Jonathan Kirsch is a book columnist for the Los Angeles Times and is an attorney specializing in copyright law.

Deane Wylie is assistant Op-Ed editor at the Los Angeles Times and previously worked with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.

In 1966, David Harris, then Stanford’s “radical” student body President, announced he would no longer cooperate with the Selective Service System overseeing military conscription, would refuse any orders Selective Service issued him, and urged everyone else to do the same. He then helped found The Resistance and organized civil disobedience against the draft in the West and nationally for the next three years. Ordered to report for military service in 1968, he refused and was convicted of “failure to obey a lawful order of military induction” and sentenced to three years in Federal prison. Harris was incarcerated between 1969 and 1971, mostly in the Federal Correctional Institution at La Tuna, Texas. After his release, he continued to organize against the war until Peace Agreements were signed in 1973. Since then, he has pursued a forty-year career as a journalist and writer and is the author of eleven books.

Winter Karen Dellenbach was born at the birth of the Atomic age in Pomona, California. While attending UCLA, the Vietnam War began to rage, as did the student body. Her political activism ignited and was fed by her peace church upbringing that instilled non-violence. She was a founder and organizer for Los Angeles Resistance. She lived communally for 23 years, was a public interest law attorney, and remains an advocate for low-income people and a political activist. She lives in Palo Alto with her husband.

Bob Zaugh was in The Resistance, a loose group of men and women who refused to cooperate with the draft and war in Vietnam. He left UCLA grad school, turned in his draft cards, refused to take a physical, and refused induction. Defended himself in Federal Court. He headed up Peace Press for twenty years and has been involved in issues such as opposing Diablo Canyon and Nuclear testing. Recently he has been a key person in the reentry work for the Amnesty case Gary Tyler.

Clara Bingham is the author of Class Action: The Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law (with Laura Leedy Gansler) and Women on the Hill: Challenging the Culture of Congress. She is a former Newsweek White House correspondent, and her writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Talk, The Washington Monthly, Ms., and other publications. Bingham produced the 2011 documentary The Last Mountain. She lives in Manhattan and Brooklyn with her husband, three children, and three stepchildren.

Vivian Gornick is the author of the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments, a biography of Emma Goldman, and three essay collections, two of which, The Men in My Life and The End of the Novel of Love, were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent book, another memoir The Odd Woman and the City, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award as well.

David L. Ulin is the author or editor of eight previous books, including The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and the Library of America’s Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the former book critic and book editor of the Los Angeles Times.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Geoff Dyer has received the Somerset Maugham Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, a Lannon Literary Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and, in 2015, the Windham Campbell Prize for nonfiction. The author of four novels and nine works of non-fiction, Dyer is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of Dissident Gardens and eight earlier novels, including Girl In Landscape and Chronic City. His writing has been translated into over thirty languages. He lives in Los Angeles and Maine.

Emily Ansara Baines is the author of The Unofficial Downton Abbey Cookbook and The Unofficial Hunger Games Cookbook. She received her BA in Creative Writing from USC and her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Emily’s work has appeared in Narrative, Jezebel, The Huffington Post, The Independent, The Bold Italic, XOJane, Bird’s Thumb, and Hello Giggles. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, who is very supportive while she works away on her collection of linked stories.

Bridget Chiao Clerkin lives in Irvine with her husband and three children.

Emily Dorff, originally from Florida, is a second-year poet in the MFA program at UC Riverside. She holds a BA from Georgetown University and is a poetry editor for the Santa Ana River Review.

Alex Dupree is a musician and third-year MFA student in poetry at UC Irvine. Before moving to LA, he lived all over Texas and in some parts of New Mexico. He’s now working on a collection of poems titled “Body & Repair.”

Howard Ho is a writer/composer. He studied Musicology and Communications at UCLA and earned his Master of Professional Writing at USC, where he was Stage and Screen Editor of the Southern California Review. This past year, he was a member of the Playground-LA Writers Pool and the Vagrancy Playwrights’ Group. His short works have been produced by the Company of Angels and New Musicals, Inc. He has written and composed two musicals, which received readings through Kaya Press and East West Players. His articles have been published by the Los Angeles Times and YOMYOMF. He is a member of Cold Tofu Improv and Playwrights’ Arena.

Cecilia Latiolais is a 2nd-year fiction candidate in UC Riverside’s MFA program and received her BA from the University of Michigan. She is working on a collection of short stories that center around controlling the mind, female body, and sexuality. She plans to continue exploring LA until it falls into the Pacific.

Niko Nelson is a poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her BA in Literary Studies from The New School and her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Niko is the founder of a literary skateboard magazine OUTLAWiNG, and her work has appeared in journals and magazines like Empty Mirror Ms.Fabulous, JustGo and Art Nouveau. This June, Niko will embark on a tour of the US and Canada to read from her latest work, featuring poems about big cities and mental states.

Benjamin S. Sneyd is an Appalachian writer from Northeast Tennessee. He most frequently writes about place, culture, and identity. His work has appeared in Burningword Literary Journal, Spry Literary Review, and elsewhere. He has worked as an intern at The Oxford American, an editorial assistant for Toad Suck Review, a general reader for Spry Literary Review, an assistant editor at The Tusculum Review, and is the editor-in-chief of Fannin Street: a journal of brave writing. He received his BA in English from Tusculum College and is currently finishing an MFA in writing at the California Institute of the Arts.

