Gary Snyder is a poet, author, scholar, cultural critic, and Professor Emeritus of UC Davis. He graduated from Reed college in Portland, Oregon (where his roommates were poets Lew Welch and Philip Whalen) in 1951. In the Bay Area, Snyder associated with Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and others who were part of the remarkable flowering of west coast poetry during the fifties. In 1956 he moved to Japan to study Zen Buddhism and East Asian culture. For the last thirty-eight years, he has lived in the northern Sierra Nevada. He divides his time between environmental and cultural issues with a focus on the Sierra Nevada ecosystem, and teaching with a focus on creative writing, ethnopoetics, and bioregional praxis. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose. He has been awarded the Pulitzer prize for poetry (1975) as well as the Bollingen Prize (1997). His selected poems No Nature was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992.

Lew Welch attended Reed College in Oregon, where he met future Beat poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. While at graduate school at the University of Chicago in 1951, he suffered a nervous breakdown. He left school and went into psychotherapy while working as an advertising copywriter. (He came up with the famous slogan "RAID KILLS BUGS DEAD.") He moved to San Francisco to pursue his work as a poet, supporting himself as a cabdriver and became an active participant in Beat culture, living at various times with Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and appearing as the character, Dave Wain in Jack Kerouac's novel, Big Sur. Welch published and performed widely during the 1960s, and taught a poetry workshop as part of the University of California Extension in San Francisco from 1965 to 1970 and as poet-in-residence at Reed College in January 1971. On May 23rd 1971, he left behind a note and walked out of Snyder's house in the mountains carrying a revolver. His body was never found. Lew Welch is included in many Beat Generation retrospectives or anthologies, and his book of collected poems, Ring of Bone, was first published in 1973.

Ramón Garcia is the author of a book of poetry Other Countries. He has published poetry in a variety of journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry 1996, Ambit, The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of U.S.-Hispanic Literature, Crab Orchard Review; Poetry Salzburg Review, Los Angeles Review and Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. He is a Professor in Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Northridge.

Alicia Partnoy is a survivor of Argentina's detention camps during the dictatorship in the late 1970s. Best known for The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival, Partnoy also published the poetry collection Little Low Flying/Volando Bajito. Poems from her Revenge of the Apple/Venganza de la Manzana rode the metro in New York, Dallas, and Washington D.C., are sung by "Sweet Honey in the Rock" and were translated into several languages, including Hebrew. Partnoy edited You Can't Drown the Fire: Latin American Women Writing in Exile, and co-edited Chicana/Latina Studies: the Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social. Her most recent book is the translation of Gail Wronsky's poetry collection So Quick Bright Things.

Susan Salter Reynolds has been a book critic and features writer at the Los Angeles Times for twenty years. Prior to that she was an assistant editor at The New York Review of Books.

Chuck Rosenthal is the author of eight novels: The Loop Trilogy, Loop's Progress, Experiments with Life and Deaf, and Loop's End; Elena of the Stars, Avatar Angel, the Last Novel of Jack Kerouac, My Mistress Humanity, The Heart of Mars; and Coyote O'Donohughe's History of Texas. He has published a memoir, Never Let Me Go, and most recently a travel book, Are We Not There Yet? Travels in Nepal, North India, and Bhutan. Rosenthal teaches fiction writing at Loyola Marymount University. He is the manager of the Glass Table Artists' Collective and Managing Editor of What Books Press.

Gail Wronsky is the author, coauthor, or translator of nine books of poetry and prose, including Dying for Beauty, Poems for Infidels, and Volando Bajito, among others. She teaches creative writing at Loyola Marymount University.

Gronk is a nationally renowned painter and performance artist from Los Angeles. During the 1970's, he was one of the founding members of ASCO, an avant-garde multi-media arts collective in Los Angeles. He is best known for his murals and his very physical approach to painting. Much of his recent work has been done as temporary, mural-scale, site-specific paintings, the latest for the Fowler Museum at UCLA in April 2010.

Shepard Fairey is the man behind OBEY GIANT. What started with an absurd sticker he created in 1989 while a student at the Rhode Island School of Design has since evolved into a worldwide street art campaign. In 2003, Fairey founded Studio Number One, a creative design firm dedicated to applying his ethos at the intersection of art and enterprise. In 2008, Fairey's HOPE portrait of Barack Obama became the iconic image of the presidential campaign and the original image now hangs in the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. In May of 2010, his exhibition MAYDAY was the final show to be mounted at Dietch Projects, in New York City. His work has also been exhibited in museums worldwide.