Melissa Fay Greene is an author of non-fiction, whose award-winning books focus on social inequalities and how individual lives are transformed by the search for justice. Her book Praying for Sheetrock, the story of a courthouse gang on the rural coast of Georgia and the black community that tried to dislodge it, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has also written The Temple Bombing, Last Man Out, and There is No Me Without You.

Seth Greenland is the author of the novels The Bones, Shining City and the forthcoming The Angry Buddhist. His play Jungle Rot won the Kennedy Center/American Express Fund for New American Plays Award and the American Theatre Critics Association Award. He was a writer/producer on the two most recent seasons of the HBO series Big Love.

Francisco Goldman is the author of The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman, and The Divine Husband and the non-fiction book, The Art of Political Murder. He is currently Allan K. Smith Professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and also directs the Premio Aura Estrada/Aura Estrada Prize.

Rachel Kushner is the author of Telex from Cuba, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award in Fiction in 2008 and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and winner of the California Book Award. Kushner's writing has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, the New York Times, Fence, Bomb, The Believer, Cabinet and Grand Street. She is co-editor of Soft Targets journal and currently at work on her second novel.

John Sayles's previous novels include Pride of the Bimbos, Los Gusanos, and the National Book Award-nominated Union Dues. He has directed seventeen feature films, including Matewan, Lone Star, and Eight Men Out, and received two Academy Award nominations. His latest film, Amigo, was completed in 2010.

Howard A. Rodman is a professor of screenwriting at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, serves on the Board of the Writers Guild of America, West, and has been Artistic Director of the Sundance Screenwriting Labs. He wrote Savage Grace, August, and Joe Gould's Secret. Rodman is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and of the Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities.

Ramón Garcia is the author of a book of poetry Other Countries. He has published poetry in a variety of journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry 1996, Ambit, The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of U.S.-Hispanic Literature, Crab Orchard Review; Poetry Salzburg Review, Los Angeles Review and Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. He is a Professor in Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Northridge.

Alicia Partnoy is a survivor of Argentina's detention camps during the dictatorship in the late 1970s. Best known for The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival, Partnoy also published the poetry collection Little Low Flying/Volando Bajito. Poems from her Revenge of the Apple/Venganza de la Manzana rode the metro in New York, Dallas, and Washington D.C., are sung by "Sweet Honey in the Rock" and were translated into several languages, including Hebrew. Partnoy edited You Can't Drown the Fire: Latin American Women Writing in Exile, and co-edited Chicana/Latina Studies: the Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social. Her most recent book is the translation of Gail Wronsky's poetry collection So Quick Bright Things.

Susan Salter Reynolds has been a book critic and features writer at the Los Angeles Times for twenty years. Prior to that she was an assistant editor at The New York Review of Books.

Chuck Rosenthal is the author of eight novels: The Loop Trilogy, Loop's Progress, Experiments with Life and Deaf, and Loop's End; Elena of the Stars, Avatar Angel, the Last Novel of Jack Kerouac, My Mistress Humanity, The Heart of Mars; and Coyote O'Donohughe's History of Texas. He has published a memoir, Never Let Me Go, and most recently a travel book, Are We Not There Yet? Travels in Nepal, North India, and Bhutan. Rosenthal teaches fiction writing at Loyola Marymount University. He is the manager of the Glass Table Artists' Collective and Managing Editor of What Books Press.

Gail Wronsky is the author, coauthor, or translator of nine books of poetry and prose, including Dying for Beauty, Poems for Infidels, and Volando Bajito, among others. She teaches creative writing at Loyola Marymount University.

Gronk is a nationally renowned painter and performance artist from Los Angeles. During the 1970's, he was one of the founding members of ASCO, an avant-garde multi-media arts collective in Los Angeles. He is best known for his murals and his very physical approach to painting. Much of his recent work has been done as temporary, mural-scale, site-specific paintings, the latest for the Fowler Museum at UCLA in April 2010.

