L.A. native Richard Montoya is an actor, director, and member of the Latino/Chicano comedy troupe, Culture Clash. Culture Clash was founded in Los Angeles in 1984 and is still an active troupe. Montoya‘s work is often a reflection on issues of race and cultural identity; he is interested in the “multicultural experiment.”

Myriam Gurba is the author of the Edmund White Award-winning novella and short story collection Dahlia Season and the chapbook Wish You Were Me. Gurba's writing appears in anthologies published by City Lights, Seal, and other fine presses. In 2011, Gurba toured with the lezzendary (legendarily lesbian) literary roadshow Sister Spit. She is not above striking Faustian deals as long as they firmly place her in the same tax bracket as Warren Buffett. She teaches remedial high school classes in Long Beach and is the kind of teacher kids trust enough to ask for a tampon.

Erin Aubry Kaplan is a journalist and essayist who was born and raised in Los Angeles. She has been a staff writer at the LA Weekly and a weekly opinion columnist for the L.A. Times, the first African American opinion columnist in the paper's history. She has contributed to many publications, including Salon.com, Essence, Oxford American and Ms. Magazine. A collection of her journalism and essays, Black Talk, Blue Thoughts and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista, was published in 2011. She teaches nonfiction in the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles.

Philip Littell has written a lot of words that have been set to music, collaborating with a veritable roll-call of classical composers: Previn, Susa, Kernis, Tork, and many more. Meanwhile he has been producing work for the less legitimate musical theater with collaborator Eliot Douglass (No Miracle: A Consolation, The Night Market, The Wandering Whore), and Libby Larsen (Billy The Kid And What He Did), has translated Moliere and Feydeau, and clowned in cabaret and sung in clubs, while continuing to work as an actor. He has two epic/historical travesty plays in hand and ready to go.

Héctor Tobar has worked as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times for nearly twenty years. He shared a Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of the 1992 riots, and then served as the national Latino Affairs correspondent, the Buenos Aires bureau chief, and the Mexico City bureau chief. He currently writes a weekly column for the paper and is the author of three books, Translation Nation, The Tattooed Soldier, and most recently, The Barbarian Nurseries. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of the city of Los Angeles.

Besides teaching writing and theatre, Brenda Varda is the founder of Wordspace in Los Angeles, a cultural hub for writers in all genres. Wordspace creates workshops and development opportunities that allow writers to experiment and connect with new audiences. In creating her own works for the theatre (Unknown, The Met, Sacred Fools, UCIRA), Varda looks to create narratives that reframe contemporary identities while still providing reference to common cultural experiences. Her MFA thesis work, Fables du Theatre, a fantasy of three theatrical fables produced in collaboration with a fictional theatre company (Immanence Theatre Ensemble), was produced at Unknown Theatre in 2008 and nominated for an LA Weekly Award.

Alie Ward is a former writer for the LA Times and columnist for the LA Weekly, and now covers cocktails for KCET and CookingChanneltv.com. She's the co-creator and co-host for Cooking Channel's Classy Ladies with Alie & Georgia as well as an on-camera contributor to Cooking Channel's Unique Sweets. She tells stories around town at Upright Citizens Brigade, The Meltdown and Public School and after 13 years in Los Angeles she knows to wear SPF 70 -- and take Fountain.

Alison Bechdel is the author of the bestselling memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Time, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. For twenty-five years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life--queer and otherwise. Bechdel is guest editor of Best American Comics, 2011, and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney's, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and The New York Times Book Review.

Deborah Vankin is a journalist and graphic novelist. As a Los Angeles Times staff writer, she covers the spectrum of arts & culture, entertainment and nightlife -- including books and comics, the art gallery and street art scenes, alternative comedy, indie film and pop culture in general. Her 2011 graphic novel "Poseurs" follows three teenagers, from very different corners of L.A., into the underworld of L.A. clubs and Hollywood parties. She's now working on a second graphic novel.

