Debra Gerod is a partner at Gruen Associates, the planning and architectural firm selected for the Union Station master plan. During her tenure at Gruen Associates, Gerod has focused on the collaborative delivery of projects, primarily in the public sector. Her work includes large-scale, significant civic and cultural projects such as courthouses, embassies, performing arts centers, museums, libraries, and transportation projects.

Jenna Hornstock has served as acting as project manager for the Union Station Master Plan for the past three years at Metro implementing the new TOD Planning Grant program, as well as managing other strategic initiatives related to transit-oriented development planning. Prior to joining Metro, Ms. Hornstock spent nearly seven years at the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles (CRA/LA), most recently as Chief of Strategic Planning and Economic Development. She holds a Master's in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a BA in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley.

Eugene Moy is a past president and the current vice president of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, where he has been a member since 1976. He has conducted research and reviewed many scholarly publications on the history of Chinese in Southern California on behalf of the Historical Society. In 1981 he was part of the team that developed historical walking tours of Los Angeles Chinatown and has been continuously involved in conducting interpretive walking tours of Old and New Chinatown since that time. In addition, he currently serves as second vice president for the Chinese American Museum at El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument.  Professionally, he is retired after over 35 years in municipal planning and redevelopment, working for five different cities in Los Angeles County.  He is a native of Los Angeles, a graduate of Cal State Long Beach, and has resided with his family in Alhambra since 1986.

Marlyn Musicant; is the Senior Exhibitions Coordinator at the Getty Research Institute. She earned her M.A. in the History of Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture at the Bard Graduate Center. Her research specialties include twentieth-century industrial design and architecture—particularly German Modernism and the history of architecture and planning in Southern California. Musicant is an editor of Los Angeles Union Station, forthcoming from Getty Publications, and the curator of the exhibit of the same name on display in Central Library’s Getty Gallery. Musicant is a native Angeleno.

Kevin Roderick is a journalist, editor, blogger, and author living in Los Angeles. He is the creator and publisher of LA Observed, a widely cited news website that Forbes rated as Best of the Web. He is a contributing writer on politics and media atLos Angeles magazine, an award-winning radio commentator, and is often asked by the media to talk about Southern California issues. Currently, he is the director of the UCLA Newsroom at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Anne Germanacos is the author of the short-story collection In the Time of the Girls by BOA Editions. Together with her husband, Nick Germanacos, she ran the Ithaka Cultural Studies Program on the islands of Kalymnos and Crete. She now runs the Germanacos Foundation in San Francisco.

Dinah Lenney wrote Bigger than Life: A Murder, a Memoir, published in Tobias Wolff’s American Lives Series at the University of Nebraska Press, and co-authored Acting for Young Actors. A longtime actor herself, she’s appeared on stage, in movies, and in countless episodes of primetime television. Her prose has been published in many journals and anthologies. A graduate of Yale and the Neighborhood Playhouse, Dinah serves as core faculty in the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC and in the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she earned her MFA. Her new memoir is The Object Parade.

Matias Viegener is an artist, author, and critic who teaches at CalArts. He is one of the members of the art collective Fallen Fruit, which has exhibited internationally in Mexico, Colombia, Denmark, Austria (Ars Electronica), LACMA, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and ARCO 2010 in Madrid. He writes regularly on art for X-tra and ArtUS, has recently published in Cabinet, Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Radical History Review, and Black Clock, and is the co-editor of Séance in Experimental Writing The Noulipian Analects. His book 2500 Random Things About Me Too was published in 2012 by Les Figues Press.

Jim Krusoe has published five novels and two books of stories,Blood Lake and Abductions. His first novel, Iceland, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2002. Since then, Tin House Books has published Girl Factory, Erased, Toward You, and Parsifal. Jim teaches writing at Santa Monica College as well as in Antioch's MFA Creative Writing Program. He has also published five books of poems.

Jessye Norman is one of America's greatest and most accomplished classical singers, with five Grammy Awards, dozens of international prizes, and a Kennedy Center Honor (its youngest-ever recipient) among her countless awards. She was born in segregated Augusta, Georgia, during the Jim Crow era and was inspired by singer Marian Anderson and by her loving and supportive parents, who insisted that all four of their children live up to the highest possible standards. She pursued music at Howard University and the University of Michigan and achieved early success with a contract from the Berlin Opera. Her career since then has reached from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera to concerts in honor of the Dalai Lama, the bicentennial of the French Republic, as well as multi-media presentations of American roots music.

Prior to becoming President and CEO of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2000, Deborah Borda was Executive Director at the New York Philharmonic and General Manager of the San Francisco Symphony. Under Borda’s leadership, the orchestra is building new bridges to the community, among them the educational initiative YOLA. As Executive Producer, Borda implemented LA Phil LIVE concert transmissions to more than 500 movie theaters. Most recently, Borda launched Take A Stand, a bi-coastal partnership with the Longy School of Music and Bard College which supports social change through music.

