Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of The Taiga Syndrome and The Iliac Crest, among many other books. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, Rivera Garza is the M. D. Anderson Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies and director of the Ph.D. program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.

Born and raised in Tijuana, Mexico, and now living in Los Angeles, Ceci Bastida is a Latin Grammy-nominated musician, songwriter, recording artist, host of Punk in Translation, and activist. Formerly part of the bands Tijuana NO, Julieta Venegas, and Mexrrissey, she now works as a solo artist and has a new album, Every Thing Taken Away. An advocate of immigration reform and prison abolition, she partners with the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights as a child advocate and with Revolve Impact as a musical activist.

Rabbi Sharon Brous is the founding and senior rabbi of IKAR, a trail-blazing Jewish community-based in Los Angeles. Brous has been named #1 Most Influential Rabbi in the U.S. by Newsweek/The Daily Beast. She blessed Presidents Obama and Biden at their National Inaugural Prayer Services, and her TED Talk, "Reclaiming Religion," has been viewed 1.5 million times. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post.

Father Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest, is the founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, the largest gang intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry program in the world, now in its 32nd year. A recipient of the California Peace Prize and Laetare Medal, he was inducted into the California Hall of Fame and named a 2014 Champion of Change by President Obama. He is also a New York Times bestselling author of four books, most recently Forgive Everyone Everything (2022). He was born and raised in Los Angeles.

Alejandra Campoverdi is a nationally recognized women’s health advocate, founder, producer, and former White House aide to President Obama. She produced and appeared in the celebrated PBS documentary Inheritance, founded the Latinos &a BRCA awareness initiative in partnership with Penn Medicine’s Basser Center, and served as the first White House deputy director of Hispanic media. Alejandra is currently on the boards of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, the Friends of the National Museum of the American Latino, and the California Community Foundation. She holds a master in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and graduated cum laude from the University of Southern California.

Jean Guerrero is a columnist at the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. Her first book, Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir, won a PEN Literary Award and was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2019. Her writing is featured in Vanity Fair, Politico, The Nation, Wired, the New York Times, The Washington Post, Best American Essays 2019 by Rebecca Solnit and more. She won the 2022 "Best Commentary" award from the Sacramento Press Club. While working at KPBS as an investigative border reporter, she won an Emmy, contributed to NPR, the PBS NewsHour, and more. Months before Trump’s family separations captured national attention, her PBS reporting on the practice was cited by members of Congress. She started her career at the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires as a foreign correspondent in Mexico and Central America.

Tracy K. Smith is a librettist, a translator, and the author of five acclaimed poetry collections, including Life on Mars, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States. She lives in Massachusetts.

Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On? and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She lives in Los Angeles.

Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and novelist. He is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller Deep Down Dark, as well as The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation, and The Tattooed Soldier. His new book is Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”. Héctor is also a contributing writer for the New York Times opinion pages and an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine. He’s written for The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times and other publications. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, L.A. Noir, Zyzzyva, and Slate. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his family.

Carribean Fragoza is a fiction and nonfiction writer from South El Monte, CA. Her collection of stories Eat the Mouth That Feeds You was published in 2021 by City Lights and was a finalist for a 2022 PEN Award. Her co-edited compilation of essays, East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, was published by Rutgers University Press, and her collection of essays Writing Home: New Terrains of California is forthcoming with Angel City Press. She has published in Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Alta, BOMB, Huizache, KCET, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtNews, and Aperture Magazine. She is the Prose Editor at Huizache Magazine and Creative Nonfiction and Poetry Editor at Boom California, a journal of UC Press. Fragoza is the founder and co-director of South El Monte Arts Posse, an interdisciplinary arts collective. She is a 2023 Whiting Literary Award recipient.

Colin Campbell is a writer and director for theater and film. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Seraglio, a short film he wrote and directed with his lovely and talented wife, Gail Lerner. He has taught Theater and/or Filmmaking at Chapman University, Loyola Marymount University, Cal Poly Pomona University, and to incarcerated youth through The Unusual Suspects. His one-person show titled Grief: A One Man ShitShow premiered at the Hollywood Fringe Festival, where it won a Best of Broadwater Award. He lives in Los Angeles and sometimes Joshua Tree.