Casey Taylor is a prose writer who recently completed her Master of Professional Writing degree at the University of Southern California. She graduated with a degree in English from Stanford University and has also studied at Oxford and the University of Salamanca. Originally from Oregon, she now lives in South LA with her husband and an overweight black cat.

Jacqueline Young is a poet from Apple Valley, CA. Her work is miniature and observational, descending from the Imagist and Objectivist movements from the early 20th century. She holds a BA in English and MA in Education from Mount Holyoke College and is currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing at California Institute of the Arts.

Juan Felipe Herrera is the 21st Poet Laureate of the United State (2015-2016) and is the first Latino to hold the position. From 2012-2014, Herrera served as California State Poet Laureate. Herrera’s many collections of poetry include Notes on the Assemblage; Senegal Taxi; Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, a recipient of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971-2007. He is also the author of Crashboomlove: A Novel in Verse, which received the Americas Award. His books of prose for children include: SkateFate, Calling The Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats Award; Upside Down Boy; and Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box. Herrera is also a performance artist and activist on behalf of migrant and indigenous communities and at-risk youth.

Tom Lutz is the founding editor in chief of Los Angeles Review of Books and the author of Crying, Doing Nothing, and the forthcoming Wanderlust: Around the World in 80 Anecdotes.

Arts educator and independent filmmaker Ben Caldwell is the founder of KAOS Network, a community arts center in Leimert Park that provides training on digital arts, media arts and multimedia. Caldwell’s films often trace historical and cultural connections. “Eyewitness: Reflections of Malcolm X & the O.A.A.U.” (2006) presents the Harlem reunion of ex-members of the Organization of Afro-American Unity. “La Buena Vida” (The Good Life) (2008), filmed over the course of three years while Caldwell taught at the California Institute of the Arts, documents the cultural exchanges between a group of hip hop artists and musicians from Los Angeles and their counterparts in Havana, Cuba.

Ayana A. H. Jamieson is a writer, editor, and organizer. She is a lecturer for State University of New York, Empire State College’s Center for Distance Learning. She is the founder of the Los Angeles-based Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, a community organization that highlights the ongoing creative, scholarly, community, and social justice work inspired by speculative fiction author Octavia E. Butler. Jamieson was one of the organizers of “Ferguson is the Future — Incubating Alternative Worlds Through Arts, Activism, and Scholarship” symposium at Princeton University. Her current book project is Octavia Butler’s biography based on Butler’s own published and unpublished writing and her Southern California origins.

Douglas Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and (2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection. His third poetry collection, Patter (2014), examines miscarriage, infertility, and parenthood. Kearney’s second book, The Black Automaton (2009) was a National Poetry Series selection. A collection of opera libretti—Someone Took They Tongues.—is forthcoming. He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Poetry, nocturnes, Pleiades, Iowa Review, Boston Review, and Indiana Review; and various anthologies. He teaches at CalArts.

A close friend of Octavia Butler during her years in Seattle, Nisi Shawl is a founder of the Carl Brandon Society and a member of Clarion West’s Board of Directors. Cynthia Ward she coauthored Writing the Other: A Practical Approach. Her story collection Filter House co-won the 2009 Tiptree Award. Shawl edited Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars. She co-edited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler; and Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. Shawl’s Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair is due out in August.

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of essays on myth-making and black presences in film, literature, and visual art, and co-editor of The Encyclopedia Project. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Viz. InterArts: Interventions, Body Forms: On Queerness and the Essay, the Reanimation Library’s Word Processor series and in Letters to the Future: An Anthology of Experimental Writing by Black Women, among others. She is currently working on a novel, The Curator. Bryant teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts.

DJ Lynnée Denise is a DJ, writer, and scholar who creates work informed and inspired by underground cultural movements, the 1980s, migration studies, theories of escape, and electronic music of the African Diaspora. Denise has received support from the Jerome Foundation, The Astrae Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Idea Capital, Residency BiljmAIR (Netherlands), and The Rauschenberg Artists as Activists Grant.

Simon Winchester is the acclaimed author of many books, including The Professor and the Madman, The Men Who United the States, Atlantic, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and Krakatoa, all of which were New York Times bestsellers and appeared on numerous best and notable lists. In 2006, Mr. Winchester was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty the Queen. He resides in western Massachusetts.

Tom Lutz is the founding editor-in-chief of Los Angeles Review of Books and the author of Crying, Doing Nothing, and the forthcoming Wanderlust: Around the World in 80 Anecdotes.

Sandra Cisneros is the author of two highly celebrated novels, a story collection, two books of poetry, and, most recently, Have You Seen Marie? She is the recipient of numerous awards, including National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Lannan Literary Award, the American Book Award, the Thomas Wolfe Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Cisneros is the founder of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral and Macondo Foundations, which serve creative writers.

Reyna Grande is an award-winning author of the novels Across a Hundred Mountains, Dancing with Butterflies, and most recently, the memoir, The Distance Between Us, which was a National Book Circle Critics Award finalist. Born in Guerrero, Mexico, Reyna entered the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant at age 10, and later went on to become the first person in her family to graduate from college. Grande currently teaches creative writing at UCLA Extension and is at work on her next novel. She is the recipient of many awards, including an American Book Award, the El Premio Aztlán Literary Award, and the Latino Book Award.