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.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a National Correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. Coates has received The National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, and the George Polk Award for his Atlantic cover story, “The Case for Reparations.” He lives in New York with his wife and son.

Robin D. G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. His books include the prize-winning, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America; Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century, written collaboratively with Dana Frank and Howard Zinn; and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. His most recent book is Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times.

Roberta Kaplan is a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and is litigating the case against Mississippi’s gay marriage ban. She lives in New York with her wife and son.

Lillian Faderman is an internationally known scholar of lesbian history and literature, as well as ethnic history and literature. Among her many honors are six Lambda Literary Awards, two American Library Association Awards, and several lifetime achievement awards for scholarship. She is the author of The Gay Revolution and the New York Times Notable Books, Surpassing the Love of Men and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers.

Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning Egyptian American journalist and commentator. Her essays and op-eds on Egypt, the Islamic world, and women’s rights have appeared in various publications, including The Washington Post and The New York Times. She has appeared as a guest commentator on MSNBC, the BBC, CNN, PBS, Al-Jazeera, NPR, and dozens of other television and radio networks, and is a contributing opinion writer for the International New York Times. She lives in Cairo and New York City.

Kelly McEvers is a national correspondent based at NPR West. She previously ran NPR’s Beirut bureau, where she earned a Peabody award, an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia award, a Gracie award, and an Overseas Press Club mention for her 2012 coverage of the Syrian conflict. In 2008-2009, McEvers was part of the award-winning “Working” series for American Public Media’s business and finance show, Marketplace. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Monthly, Slate and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her work has aired on This American Life, The World, and the BBC.

Winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, Joseph E. Stiglitz is the best-selling author of Making Globalization Work, Globalization and Its Discontents, and The Three Trillion Dollar War, co-authored with Linda Bilmes. He was chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and served as senior vice president and chief economist at the World Bank. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Jim Newton is a veteran journalist, author, and educator. He began his career as a clerk to James Reston at The New York Times and spent 25 years as a reporter, bureau chief, columnist, and editor at the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of two critically acclaimed biographies, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made and Eisenhower: The White House Years. Last year, he collaborated with former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on Panetta's autobiography, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace. He is presently creating a new magazine at UCLA scheduled to debut this spring.

Jennifer Clement has studied literature in New York and Paris. Among many honors for her work, the internationally acclaimed novel Prayers for the Stolen was awarded the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) Fellowship for Literature as well as the Sara Curry Humanitarian Award. She is also the author of the memoir Widow Basquiat and the novels A True Story Based on Lies, a finalist for the Orange Prize, and The Poison That Fascinates, as well as several books of poetry. Clement’s work has been translated into twenty languages. She lives in Mexico City and was President of PEN Mexico from 2009 to 2012.

Magdalena Edwards is a writer based in Los Angeles and born in Santiago, Chile. Her essays and lyrical experiments have appeared recently in The Millions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review Daily. Her work as a staff writer for Chile's leading newspaper El Mercurio led to graduate studies at UCLA in Comparative Literature, with an emphasis on twentieth-century poet-translators from the Americas, including Elizabeth Bishop, Octavio Paz, and Manuel Bandeira. Edwards occasionally translates poetry and prose from Spanish and Portuguese, and she is an editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is working on a book about love.

Winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, Joseph E. Stiglitz is the best-selling author of Making Globalization Work, Globalization and Its Discontents, and The Three Trillion Dollar War, co-authored with Linda Bilmes. He was chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and served as senior vice president and chief economist at the World Bank. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Jim Newtonis a veteran journalist, author, and educator. He began his career as a clerk to James Reston at The New York Times and spent 25 years as a reporter, bureau chief, columnist, and editor at the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of two critically acclaimed biographies, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made and Eisenhower: The White House Years. Last year, he collaborated with former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on Panetta's autobiography, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace. He is presently creating a new magazine at UCLA scheduled to debut this spring.

Ana Tijoux es una cantante dos veces nominada al GRAMMY, con tres álbumes de estudio: 1977, La Bala, y Vengo en 2014. Nacida en Francia -donde su padre y madre fueron exiliadxs durante la dictadura militar en su país natal, Chile, Tijoux regresó a Chile para producir sus álbumes, sonidos que abarcan desde la época dorada del hip-hop intelectual al jazz, funk y ritmos del folklore latinoamericano. Sus colaboraciones incluyen trabajo con Julieta Venegas y Jorge Dexter.

Ana Tijoux is a two-time Grammy-nominated musician with three studio albums: 1977, La Bala, and 2014's Vengo. Born in France—where her parents were exiled during the military dictatorship in their native Chile—Tijoux returned to Chile to produce her albums,  sounds spanning the golden age of intellectual hip hop to jazz, funk, and folkloric Latin rhythms. Her collaborations include work with Julieta Venegas and Jorge Drexler.

Jen Hofer es una poeta radicada en Los Ángeles, traduce del español, trabaja como intérprete de justicia social y maestra, teje, hace libros a mano, escribe cartas en la calle en su escritorio público, es ciclista urbana y co-fundadora de Antena, una colectiva para la justicia del lenguaje y la experimentación del lenguaje. Publica poemas y traducciones con numerosas editoriales pequeñas y en varias manifestaciones DIY/DIT. Enseña en CalArts y en el Colegio Otis, y trabaja localmente haciendo abogacía para la justicia del lenguaje con Antena Los Ángeles.

Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and language experimentation collaborative Antena. She publishes poems and translations with numerous small presses and in various DIY/DIT incarnations. She teaches at CalArts and at Otis College and works locally doing language justice advocacy with Antena Los Ángeles.

Sandy Tolan is the author of Me & Hank and The Lemon Tree. As co-founder of Homelands Productions, Tolan has produced dozens of radio documentaries for NPR and PRI. He has also written for more than forty magazines and newspapers. His work has won numerous awards, and he was a 1993 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and an I. F. Stone Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He is an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Kelly McEvers is a national correspondent based at NPR West. She previously ran NPR's Beirut bureau, where she earned many awards, including a George Foster Peabody award, for her 2012 coverage of the Syrian conflict. She recently made a radio documentary about being a war correspondent with renowned radio producer Jay Allison of Transom.org. In 2008 and 2009, McEvers was part of a team that produced the award-winning Working series for American Public Media's business and finance show Marketplace.

Karima Bennoune is a professor of International Law at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. She is a former legal advisor for Amnesty International. Currently, Bennoune sits on the board of the network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML). She has appeared on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 and made frequent appearances on MSNBC, including on All In With Chris Hayes, after the Paris attacks. Her recent book,Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism, which details local struggles against extremism, is based on 300 interviews with people of Muslim heritage from 30 countries. It won the 2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The related TED talk, “When people of Muslim heritage challenge fundamentalism,” has received over 1.2 million views.

Ani Zonneveld is the founder and President of Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV). Since its inception in 2007, Ani has presided over MPV’s expansion to include chapters and affiliates in the United States and around the world, as well as securing consultative status at the United Nations. She is a strong supporter of women and LGBTQ rights, freedom of expression, and for freedom of and from belief. Ani is the brainchild of Literary Zikr—a project that counters radical Islam online, co-editor of an anthology Progressive Muslim Identities—Personal Stories from the U.S. and Canada, and a contributor for Huffington Postand Open Democracy. Ani performs Islamic wedding services for mixed-faith and gay couples.