Jacques d'Amboise joined the New York City Ballet at fifteen, became a principal dancer at seventeen, and remained so for the next thirty-five years. He has appeared in the films Seven Brothers, Carousel, The Best Things in Life Are Free, Watching Ballet, and Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1976, he founded the National Dance Institute, an arts education program, and is the author of Teaching the Magic of Dance.

Sasha Anawalt is director of USC Annenberg Arts Journalism Programs, including the Masters degree in Specialized Journalism (The Arts) program. She also directs the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program and the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater. In October 2009, she co-directed and co-produced with Douglas McLennan the first-ever National Summit on Arts Journalism. Anawalt wrote the best-selling cultural biography, The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company. She was chief dance critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, LA Weekly and on KCRW, National Public Radio. Her reviews and features have been published widely.

Joyce Carol Oates has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, (nominated for the National Book Award ), and The Falls. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award and the National Book Award. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Michael Silverblatt is the host of KCRW's half-hour radio show Bookworm, where he introduces listeners to new and emerging authors along with writers of renown. He created Bookworm for KCRW-FM in 1989. The complete Bookworm archive can be heard at kcrw.com/bookworm.

British-born Colin Thubron has spent his working life writing and traveling in the vast land mass of Asia. His earliest books were on Damascus, Lebanon, Jerusalem and Cyprus. In the eighties he traveled by car through the Soviet Union for Where Nights Are Longest and through China for Behind the Wall. His later travel books include The Lost Heart of Asia, on the republics of Central Asia; In Siberia; and Shadow of the Silk Road, the account of a journey from eastern China to the Mediterranean. He has published seven novels including A Cruel Madness and Turning Back the Sun. His many awards include the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs.

Born in England, to Indian parents, Pico Iyer grew up in Southern California. He is the author of seven works of non-fiction, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul. He has also written the novels Cuba and the Night and Abandon. Iyer has been an essayist for Time magazine, while also writing for The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The New York Times and National Geographic. His most recent book, The Open Road, describing more than 30 years of talking and traveling with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was a best-seller across the U.S. Iyer has been based for the past 20 years near Nara, in rural Japan, though he is always on the road.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is a Fellow and Deputy Director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations. She covered presidential politics and public affairs for ten years as a producer with ABC News and This Week with George Stephanopoulos, before leaving to write about women entrepreneurs in war zones including Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Her reporting on this topic has been published widely and she frequently appears on TV news shows as a policy expert on Afghanistan. She served as an informal advisor on the topic of women's economic empowerment for General McChrystal's staff in Afghanistan as well as economic officials at the American Embassy in Kabul.

Kai Ryssdal is the host of Marketplace on American Public Media. Before joining Marketplace, Kai was a reporter and substitute host for The California Report, a news and information program distributed to public radio stations throughout California. His radio work has won first place awards from the Radio and Television News Directors Association and the national Public Radio News Directors Association.

Before his career in public radio, Kai served in the United States Navy, was a Pentagon staff officer, and was a member of the United States Foreign Service.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her fiction has appeared in several magazines and anthologies, including the New Yorker, Tin House, the Georgia Review, and the Best American Short Stories 2004 and 2009. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and an NEA Fellowship, she directs the MFA program in writing at the University of California, San Diego. She lives in Los Angeles and was recently named one of "20 Under 40" fiction writers by the New Yorker.

Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is the recipient of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Whiting Writers' Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and is a 2010 recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Grant. In 2007, Granta named her one of the best American novelists under thirty-five. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among others. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis.

Brighde Mullins' plays have been produced in New York, London, and San Francisco. Titles include:Monkey in the Middle, Fire Eater, Topographical Eden; Pathological Venus. She has received a Whiting Foundation Award; an NEA Fellowship and others. She has taught at Harvard University and at Brown University, and for fifteen years she curated the Reading Series at Dia Art Foundation in New York. She is currently the Director of the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC.