Emily Ansara Baines is the author of The Unofficial Downton Abbey Cookbook and The Unofficial Hunger Games Cookbook. She received her BA in Creative Writing from USC and her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Emily’s work has appeared in Narrative, Jezebel, The Huffington Post, The Independent, The Bold Italic, XOJane, Bird’s Thumb, and Hello Giggles. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, who is very supportive while she works away on her collection of linked stories.

Bridget Chiao Clerkin lives in Irvine with her husband and three children.

Emily Dorff, originally from Florida, is a second-year poet in the MFA program at UC Riverside. She holds a BA from Georgetown University and is a poetry editor for the Santa Ana River Review.

Alex Dupree is a musician and third-year MFA student in poetry at UC Irvine. Before moving to LA, he lived all over Texas and in some parts of New Mexico. He’s now working on a collection of poems titled “Body & Repair.”

Howard Ho is a writer/composer. He studied Musicology and Communications at UCLA and earned his Master of Professional Writing at USC, where he was Stage and Screen Editor of the Southern California Review. This past year, he was a member of the Playground-LA Writers Pool and the Vagrancy Playwrights’ Group. His short works have been produced by the Company of Angels and New Musicals, Inc. He has written and composed two musicals, which received readings through Kaya Press and East West Players. His articles have been published by the Los Angeles Times and YOMYOMF. He is a member of Cold Tofu Improv and Playwrights’ Arena.

Cecilia Latiolais is a 2nd-year fiction candidate in UC Riverside’s MFA program and received her BA from the University of Michigan. She is working on a collection of short stories that center around controlling the mind, female body, and sexuality. She plans to continue exploring LA until it falls into the Pacific.

Niko Nelson is a poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her BA in Literary Studies from The New School and her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Niko is the founder of a literary skateboard magazine OUTLAWiNG, and her work has appeared in journals and magazines like Empty Mirror Ms.Fabulous, JustGo and Art Nouveau. This June, Niko will embark on a tour of the US and Canada to read from her latest work, featuring poems about big cities and mental states.

Benjamin S. Sneyd is an Appalachian writer from Northeast Tennessee. He most frequently writes about place, culture, and identity. His work has appeared in Burningword Literary Journal, Spry Literary Review, and elsewhere. He has worked as an intern at The Oxford American, an editorial assistant for Toad Suck Review, a general reader for Spry Literary Review, an assistant editor at The Tusculum Review, and is the editor-in-chief of Fannin Street: a journal of brave writing. He received his BA in English from Tusculum College and is currently finishing an MFA in writing at the California Institute of the Arts.

Casey Taylor is a prose writer who recently completed her Master of Professional Writing degree at the University of Southern California. She graduated with a degree in English from Stanford University and has also studied at Oxford and the University of Salamanca. Originally from Oregon, she now lives in South LA with her husband and an overweight black cat.

Jacqueline Young is a poet from Apple Valley, CA. Her work is miniature and observational, descending from the Imagist and Objectivist movements from the early 20th century. She holds a BA in English and MA in Education from Mount Holyoke College and is currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing at California Institute of the Arts.

Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator, historian, and naturalist and an affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses. She also worked as a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. She is the author of the bestselling H Is for Hawk, as well as a cultural history of falcons, titled Falcon, three collections of poetry, and the monthly "On Nature" column for the New York Times Magazine. As a professional falconer, she assisted with the management of raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia.

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.

Sandra Cisneros is the author of two highly celebrated novels, a story collection, two books of poetry, and, most recently, Have You Seen Marie? She is the recipient of numerous awards, including National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Lannan Literary Award, the American Book Award, the Thomas Wolfe Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Cisneros is the founder of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral and Macondo Foundations, which serve creative writers.

Reyna Grande is an award-winning author of the novels Across a Hundred Mountains, Dancing with Butterflies, and most recently, the memoir, The Distance Between Us, which was a National Book Circle Critics Award finalist. Born in Guerrero, Mexico, Reyna entered the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant at age 10, and later went on to become the first person in her family to graduate from college. Grande currently teaches creative writing at UCLA Extension and is at work on her next novel. She is the recipient of many awards, including an American Book Award, the El Premio Aztlán Literary Award, and the Latino Book Award.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a National Correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. Coates has received The National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, and the George Polk Award for his Atlantic cover story, “The Case for Reparations.” He lives in New York with his wife and son.

