Andrei Codrescu is an award-winning writer and National Public Radio commentator. His latest books are Jealous Wit­ness: New Poems and New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing from the City (Algonquin). The author of many essay collections, including The Disappearance of the Outside, he is the MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University.

Judge Thomas Buergenthal arrived at Auschwitz at age ten, and was soon separated from his mother and then his father. By some remarkable strokes of luck, he managed to survive until he was liberated from Sachsenhausen in 1945, and almost two years after his liberation, he was miraculously reunited with his mother. Since then, Buergenthal has devoted his life to international and human rights law. He received law degrees from New York University Law School and Harvard Law School and is currently the American judge at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Co recipient of the 2008 Gruber Foundation International Justice Prize, he lives in The Hague, Netherlands.

Award-winning author and journalist Mark Arax is a co-author of The King of California-a Los Angeles Times bestseller-and author of In My Father's Name. He is a contributing writer at Los Angeles magazine and a former senior writer at the Los Angeles Times. He teaches nonfiction writing at Claremont McKenna College and lives in Fresno.

Minal Hajratwala was born in San Francisco and raised in New Zealand and suburban Michigan. In the course of researching Leaving India, she spent seven years traveling the world and interviewed over seventy-five members of her extended family. A poet and performer, she worked as an editor and reporter for eight years at the San Jose Mercury News.

Azadeh Moaveni is the author of Lipstick Jihad and co-author, with Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, of Iran Awakening. She has lived and reported throughout the Middle East, and speaks both Farsi and Arabic fluently. As one of the few American correspondents allowed to work continuously in Iran since 1999, she has reported widely on youth culture, women's rights, and Islamic reform for Time, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is the Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education at Harvard and the chair of the board of the MacArthur Foundation. As a sociologist, she examines the culture of schools, the patterns and structures of classroom life, socialization within families and communities, and the relationships between culture and learning styles. She is the author of eight books, including Worlds Apart: Relationships Between Families and Schools; Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer and The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other.

Henry Alford the author of two acclaimed works of investigative humor - Big Kiss: One Actor's Desperate Attempt to Claw His Way to the Top and Municipal Bondage: One Man's Anxiety-Producing Adventures in the Big City. He has been a regular contributor to the New York Times and Vanity Fair, and a staff writer at Spy. He has also written for The New Yorker, GQ, New York, Details, Harper's Bazaar, Travel & Leisure, the Village Voice, and Paris Review.

Azar Nafisi is the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, and a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University-SAIS. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children.

Laura Miller is founder of Salon.com, where she is currently a staff writer, and a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, and other publications. She lives in New York.

Sarah Lyall grew up in New York City and is a graduate of Yale University. She writes for The New York Times out of their London bureau. She had previously been the publishing correspondent for the newspaper. She lives in London with her husband, the writer Robert McCrum, and their two daughters.