Rabbi Sharon Brous is the senior and founding rabbi of IKAR, which launched in 2004 with the goal of reinvigorating Jewish tradition and practice and inspiring people of faith to reclaim a moral and prophetic voice. IKAR is one of the fastest-growing and most influential Jewish congregations in the country. Rabbi Brous’s 2016 TED Talk, "Reclaiming Religion," has been viewed by more than 1.4 million people and translated into 23 languages. In 2013, she was at the Inaugural National Prayer Service and blessed President Barack Obama, and then she returned in 2021 to bless President Biden. She spoke in 2017 at the Women’s March in Washington, DC, and the following year at the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

Colm Tóibín is the author of ten novels, including The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He has been named the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022–2024 by the Arts Council of Ireland. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.

Rachel Kushner is the author of the novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba. Her most recent book, The Hard Crowd, s twenty years of essays on politics, art, and culture. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty-six languages.

Azar Nafisi is the author of the multi-award-winning New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, as well as Things I’ve Been Silent About, The Republic of Imagination, and That Other World. Formerly a Fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Foreign Policy Institute, she has taught at Oxford and several universities in Tehran. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Jeffrey Brown is the author of The News and Peabody Award-winning Senior Correspondent and Chief Arts Correspondent for PBS NewsHour, public television’s prestigious nightly news program viewed by millions. In a career spanning more than thirty years at the NewsHour, Brown has interviewed numerous leading American, and international newsmakers, moderated studio discussions on a vast array of topics and reported from across the United States and other regions of the globe. In addition, he leads the NewsHour’s extensive coverage of arts and culture “Canvas,” hosts the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with The New York Times, and regularly speaks at conferences and forums. Jeffrey Brown is married to Paula Crawford, an artist, author, and professor at George Mason University. They have two children.

Yusef Salaam is the inspirational speaker and prison reform activist who, at age fourteen, was one of the five teenage boys wrongly convicted and sentenced to prison in the Central Park jogger case. In 1997, he left prison as an adult to a world he didn't fully recognize or understand. In 2002, the sentences for the Central Park Five were overturned, and all Five were exonerated for the crime they didn't commit. Yusef now travels the world as an inspirational speaker, speaking about the effects of incarceration and the devastating impact of disenfranchisement. He is an advocate and educator on issues of mass incarceration, police brutality, and misconduct, press ethics and bias, race and law, and the disparities in the criminal justice system, especially for men of color.

Ekow N. Yankah holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Columbia Law School, and Oxford University. His work focuses on questions of political and criminal theory and, particularly, questions of political obligation and justifications of punishment. His work has appeared in law review articles, peer-reviewed legal theory journals, books, and medical journals, including NOMOS, Ratio Juris, Law and Philosophy, Criminal Law and Philosophy, the Fordham Law Review and the Illinois Law Review among others. His interests have also led him to develop expertise in voting rights and election law, serving as the co-chair of the New York Democratic Lawyers Council as well as the voting rights arm of the New York Democratic party. He maintains a public presence writing for publications spanning The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Salon among others and has been a regular commentator on criminal law issues on television and radio including NBC, CNN, MSNBC, BBC, BBC International, NPR and PBS.

Amy Solomon is a producer on HBO’s Silicon Valley and Barry. She currently runs Alec Berg’s production company, where she develops content for film and television. She lives in Los Angeles.

Karen Chee is a Brooklyn-based comedian, writer, and actor. Currently, she writes and performs for Late Night with Seth Meyers (NBC) and is working on a book. Previously, Chee has written for the Golden Globes and Yearly Departed (Amazon), helped develop pilots for Netflix and Comedy Central, acted in HBO’s High Maintenance, and regularly contributed to The New Yorker. She has also been published in places like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and McSweeney’s. Before the pandemic, her evenings were spent mostly doing stand-up comedy.

Emily V. Gordon started out as a masters-level couples and family therapist, practicing for about six years before changing careers. She moved on to booking stand-up comedy for live audiences and TV, which led to a career as a writer and producer. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Kumail Nanjiani.