Lynell George is an L.A.-based journalist and essayist who covers art, culture, social issues, and identity politics. Formerly a longtime staff writer at both the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly, her work has also appeared in Vibe, Essence, The Smithsonian, Black Clock and Boom: A Journal of California. George has taught journalism at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and is currently an art and culture columnist for KCET|Artbound.

Marisela Norte is the recipient of the Ben Reitman award from San Diego State University for Peeping Tom Tom Girl, a collection of poetry and prose. Her poems featured on MTA buses in the "Out Your Window" project were recently selected among the ten best transit poems in the world by The Atlantic. Norte continues to document life in Los Angeles in words and through photography via public transportation.

Frosty is the co-founder and creative director of dublab. He is the proud host of the radio thrill called "Celsius Drop." As an extension of dublab’s future roots radio transmissions Frosty produces the "dublab presents" album collection and a series of highly-themed, world-touring art exhibitions. Frosty has been voted "best dj in Los Angeles" by the LA Weekly but personally prefers to hear his friends play great tunes. That being said he’s fortunate to frequently travel to exotic locales to play far-out records.

Cynthia Hawkins is the owner of Hawkins House of Burgers in Watts, where her commitment to serving "only the best" fresh ingredients for decades has led her restaurant to be celebrated as one of the best burger joints in the U.S. Cynthia is the youngest in a family of successful entrepreneurs and grew up helping her parents manage their "50s style" malt shop, later converted to Slater Market- a neighborhood grocery store- before taking over the space and reinventing it as Hawkins House of Burgers. Cynthia’s restaurant has been featured on the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods and has received rave reviews from Los Angeles Magazine, LA Weekly 99 Essential Restaurants, Zagat, LAist, and Ask Men, among others.

Ricardo Jordan Diaz is the Chef and Founder of Colonia Restaurant Group. Diaz grew up in the restaurant business, and at the age of nine, he was already washing dishes every weekend at his family’s Mexican seafood chain “El 7 Mares”. After opening a number of family locations, he set out on his own to recreate the Latin dining experience. Starting with a few Dorados restaurants in the late nineties, Diaz went on to found Cook’s Tortas in 2007, Guisados in 2010, Bizarra Capital in 2012, Colonia Taco Lounge in 2013, Colonia Publica in 2014 and become Executive Chef of Santa Monica’s Tacoteca that same year. His goal is to expose patrons to the wonderful variety and extensive ingredients that Latin cuisine offers in its home countries.

Josh Kun is a professor in the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. He is the author of the new book To Live and Dine in L.A.: Menus and the Making of the Modern City(Angel City Press) based on the special collections of the Los Angeles Public Library. His first collaboration with the Library was Songs in the Key of Los Angeles, an examination of the early sheet music of the city that resulted in an award-winning book, as well as new recordings, public concerts, and an online web series with KCET Artbound. He is also the author of the American Book Award-winning Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America, co-author of And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Our Vinyl, and co-editor of Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border, among other volumes.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of six collections of poetry, including After, Given Sugar, Given Salt, The Lives of the Heart, and The October Palace, as well as a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She edited and co-translated The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, and Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems. In 2004, Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor formerly held by such poets as Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop. In 2012, she was elected Chancellor of the Academy. Her newest work, published spring of 2015, is a volume of poetry titled The Beauty and a book of essays titled Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World.

Louise Steinman is the curator of the award-winning ALOUD series and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of three books: The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War; The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance and The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation. She will be a spring 2015 writer-in-residence at the Warsaw Bauhaus. Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books and on her Crooked Mirror blog.

Jill Leovy is a reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times, where she has worked for fifteen years. She's the recipient of numerous journalism awards, including, as a member of a six-reporter team, the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. In 2007, Leovy created an innovative blog project called "The Homicide Report" that covered every single one of the 845 murders in Los Angeles that year.

Warren Olney is the host and executive producer of Which Way, LA? and To the Point. WWLA is the signature daily local news program on 89.9 KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com. Olney reaches a national audience with To the Point, distributed by Public Radio International and several other public radio markets nationwide. Olney and both of his programs have been honored with nearly 40 national, regional, and local awards for broadcast excellence since its inception. Most recently, Olney received the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award for his broad achievements in television news, as well as his storied career over 20 years on public radio, both locally and nationally.