Colson Whitehead is the author of the New York Times bestseller Zone One as well as the novels Sag Harbor; The Intuitionist, a finalist for the PEN/ Hemingway award John Henry Days, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Apex Hides the Hurt, winner of the PEN Oakland Award. He has also written a book of essays about his hometown,The Colossus of New York. A recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship, he lives in New York City.

Laurie Winer is a long-time journalist who has been on staff at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. She is a founding editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Laurie is inexplicably proud that she has played poker in Vegas, Macau, and every card room in Southern California.

American pianist Jeremy Denk has steadily built a reputation as an unusual and compelling artist with a broad and thought-provoking repertoire. In 2013 he became a MacArthur Grant recipient and was named Instrumentalist of the Year by Musical America. He has appeared as a soloist with many major orchestras in the USA and abroad and regularly gives recitals around the United States. Denk is the artistic director of the 2014 Ojai Music Festival, for which he is also composing the libretto to a semi-satirical opera. He is also known for his witty and personal writing in the New Yorker, New York Times Book Review,Newsweek and NPR Music’s website and for his blog Think Denk.

Jeffrey Kahane, equally at home at the keyboard or on the podium, has established an international reputation as a truly versatile artist, recognized around the world for his mastery of diverse repertoire ranging from Bach, Mozart and Beethoven to Gershwin, Golijov and John Adams. Now in his 17th season as music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, he previously served as music director of the Colorado and Santa Rosa symphonies. He has garnered tremendous critical acclaim for his innovative programming and commitment to education and community involvement and received multiple ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming for his work in both Los Angeles and Denver.

George Packer is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of two novels and three works of nonfiction including The Assassins' Gate, which will be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in November 2005, and Blood of the Liberals (FSG, 2000), which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is also the editor of the anthology The Fight for Democracy. He lives in Brooklyn.

Mike Shuster is a diplomatic correspondent and roving foreign correspondent for NPR. He is based in NPR's Los Angeles bureau. When he is not traveling outside the U.S., he covers issues of nuclear non-proliferation and weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and the Pacific Rim. Shuster took up his current post in 1994, using New York as a base. He moved to Los Angeles in 2000. In the past two years, he has contributed many reports to NPR's extensive coverage of the Middle East, traveling four times to Israel since September 2000. He has also reported from Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq. Shuster's reports have also focused on India and Pakistan, the Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, and the Congo.

Geraldine Brooks is an award-winning author and journalist. Brooks covered environmental issues as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald, and at The Wall Street Journal she focused on crises in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. In 2006 she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, and in that same year she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March. Brooks’ most recent novel, Caleb’s Crossing, was a New York Times best seller. Other novels, Year of Wonders and People of the Book, are international bestsellers, translated into more than 25 languages. She is also the author of the nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence.

Carla Kaplan is the Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern University and the author of several books, including The Erotics of Talk: Women's Writing and Feminist Paradigms, Miss Anne in Harlem, and the highly acclaimed Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, the first published collection of a major African American woman's letters- which made Kaplan a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. Kaplan has received numerous academic honors, including the Robert D. Klein Award, the Mary L. Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Wellesley College, fellowships from The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Culture among others. She is an occasional contributor to The Los Angeles Times and The Nation, and lectures widely on literature and culture.

Nathan Englander was born in New York in 1970. His short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Englander’s story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, earned him a PEN/Malamud Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. He lives in New York City.

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in LA. Everywhere else he is an author and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. He writes the award-winning Tommywood column (www.tommywood.com) that appears in The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. Recently he served as American Film and TV editor of the 2nd Edition of The Encyclopedia Judaica.

Robert Pinsky is the first United States Poet Laureate to have served three consecutive terms in the post. His book Gulf Music, is his seventh volume of poetry. His The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 was a Pulitzer Prize nominee and received the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union. He is the author of the best-selling translation of The Inferno of Dante, co-translator of The Separate Notebooks, and author of The Life of David, a work of prose.

The poetry editor for the online magazine Slate, for seven years Pinsky appeared regularly on The News Hour With Jim Lehrer. He writes the weekly "Poet's Choice" column for the Washington Post. He was elected in 1999 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his poems appear in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review, American Poetry Review, and frequently in The Best American Poetryanthologies. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. He is one of the few members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to have appeared on The Simpsons.

Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, and Further Tales of the City have been the basis of three highly acclaimed television miniseries. He is also the author of Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You and Maybe the Moon. His most recent novel, The Night Listener, became a major motion picture starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette. Maupin lives in San Francisco with his partner, Christopher Turner.