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.

Eric Lax is the author of Faith, Interrupted; Conversations with Woody Allen; Life and Death on 10 West (A New York Times Notable Book of the Year); The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat (A Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2004); and co-author, with A. M. Sperber, of Bogart (nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography). His biography Woody Allen was a New York Times and international bestseller and a Notable Book of the Year. His books have been translated into eighteen languages, and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine. He is an officer of PEN International.

Dr. Robert Peter Gale, M.D. is the author of more than twenty books, eight hundred scientific articles, and numerous pieces on medical topics and nuclear energy for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. For twenty years, Gale was on the faculty of the UCLA School of Medicine and has served as chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry. Dr. Gale was appointed by the Soviet Union government in 1986 to lead the medical relief efforts for victims of the Chernobyl nuclear power station accident, and in 2011, the Japanese government requested that Gale be in charge of treating radiation victims from the deadly Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Photo Credit: Jeremy Sutton Hibbert for Greenpeace. Image taken in Fukushima, Japan.

Hanna Rosin is a senior editor at The Atlantic and a founder of DoubleX, Slate’s women’s section. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, The New Republic, and The Washington Post, and is the recipient of a 2010 National Magazine Award.

Katherine Spillar is the executive vice president of the Feminist Majority Foundation and the Feminist Majority, national organizations working for women’s equality, empowerment, and non-violence. She is also the executive editor of Ms. Magazine. Under her oversight, Ms. won the prestigious “Maggie Award” for the best feature article for its investigation into the network of extremists connected to Scott Roeder, who murdered Dr. George Tiller. Spillar also led the magazine’s investigative report on human trafficking and working conditions akin to indentured servitude in the garment factories on the U.S. Territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, which led to the passage of labor and immigration reforms in Congress.  Spillar is a trained economist and researcher and a specialist in community organizing and speaks to diverse audiences nationwide on a broad range of domestic and international feminist topics.

Tani Ikeda is an award-winning director of narratives, documentaries, music videos, and commercial films. She is also co-founder of imMEDIAte Justice, a summer workshop and community outreach program for girls devoted to revolutionizing sex education through filmmaking. As the current executive director of imMEDIAte Justice, she was recently named one of the "25 Visionaries Who are Changing Your World" by the Utne Reader. Ikeda was selected as one of Film Independent’s 33 Emerging Filmmakers as a Project: Involve Directors Fellow. She tours the country speaking at universities and national conferences and has launched film production programs on the Quinault Reservation in Washington, a media justice camp for girls in Uganda, and a film summer camp in China.

Carol Downer is an American feminist lawyer. In 1972, Downer’s arrest, trial, and acquittal in a case dubbed "The Great Yogurt Conspiracy" brought national attention to the women’s health education project that she and her colleagues started, the Feminist Women’s Health Centers.  She is the co-author of A New View of a Woman’s Body and How to Stay Out of the Gynecologist’s Office.

Dr. Amy Parish is a biological anthropologist, primatologist, and Darwinian feminist. She taught at the University of Southern California in the Gender Studies, Arts and Letters, Public Health, and Anthropology departments for thirteen years. She is currently affiliated faculty at Georgetown University and a research associate at University College London.  She conducted ground-breaking research on patterns of female dominance and matriarchal social structure in one of our closest living relatives, the bonobo.  She is currently working on a book about love, marriage, and the experience of being a wife.

The recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Sidney Hillman Award, Charles Bowden is the critically acclaimed author of many books including Down by the River, A Shadow in the City, and Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing. He is a contributing editor of GQ and Mother Jones magazine, and also writes for other magazines such as Harper's Magazine, New York Times Book Review, Esquire, and Aperture. Bowden lives in Tuscon, AZ.