Armistead Maupin is the author of the Tales of the City series, of which The Days of Anna Madrigal is the ninth book and which includes Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You, Michael Tolliver Lives, and Mary Ann in Autumn. Three television miniseries were made from the first three Tales novels. Maupin is also the author of Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener. A stage musical version of Tales of the City premiered at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater in May 2011. Maupin lives in Santa Fe with his husband, Christopher Turner.

Chris Freeman teaches English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. His first book, The Isherwood Century, won a Lambda Literary Award. He and his writing partner have recently completed a new collection of essays on Isherwood, which will be published in late 2014. They co-edited Love, West Hollywood, an anthology of tales of LGBTQ Los Angeles. Freeman is on the advisory board of the Monette-Horwitz Trust and is a board member of ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.

During this program, we paid tribute to Los Angeles' unofficial poet laureate, Wanda Coleman, with an evening of readings and shared memories. Honoring what she did for poetry and who she was in Los Angeles: a shy larger-than-life figure who, for decades, reminded us how to be our own most authentic selves, who made us remember histories of poetry and oppression and music. We will miss her, and we will celebrate her. We will remember her. Musical accompaniment was provided by David Ornette Cherry.

Evelyn McDonnell is the author and co-editor of five books, including Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids and Rock ‘n’ Roll. She has worked as a pop music critic for the Miami Herald and as senior editor for the Village Voice. She’s won several awards, including an Annenberg Fellowship at USC and first place for enterprise by the South Florida Black Journalists Association. She is currently a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University.

Exene Cervenka is an American singer, songwriter, artist, and activist. Shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 1977, Exene met John Doe at a poetry workshop at Beyond Baroque. Together with guitarist Billy Zoom, they formed the seminal Los Angeles punk band, X. To this day, X continues to play nationally and internationally with all four original members: Cervenka, Doe, Zoom, and drummer D.J. Bonebrake. Over the years, Exene has published poetry, prose, and art books; exhibited her collages in museums and galleries; recorded and toured with her other bands; played solo shows with an acoustic guitar and her songs; and said "yes" to just about every insane, imaginative, worthwhile project other thinking humans have offered her.

Allison Wolfe formed the all-girl punk band Bratmobile with the intention of helping to create and expand a feminist music scene spearheaded by Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill. This feminist, DIY (do-it-yourself) music scene, soon to be coined "riot grrrl," had a goal of making the punk rock scene more feminist while simultaneously making academic feminism more "punk." Later recognized as a strain of third-wave feminism, riot grrrl spread throughout the 1990s, mostly in the US and UK, as a loose network of young, feminist, alternative music scene women who believed in fighting the power with cultural activism. After the demise of Bratmobile and riot grrrl, Allison continued to be active in bands such as Cold Cold Hearts, Deep Lust, Partyline, and Cool Moms. In 1999-2000, she also initiated Ladyfest, a non-profit, DIY feminist music festival. Allison currently resides in Los Angeles, where she is working on an oral history of riot grrrl book/film project.

Eli and Edythe Broad have built two of the most prominent collections of postwar and contemporary art worldwide: The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection and The Broad Art Foundation. The two collections together include nearly 2,000 works by more than 200 artists. Since 1984, The Broad Art Foundation has operated an active “lending library” of its extensive collection and will open a contemporary art museum in downtown Los Angeles in the fall 2014.

Joanne Heyler is the director/chief curator of The Broad Art Foundation. She has curated the Broad collections and directed the Foundation’s “lending library” program since 1995. Under Ms. Heyler’s direction, the Foundation’s collection has added over 60 artists, including in-depth representations of work by crucial postwar figures such as Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys, as well as work by more recent figures like Damien Hirst, Sharon Lockhart, Kara Walker, and Mark Bradford. As an adviser to the Broads, Ms. Heyler is closely involved with the Broads’ philanthropic investments in the visual arts.

Inge Reist is the director of The Frick Collection's Center for the History of Collecting and the chief of Research Collections and Programs at the Frick Art Reference Library. She is the co-editor of Provenance: An Alternative Art History, and her essays on the history of collecting have been included in numerous publications. From 2005 to 2011, Reist served as the chairman of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History from 2005 to 2011. She currently serves on the editorial board of Art Documentation and the Art Advisory Board for EBSCO Publishing.

Greg Goldin has written widely about architecture and urban affairs for Los Angeles Magazine, L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, and Architect's Newspaper. He is the curator of Windshield Perspective, a Getty Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. now showing at A+D Architecture and Design Museum > Los Angeles. He is co-curator of Never Built: Los Angeles and co-author of the book of the same title.

Christopher Hawthorne is architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. Before coming to the Times he was architecture critic for Slate and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Washington Post, Metropolis, Architect, Domus, I.D., Print, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and Architectural Record, among many other publications. He is the author, with Alanna Stang, of The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture.

Mia Lehrer is the founder of Mia Lehrer + Associates, known for its wide spectrum of design and development of ambitious public and private projects, including urban revitalization developments, large urban parks, and complex commercial projects. She is internationally recognized for her progressive landscape designs, working with such natural landmarks as parks, lakes, and rivers, coupled with her advocacy for ecology and people-friendly public space. Lehrer believes that great landscape design coupled with sustainability has the power to enhance the livability and quality of life in our cities and, in doing so, improve by great measure the quality of our environment.

Sam Lubell is the West Coast Editor of the Architect’s Newspaper. He has written five books about architecture: Never Built: Los Angeles, Paris 2000+, London 2000+, Living West, and Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, New York Magazine, Architectural Record, Architect Magazine, Architectural Review, and several other publications. His exhibition Never Built: Los Angeles opens on July 27.

Alan Hess is an architect, historian, and author whose nineteen books on modern architecture and urbanism include monographs on Oscar Niemeyer, Frank Lloyd Wright, John Lautner, and the architectural histories of Las Vegas, Palm Springs, the Ranch House, and Googie architecture. Hess holds a Master of Architecture degree, was a National Arts Journalism Fellow at Columbia University's School of Journalism, and was the recipient of a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. As a preservationist, Hess qualified the oldest remaining McDonald’s drive-in restaurant, located in Downey, for the National Register of Historic Places.

William Deverell is a professor of history at the University of Southern California, where he specializes in the history of California and the American West and directs a scholarly institute that collaborates with the Huntington Library in Pasadena. He is the author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910. With Greg Hise, he is co-author of Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region. William is a Fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC.

Donald C. Jackson is the author of Building the Ultimate Dam: John S. Eastwood and the Control of Water in the American West and Pastoral and Monumental: Dams, Postcards, and the American Landscape (June 2013). In 2004 he co-authored with Norris Hundley Jr. the article “Privilege and Responsibility: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster,” published in California History. Jackson is a Professor of History at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, and was recently in residence as a Trent R. Dames Fellow at The Huntington Library.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, activist, and author of thirteen books about ecology, environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and memory. Her books include A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories; Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and most recently, the bestselling volume of 19 essays and 22 innovative maps, titled Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. Solnit has received many awards for her writing, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award for her book River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.

Patt Morrison is a writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times and she hosted the daily Patt Morrison public affairs program on KPCC. She has won six Emmys and ten Golden Mike awards for Life & Times Tonight on KCET, and for her KPCC show, which won three Golden Mike Awards for Best Public Affairs Show in its six-year run. She’s the author of the best-selling Rio LA, Tales from the Los Angeles River, and her interview subjects include Salman Rushdie, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Ray Bradbury.

Josh Kun is a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, where he is director of The Popular Music Project at The Norman Lear Center. He is the author of 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. With The Grammy Museum, he recently curated "Trouble in Paradise: Music and Los Angeles 1945-1975", part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time series. He is currently collaborating with The Library Foundation of Los Angeles, The Los Angeles Public Library, and Angel City Press on Songs in the Key of L.A., a multimedia exploration of Los Angeles through its vintage sheet music.

The music of GRAMMY® Award-winning band Quetzal, is at once visceral, and intellectual. It makes you move, it makes you sing, and it makes you think. Sometimes thought of as a rock band, its members draw from a much larger web of musical, cultural, and social engagement. On the band’s latest full-length release Imaginaries, Quetzal creatively combines shades of East L.A.’s soundscape, traditional son jarocho of Veracruz, salsa, R&B, and more to express the political and social struggle for self-determination and self-representation, which ultimately is a struggle for dignity.

Juan Felipe Herrera is the current California Poet Laureate and an award-winning writer and teacher in the Creative Writing Department at UC Riverside. He has published numerous volumes of poetry, prose, theater, children’s books, and young adult novels, including Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, which received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award, the International Latino Award in poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, and the UC Berkeley Regent’s Fellowship. His most recent work is Senegal Taxi.

Marisa Urrutia Gedney, writer and educator, is a native Angeleno and was recently named one of Forbes Magazine's top 30 under 30 in Education. She is currently the Director of Programming for 826LA where she helps students write and publish their stories.

Freddy Lopez is a poet, writer, rapper, and performer from East Palo Alto. He is currently an undergraduate at U.C. Riverside, where he was recently in the case of the play Stars of Juarez, written by Juan Felipe Herrera. Lopez co-founded a self-expression organization called Art of the P.O.O.R. His future goals include becoming a professional rapper-poet-guitarist-performer, an education revolutionary, and starting a center for self-expression in his hometown.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Torch and Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, a collection of writings from her "Dear Sugar" column in The Rumpus. Her memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as the inaugural title for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. Her stories and essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Allure, The Rumpus, The Missouri Review, The Sun, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere.

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor at High Country News, where she writes about politics, the environment, and natural resources. Her work has also appeared in Mother Jones, The Atlantic, Sierra, Audubon, the LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times.

Gavin Newsom is the 49th lieutenant governor of the state of California, following his two terms as the youngest mayor elected in San Francisco in over one hundred years. Previously, he founded fifteen small businesses in the San Francisco Bay area and now hosts The Gavin Newsom Show on Current TV. His newest book is Citizenville: Connecting People and Government in the Digital Age.

Patt Morrison is a writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and she hosted the daily Patt Morrison public affairs program on KPCC. She has won six Emmys and ten Golden Mike awards for Life & Times Tonight on KCET and for her KPCC show, which won three Golden Mike Awards for Best Public Affairs Show in its six-year run. She’s the author of the best-selling Rio LA, Tales from the Los Angeles River, and her interview subjects include Salman Rushdie, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and Ray Bradbury.