), Uncommon Wisdom (1988), The Web of Life (1996), and The Hidden Connections (2002). He coauthored Green Politics (1984), Belonging to the Universe (1991), and EcoManagement (1993), and coedited Steering Business Toward Sustainability (1995). His most recent book is The Science of Leonardo.