Robin Coste Lewis is a Provost’s Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies at USC. A Cave Canem fellow, she received her MFA from NYU and an MTS in Sanskrit from Harvard's Divinity School. A finalist for the International War Poetry Prize, the National Rita Dove Prize, and the Discovery Prize, her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies. She has taught at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College, and the NYU/MFA in Paris. Born in Compton, her family is from New Orleans. Her book of poems, Voyage of the Sable Venus, is forthcoming from Knopf.

Claudia Rankine is the author of four previous books, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. She currently serves as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Pomona College in California. She is a recent recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize, given annually by Poets & Writers, "to an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition."

Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include The Argonauts (forthcoming in May 2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets, The Red Parts: A Memoir and Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions. Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes and Jane: A Murder. She is the recipient of many awards, including an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She has taught on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts since 2005.

Lourdes Grobet, a contemporary photographer, is best known for her photographs of Mexican Lucha libre wrestlers. Her work has been exhibited widely in more than a hundred individual and joint exhibitions, including MoMA in New York and San Francisco and festivals such as PhotoEspaña in Madrid. Among her many published books are Lourdes Grobet: LuchaLibre, Espectacular de LuchaLibre, and Luchalibremexicana. Among her other projects are: Paisajespintados, Teatrocampesino, Strip Tease. Bering: Balance and Resistance (2013) is her first documentary film, inspired by a photographic exhibition of the same name she authored in 2009. Groubet lives in Mexico.

Julianna Brannum is a documentary filmmaker based in Austin, TX. Her first film, The Creek Runs Red, aired in 2007 on PBS’s national prime-time series, Independent Lens. In early 2008, she co-produced a feature-length documentary with Emmy Award-winning producer Stanley Nelson for PBS’s We Shall Remain – a 5-part series on Native American history. Brannum was a 2007 Sundance Institute/Ford Foundation Fellow and has been awarded many grants and fellowships for her latest documentary LaDonna Harris: Indian 101. She is a member of the Quahada band of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma.

Yolanda Cruz is a filmmaker from Oaxaca, Mexico. She is a 2011 Sundance Screenwriting and Directing Lab Fellow, whose first feature script, La Raya, will be produced by Canana Films in 2015. Her work has been screened at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Park la Villette in Paris, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the National Institute of Cinema in Mexico City. She holds an MFA from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. Cruz is also an alumna of the Sundance Institute Native Lab.

Kim Bancroft is a longtime teacher turned editor and writer. Kim has edited several memoirs, including Ariel: A Memoir, by Ariel Parkinson; The Morning the Sun Went Down, by Darryl Babe Wilson; and Ruth’s Journey: A Survivor’s Memoir, by Ruth Glasberg Gold. Most recently, she edited Literary Industries, the 1890 memoir of her great-great-grandfather Hubert Howe Bancroft, historian, and founder of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley (Heyday, 2013). She is also the author of The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher.

Malcolm Margolin is executive director of Heyday, an independent nonprofit publisher and unique cultural institution, which he founded in 1974. Margolin is the author of several books, including The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco–Monterey Bay Area, named by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the hundred most important books of the twentieth century by a western writer. He has received dozens of prestigious awards, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fred Cody Award Lifetime Achievement from the San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, and a Cultural Freedom Award from the Lannan Foundation. He helped found the Bay Nature Institute and the Alliance for California Traditional Artists.

Vincent Medina, Jr, a member of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area, works for Heyday Books, where he focuses on sharing the stories of the larger California Indian world. He authors the lively multimedia blog Being Ohlone in the 21st Century, and is active in the revitalization of the Chochenyo language, the indigenous language of the eastern shores of the San Francisco Bay that many linguists had long labeled "extinct." Using wax cylinder recordings and ethnographic notes, he has helped bring the language into modern times. Vincent is currently in college and lives in San Lorenzo, California, which is part of his Jalquin Ohlone ancestral homeland.

James Ellroy, a native of Los Angeles, is a master of noir crime fiction. Ellroy has up close and personal knowledge of the world of crime, his life shadowed by a gruesome event: the unsolved murder of his mother when he was a child. Nearly all of his writing is set in Los Angeles, in the rough, racist, pre-Miranda Los Angeles of the decade following the Second World War. He is the author of the L. A. Quartet novels: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L. A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He is also the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy—American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's a Rover. His memoir, My Dark Places, was named as Time magazine’s Best Book of The Year.

Walter Kirn is the author of bestselling Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade, as well as Thumbsucker and Up in the Air, both made into major films. His work has appeared in GQ, New York, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine.

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.