Manal al-Sharif was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in 1979. In 2011, she was imprisoned for driving a car and charged with “driving while female.” The mother of two sons, she is now a leading women’s rights activist and has been lauded by TIME, Foreign Policy, Forbes, and the Oslo Freedom Forum. 

Kelly McEvers is a host of NPR’s All Things Considered and of the NPR podcast, Embedded. She was previously a Middle East correspondent for NPR, where she earned multiple awards for her coverage of the Syrian conflict. She has covered the Arab Spring, the war in Iraq, and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and Slate. Her radio work has also aired on This American Life and the BBC. She lives in Los Angeles.

Tim Weiner has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his work on American intelligence and national security. He covered the CIA for The New York Times and worked in 18 nations as a foreign correspondent. His books include Legacy of Ashes and Enemies—histories of the CIA and the FBI—and One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon.

Erwin Chemerinsky is the founding dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law. He has authored eight books, most recently The Case Against the Supreme Court (2014), and more than 200 law-review articles. He has argued several cases before the Supreme Court and various circuits of the United States Court of Appeals.

Jim Newton is a veteran journalist, author and teacher. In 25 years at the Los Angeles Times, Newton worked as a reporter, editor, bureau chief, columnist and, from 2007 through 2010, editor of the editorial pages. Newton currently serves as the editor-in-chief of Blueprint, a new UCLA magazine addressing the policy challenges facing California and Los Angeles in particular. He also teaches in the Communication Studies and Public Policy department at UCLA. Newton is currently at work on this fourth book entitled Jerry Brown and the Creation of Modern California.

C. Nicole Mason, Ph.D., is the author of Born Bright: A Young Girl’s Journey from Nothing to Something in America (St. Martin’s Press) and heads up CR2PI at the New York Women’s Foundation. Her commentary and writing have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Politico, The Nation, The Progressive, Spotlight on Poverty, USA Today, Marie Claire Magazine, Ms. magazine, Essence Magazine, The Washington Post and on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and NBC, among other outlets.

Karon Jolna, Ph.D. is education director and editor at Ms. magazine. During her tenure, she has expanded the use of Ms. as a textbook in hundreds of universities in the U.S. and Canada, driving growth and revenue to sustain the magazine for the next generation. She is co-editor of Gender, Race and Class: From the Pages of Ms. magazine, 1972-present. Dr. Jolna served as a research scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 2004-2015. At UCLA, she developed and taught one of the first women and leadership courses featuring inspiring women leaders from a broad range of fields.

Tim Wu is an author, policy advocate and professor at Columbia University, currently serving as Senior Advisor to the United States Federal Trade Commission.  In 2006, he was recognized as one of fifty leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine, and in the following year, 01238 magazine listed him as one of Harvard’s one hundred most influential graduates. He writes for Slate, where he won the Lowell Thomas gold medal for travel journalism, and he has contributed to The New Yorker, Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Forbes.

Madeleine Brand is the host of KCRW’s award-winning Press Play, a show she created to bring a distinct, Southern California lens to news and culture. Madeleine has been a journalist for 25 years, primarily in public radio. She worked at NPR for 13 years in Los Angeles, New York and Washington. She’s won numerous awards for her hosting and reporting. Madeleine has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree with honors in English from UC Berkeley.

Maureen Dowd is a columnist for The New York Times and a best-selling author. During the 1970s and the early 1980s, she worked for TIME magazine and The Washington Star, where she covered news as well as sports and wrote feature articles. Dowd joined the Times in 1983 as a metropolitan reporter and eventually became an op-ed writer for the newspaper in 1995. In 1999, she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her series of columns on the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Clinton administration.

Adam Nagourney served as The New York Times‘ chief national political correspondent for many years before moving to the West Coast in 2010 to become the paper’s Los Angeles bureau chief. He’s one of the nation’s top political reporters and has covered several campaigns, including Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate run, the reelection of President George W. Bush and President Obama’s historic election. He previously worked as White House correspondent for USA Today, covering Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and the first year of the Clinton White House. Nagourney also contributes to the NYT‘s political blog, “The Caucus."

Ben Ehrenreich is the author of one book of journalism, The Way to the Spring; two novels, Ether and The Suitors; and many articles, stories, and essays. He lives in Los Angeles.

Amy Wilentz is the author of Farewell Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti, The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier, Martyrs’ Crossing, and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger. She is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, and also was a 1990 nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2014, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Farewell, Fred Voodoo. She has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, Thompson-Reuters magazine, The New Republic, The Village Voice, and many other publications. She teaches in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California at Irvine, and lives in Los Angeles.

Dr. Baz Dreisinger is: professor, journalist, justice worker, film and radio producer, cultural critic and prison-rights activist. As a journalist and critic, Dr. Dreisinger writes about Caribbean culture, race-related issues, travel, music and pop culture for such outlets as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and ForbesLife, and produces on-air segments about music and global culture for National Public Radio. Together with filmmaker Peter Spirer, Professor Dreisinger produced and wrote the documentaries Black & Blue: Legends of the Hip-Hop Cop which investigates the New York Police Department’s monitoring of the hip-hop industry, and Rhyme & Punishment about hip-hop and the prison industrial complex. She is the author of Near Black: White to Black Passing in American Culture (2008) and, in 2016, Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World.

Scott Budnick is the Founder and President of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition. He grew up in Atlanta, GA, and graduated from Emory University in 1999 with degrees in Business and Film. Formerly the Executive Vice President of Todd Phillips’ production company, Green Hat Films, Scott executive produced many successful comedies including the highest grossing rated-R comedies in history, The Hangover series. Outside of film, Scott is a fierce champion for children in need. Scott is a teacher and serves on the Board for InsideOUT Writers, an organization that aims to reduce juvenile recidivism through the use of creative writing and by providing a range of services to meet the needs of currently and formerly incarcerated young adults. Scott also serves on the Board of the Los Angeles Conservation Corps and on the Advisory Board for the Loyola Law School Center for Juvenile Law and Policy. For his work with youth in the criminal justice system, Governor Jerry Brown named Scott California’s Volunteer of the Year for 2012. Scott currently sits on the Board of State and Community Corrections (BSCC) and the Governor-appointed Community Colleges Board of Governors. Most recently, Scott was selected to be a Board Member of President Obama’s newly created foundation, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance.

Ellen R. Malcolm is the founder of EMILY’s List and has helped level the political playing field for women candidates, given women donors unprecedented influence in electoral politics, brought millions of women voters to the polls; and created a powerful movement dedicated to restoring progressive values to the American government.

Ann Friedman is a freelance journalist who writes about gender, politics, technology, and culture. She is a columnist for New York magazine’s website, and her work appears regularly in The Guardian, The New York Times, ELLE, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Republic. She also co-hosts the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, makes hand-drawn pie charts, and sends a popular weekly email newsletter.

Stephen Breyer, a San Francisco native, taught law for two decades at Harvard Law School, from which he graduated magna cum laude. He was nominated to the United States Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton and sworn in on August 3, 1994. He is the author of several books, including Making Our Democracy Work, which he spoke about on ALOUD in 2010.

Jeffrey Toobin is the bestselling author of The Oath, The Nine, Too Close to Call, A Vast Conspiracy, and The Run of His Life. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the senior legal analyst at CNN. He lives with his family in New York.