Javier Sicilia is the leader of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, founded in April 2011 after the death of his son to drug violence in Mexico. The movement organizes the voices of families of the victims and leads caravans throughout the country, calling for reforms to strategies used in the drug war, which has claimed some 50,000 lives in the last five years. Sicilia was awarded a "people's choice" human rights prize by Global Exchange and was profiled as one of TIME Magazine's People of the Year for 2011. Sicilia is a poet, essayist, novelist, and journalist in Mexico. In 2009 he was awarded the Aguascalientes National Award in Poetry, one of the most prestigious honors in Mexican literature.

Rubén Martínez is an author, teacher, and performer. He is the author of several books, including Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail, and the upcoming Desert America: The Ethics of Boom and Bust in the New Old West. He holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University.

Betto Arcos, a native of Veracruz, Mexico, is a freelance reporter for BBC-PRI's The World and NPR. He has been a regular contributor to NPR's Weekend All Things Considered reviewing Latin and world music, since 2009. Betto is also host of KPFK's "Global Village" on KPFK 90.7, a daily program he created as music director in 1997.

Photo credit: Ted Lewis

Mark Salzman is an award-winning novelist and memoirist. The son of a social worker and a music teacher, Salzman grew up in Connecticut and studied Chinese language and philosophy at Yale University. After college he spent two years in China, learning martial arts from some of China's most renowned teachers, an experience he documented in his bestselling memoir Iron & Silk. His other books include The Laughing Sutra, Lost in Place, The Soloist and Lying Awake. He lives in Los Angeles.

Pico Iyer is the author of two novels and seven works of nonfiction, including the bestseller The Open Road, based on three decades of his conversations with the Dalai Lama. A writer for Time since 1982, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, and many other magazines and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific. He was born in Oxford, England, to parents from India, in 1957, grew up in California and currently lives in Japan.

Thomas Curwen is an award-winning staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, where he has worked as the editor of the Outdoors section, as a writer-at-large and an editor for the features sections and as the deputy editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Has has received an Academy of American Poets prize, a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for mental health journalism, and in 2008 he was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

Wael Ghonim was born in Cairo and grew up in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, earning a degree in computer engineering from Cairo University in 2004 and an MBA from the American University in Cairo in 2007. He joined Google in 2008, rising to become Head of Marketing for Google Middle East and North Africa. He is currently on sabbatical from Google to launch an NGO supporting education and technology in Egypt.

Reza Aslan, associate professor of creative writing at the University of California Riverside is author of the best-selling No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam and editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Middle East. He is founder of AslanMedia, an online journal for news and entertainment about the Greater Middle East and the world.

[ALOUD] at the Los Angeles Theatre Center 514 South Spring Street Los Angeles, CA 90013

Special thanks to Human Rights Watch, Southern California, for their help in promoting this program.

Photo: Will Roth

Luis J. Rodríguez, the son of Mexican immigrants, began writing in his early teens and has won national recognition as a poet, journalist, fiction writer, children's book writer, and critic. His memoir, Always Running La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. earned a Carl Sandburg Literary Award, was designated a New York Times Notable Book and has been named by the American Library Association as one of the nation's 100 most censored books. Rodriguez co-founded Tia Chucha Press and Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural & Bookstore, a cultural center in Northeast San Fernando Valley. He is currently working as a peacemaker among gangs on a national and international level.

Father Gregory Boyle was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1982. Since 1986, Father Gregory has been the pastor of Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights, sited between two large public housing projects. In 1988, Father Gregory began what would become Homeboy Industries, now located in downtown Los Angeles. Since Father Greg started Homeboy Industries nearly twenty years ago, it has served members of more than half of the gangs in Los Angeles. Fr. Greg is the recipient of numerous awards, including the California Peace Prize, the Irvine Leadership Award and an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Occidental College. His bestselling memoir, Tattoos on the Heart, has been honored by PEN USA as the 2011 Best Creative Nonfiction Book of the Year.