C. Nicole Mason, Ph.D., is the author of Born Bright: A Young Girl’s Journey from Nothing to Something in America (St. Martin’s Press) and heads up CR2PI at the New York Women’s Foundation. Her commentary and writing have been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Politico, The Nation, The Progressive, Spotlight on Poverty, USA Today, Marie Claire Magazine, Ms. magazine, Essence Magazine, The Washington Post and on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and NBC, among other outlets.

Karon Jolna, Ph.D. is education director and editor at Ms. magazine. During her tenure, she has expanded the use of Ms. as a textbook in hundreds of universities in the U.S. and Canada, driving growth and revenue to sustain the magazine for the next generation. She is co-editor of Gender, Race and Class: From the Pages of Ms. magazine, 1972-present. Dr. Jolna served as a research scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 2004-2015. At UCLA, she developed and taught one of the first women and leadership courses featuring inspiring women leaders from a broad range of fields.

Writer-performer Barry Yourgrau is the author of acclaimed books of brief fiction, including Wearing Dad’s Head and The Sadness of Sex, in whose film version he starred. He’s appeared on MTV and NPR and written for the New York Times, Huffington Post, Paris Review, and Vice, among others. Born in South Africa, he lives in New York and Istanbul.

Aimee Bender is the author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (NY Times Notable Book), An Invisible Sign of My Own (LA Times Pick of the Year), Willful Creatures (The Believer’s “Best Books of the Year”), The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (SCIBA Award, Alex Award), and The Color Master (NY Times Notable Book). Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and has been heard on PRI’s “This American Life” and “Selected Shorts.” She has received two Pushcart Prizes as well as nominations for the Tiptree Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at USC.

Rebecca Solnit is a prolific writer, and the author of many books including Savage Dreams, Storming the Gates of Paradise, and the best-selling atlases Infinite City and Unfathomable City, all from UC Press. She received the Corlis Benefideo Award for Imaginative Cartography from the North American Cartographic Information Society for her work on the previous atlases.

Christopher Hawthorne is architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. Before coming to the Times he was architecture critic for Slate and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Washington Post, Metropolis, Architect, Domus, I.D., Print, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and Architectural Record, among many other publications. He is the author, with Alanna Stang, of The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture, published by Princeton Architectural Press.

Hisham Matar was born in New York City to Libyan parents, spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo, and has lived most of his adult life in London. His debut novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award and won numerous international prizes, including the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, a Commonwealth First Book Award, the Premio Flaiano, and Premio Gregor von Rezzori. His second book, Anatomy of a Disappearance, published in 2011, was named one of the best books of the year by The Guardian and the Chicago Tribune. His work has been translated into twenty-nine languages. He lives in London and New York.

Louise Steinman is the curator of the award-winning ALOUD series and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of three books: The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War; The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance; and The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation. She was a 2015 Fellow at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida. Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books and on her Crooked Mirror blog.

Eileen Myles has published more than a dozen books of poetry, art journalism, and fiction. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a Warhol/Creative Capital Grant, and a 2014 Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant. She lives in New York.

Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, and nonfiction author of several books, including The Argonauts, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and a New York Times Best Seller; The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial; The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning; Bluets; and Jane: A Murder. She teaches in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles, California.

Judith Freeman is the author of four novels—Red Water, The Chinchilla Farm, Set for Life, and A Desert of Pure Feeling—and of Family Attractions, a collection of stories, and The Long Embrace, a biography of Raymond Chandler. She lives in California and Idaho.

Michelle Huneven is the author of four novels including Round Rock, and Jamesland, both New York Times Notable Books and finalists for the LA Times Book Award. Her third novel, Blame, was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the LA Times Book Award; and her fourth novel, Off Course, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She was the recipient of a GE Younger Writers Award, a Whiting Award for Fiction, and a James Beard award for her work reviewing restaurants for the LA Times, the LA Weekly, and other publications. She has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop and been a senior fiction editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. A short story, "Too Good to Be True," was recently published in Harpers. Michelle teaches creative writing at UCLA and lives in Altadena, California, with her husband, dog, cat, and talkative African Gray parrot.

Eddie Huang is the proprietor of Baohaus, a restaurant in New York City. He’s the author of the bestselling memoir Fresh Off the Boat, host of Huang’s World on ViceTV, and executive producer of the ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, based on his memoir.

Constance Wu was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. She is best known for her role as Jessica Huang in the ABC comedy series, Fresh Off the Boat, now in its second season. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her pet bunny Lida Rose.

Vivian Gornick is the author of the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments, a biography of Emma Goldman, and three essay collections, two of which, The Men in My Life and The End of the Novel of Love, were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent book, another memoir The Odd Woman and the City, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award as well.

David L. Ulin is the author or editor of eight previous books, including The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and the Library of America’s Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the former book critic and book editor of the Los Angeles Times.

William Finnegan is the author of Cold New World, A Complicated War, Dateline Soweto, and Crossing the Line. He has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist and has won numerous journalism awards, including two Overseas Press Club awards since 2009. A staff writer at the New Yorker since 1987, he lives in Manhattan.

David Rensin has written or co-written 17 books, seven of them NY Times bestsellers. They include All for a Few Perfect Waves, an oral/narrative biography of rebel surfing icon Miki Dora; The Mailroom, an oral history of what it’s like to start at the bottom dreaming of the top in Hollywood; and Devil at My Heels, the autobiography of WWII/Olympian Louis Zamperini. He lives and surfs in Ventura, California.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Geoff Dyer has received the Somerset Maugham Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, a Lannon Literary Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and, in 2015, the Windham Campbell Prize for nonfiction. The author of four novels and nine works of non-fiction, Dyer is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of Dissident Gardens and eight earlier novels, including Girl In Landscape and Chronic City. His writing has been translated into over thirty languages. He lives in Los Angeles and Maine.