Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning Egyptian American journalist and commentator. Her essays and op-eds on Egypt, the Islamic world, and women’s rights have appeared in various publications, including The Washington Post and The New York Times. She has appeared as a guest commentator on MSNBC, the BBC, CNN, PBS, Al-Jazeera, NPR, and dozens of other television and radio networks, and is a contributing opinion writer for the International New York Times. She lives in Cairo and New York City.

Kelly McEvers is a national correspondent based at NPR West. She previously ran NPR’s Beirut bureau, where she earned a Peabody award, an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia award, a Gracie award, and an Overseas Press Club mention for her 2012 coverage of the Syrian conflict. In 2008-2009, McEvers was part of the award-winning “Working” series for American Public Media’s business and finance show, Marketplace. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Monthly, Slate and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her work has aired on This American Life, The World, and the BBC.

Jessica Jackley is an entrepreneur focused on financial inclusion, the sharing economy, and social justice. She is best known as a co-founder of Kiva, the world’s first and largest micro-lending website. She is also a co-founder of ProFounder, a pioneering crowdfunding platform for U.S. entrepreneurs, and Kin & Co. consulting group, helping organizations support women and working families. Jessica is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and an active board member for several nonprofit organizations, including Habitat for Humanity. She lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband, Reza Aslan, and their three sons.

Larissa MacFarquhar has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. Her subjects have included John Ashbery, Barack Obama, and Noam Chomsky, among many others. Previously she was a senior editor at Lingua Franca and an advisory editor at The Paris Review. She lives in New York.

Alex Cohen is co-host of KPCC’s Take Two show. Prior to that, she was the host of KPCC’s All Things Considered. She has also hosted and reported for NPR programs, including Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Day to Day as well as American Public Media’s Marketplace and Weekend America. Prior to that, she was the L.A. Bureau Chief for KQED FM in San Francisco. She has won various journalistic awards, including the LA Press Club’s Best Radio Anchor prize. Alex is also the author of Down and Derby: The Insider’s Guide to Roller Derby.

Lauren Groff is the author of two novels, The Monsters of Templeton (New York Times bestseller), and Arcadia (New York Times extended bestseller), as well as the short-story collection Delicate, Edible Birds. Her short stories have appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Atlantic Monthly, and in several Best American Short Stories anthologies. Groff’s fiction has won the Paul Bowles Prize, the Medici Book Club Prize, and the Pen/O. Henry Prize, and the Pushcart Prize, and been shortlisted for the Orange Prize and a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize.

Julie Robinson is the founder and creative force behind Literary Affairs and The Beverly Hills Literary Escape. She runs over 30 book clubs per month, as well as leading Classic Literary Luncheons, Literary Tours, and more.

Mary Karr is the author of three award-winning, bestselling memoirs: The Liars’ Club, Cherry, and Lit. A Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, Karr has won Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays. Other grants include the Whiting Writer’s Award, PEN’s Martha Albrand Award, and Radcliffe’s Bunting Fellowship. The Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University is currently adapting her books for a Showtime series based on her life.

David L. Ulin is the author, most recently of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, which comes out in October from the University of California Press. His other books include The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is a book critic and former book editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Salman Rushdie is the author of twelve novels— including Midnight’s Children (Booker Prize, Best of the Booker), The Satanic Verses, and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published nonfiction: Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line, and co-edited the anthologies Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of American PEN, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a novelist. He is the author of The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation, The Tattooed Soldier, and most recently, his book on the Chilean Miners, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Four-time Emmy award-winning composer Laura Karpman maintains a vibrant career in film, television, videogame, concert and theater music. Her distinguished credits include scoring Kasi Lemmons’ Black Nativity, Spielberg’s miniseries Taken, the Showtime series Odyssey 5, and Masters of Science Fiction (both Emmy-nominated). Karpman has received two GANG awards and additional nominations for her videogame music which has been performed by orchestras internationally.

Commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Karpman collaborated with soprano Jessye Norman, and The Roots on Ask Your Mama, a multimedia opera based on a text by Langston Hughes. It received a sold-out premiere at Carnegie Hall in March 2009 and its West Coast premiere at The Hollywood Bowl and was revived at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Karpman is now working on an opera for Glimmerglass for 2016 and a work in collaboration with Rebecca Walker for the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus to premiere in 2015. She has just been awarded a grant from Opera America to develop an opera with NY Times columnist Gail Collins called Balls! based on the match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.

Janai Brugger’s extraordinary career as a soprano has taken her all over the world. Her numerous accomplishments include a debut at Ravinia Festival under the baton of James Conlon with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and winner of Placido Domingo’s Operalia competition in 2012. Brugger has performed in several operas with the Domingo Thornton Young Artist Program, including Le Nozee di Figaro, Rigoletto, and La Boheme, all of which were performed in Los Angeles. Her 2014-2015 season includes an appearance at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London.

Collaborative pianist Victoria Kirsch is a lover of poetry, both spoken and sung. She curates and performs a wide range of text-based musical programs in a variety of local, regional, and national venues. She also creates and performs exhibition-inspired concerts at local museums and galleries, including the USC Fisher Museum of Art, where she has presented yearly concerts since 2004 (Warhol’s World in Song, Yousuf Karsh: Hero of a Thousand Faces, Drawn To Language, The Poet’s Voice) as part of the campus-wide Visions and Voices program. Kirsch is the co-creator of This and My Heart, a theatrical concert program based on the works of Emily Dickinson, and serves as music director of OperaArts, a Coachella Valley-based organization featuring operatic concerts with piano and orchestra.

Taura Stinson is a veteran songwriter who has penned songs for Destiny’s Child, Kelis, Kelly Rowland, and Deborah Cox, among others, and has collaborated with numerous artists, including Raphael Saadiq, Dr. Dre, Kanye West, Andre 3000. Taura has also written and produced several songs for films such as Black Nativity and Epic, and more recently served as lead lyricist for the animated film Rio 2. She is currently part of a Folk & B duo called Art Peace with Chrissy DePauw, and they are eagerly awaiting the release of their debut album Free Music.

David Young followed his interest in music and the bass right into a performing and teaching career. Coming to Los Angeles in 1975, he has taught at a total of around a dozen schools, most consistently at the Colburn School in downtown Los Angeles. In his performing career, he has played with most every orchestra in Los Angeles, settling upon the Los Angeles Opera. Developing and narrating children’s concerts complement his enjoyment of things like lecturing about the wonders of opera.

Most widely known as the “Gangsta Gardener,” Ron Finley inadvertently started a horticultural revolution when he transformed the barren parkway in front of his South Central L.A. home into an edible oasis. Ron travels the world, speaking to people about the importance of growing their own food and reminding them that they have the power to design their own lives. By turning food prisons into food forests, the Ron Finley Project is transforming culture one garden at a time.

Elizabeth Medrano has a long track record of involvement in social and environmental justice work beginning in the mid-1990s. In her role as the Coordinator and Organizer for the Healthy School Food Coalition, a program of the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College, she focuses on organizing and training school populations on advocacy directed at full implementation of school food and nutrition motions adopted by the Los Angeles Board of Education. In 2012, Medrano authored the School Food Policy & Organizing Toolkit, and most recently, along with California Food Policy Advocates, she co-authored the School Food, Lessons Learned Report, which was released in 2014.

Neelam Sharma is the executive director of Community Services Unlimited, an organization she became acquainted with through her work with the Black Panther organization she founded in Britain in the mid-1980s. Upon relocating to the United States in 1997, her food justice work with CSU was birthed by her specific need to feed her family healthy food when she moved to South LA and was driven by her broader understanding of the basic human right to high-quality, culturally appropriate food as a critical element of social justice. She first became a community activist as a pre-teen in response to an attempt by fascists to organize in Southall, London, where she grew up. In addition to being an activist, Neelam loves dancing, reading, and storytelling and is excited about what the future has in store.