Robin D. G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. His books include the prize-winning, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America; Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century, written collaboratively with Dana Frank and Howard Zinn; and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. His most recent book is Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times.

Roberta Kaplan is a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and is litigating the case against Mississippi’s gay marriage ban. She lives in New York with her wife and son.

Lillian Faderman is an internationally known scholar of lesbian history and literature, as well as ethnic history and literature. Among her many honors are six Lambda Literary Awards, two American Library Association Awards, and several lifetime achievement awards for scholarship. She is the author of The Gay Revolution and the New York Times Notable Books, Surpassing the Love of Men and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers.

Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning Egyptian American journalist and commentator. Her essays and op-eds on Egypt, the Islamic world, and women’s rights have appeared in various publications, including The Washington Post and The New York Times. She has appeared as a guest commentator on MSNBC, the BBC, CNN, PBS, Al-Jazeera, NPR, and dozens of other television and radio networks, and is a contributing opinion writer for the International New York Times. She lives in Cairo and New York City.

Kelly McEvers is a national correspondent based at NPR West. She previously ran NPR’s Beirut bureau, where she earned a Peabody award, an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia award, a Gracie award, and an Overseas Press Club mention for her 2012 coverage of the Syrian conflict. In 2008-2009, McEvers was part of the award-winning “Working” series for American Public Media’s business and finance show, Marketplace. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Monthly, Slate and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her work has aired on This American Life, The World, and the BBC.

Mary Karr is the author of three award-winning, bestselling memoirs: The Liars’ Club, Cherry, and Lit. A Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, Karr has won Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays. Other grants include the Whiting Writer’s Award, PEN’s Martha Albrand Award, and Radcliffe’s Bunting Fellowship. The Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University is currently adapting her books for a Showtime series based on her life.

David L. Ulin is the author, most recently of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, which comes out in October from the University of California Press. His other books include The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is a book critic and former book editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Meghan Daum is the author of four books, most recently the collection of original essays The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion. She is also the editor of Selfish, Shallow & Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not To Have Kids, which was published in March of this year. Her other books include the essay collection My Misspent Youth, the novel The Quality of Life Report, and Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House, a memoir. Since 2005, Daum has been an opinion columnist at The Los Angeles Times, covering cultural and political topics. Meghan has written for numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, andVogue.

Leslie Jamison has published work in Harper’s, A Public Space, Oxford American, and The Believer. Her debut novel, The Gin Closet, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize. She lives in Brooklyn and is completing a doctorate at Yale University.

Molly Pulda is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities at USC. She is working on a manuscript about secrecy in contemporary literature and culture.

Lynell George is an L.A.-based journalist and essayist who covers art, culture, social issues, and identity politics. Formerly a longtime staff writer at both the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly, her work has also appeared in Vibe, Essence, The Smithsonian, Black Clock and Boom: A Journal of California. George has taught journalism at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and is currently an art and culture columnist for KCET|Artbound.

Marisela Norte is the recipient of the Ben Reitman award from San Diego State University for Peeping Tom Tom Girl, a collection of poetry and prose. Her poems featured on MTA buses in the "Out Your Window" project were recently selected among the ten best transit poems in the world by The Atlantic. Norte continues to document life in Los Angeles in words and through photography via public transportation.

Frosty is the co-founder and creative director of dublab. He is the proud host of the radio thrill called "Celsius Drop." As an extension of dublab’s future roots radio transmissions Frosty produces the "dublab presents" album collection and a series of highly-themed, world-touring art exhibitions. Frosty has been voted "best dj in Los Angeles" by the LA Weekly but personally prefers to hear his friends play great tunes. That being said he’s fortunate to frequently travel to exotic locales to play far-out records.

Tracy K. Smith is the author of three acclaimed books of poetry: The Body's Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets and an Essence Literary Award; and most recently, Life on Mars, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. Other honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a Whiting Writers' Award, and an Academy of American Poets Fellowship. A Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University, she lives in Princeton with her family.

Lynell George is an L.A.-based journalist and essayist who covers art, culture, social issues, and identity politics. Formerly a longtime staff writer at both the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly, her work has also appeared in Vibe, Essence, The Smithsonian, Black Clock and Boom: A Journal of California. George has taught journalism at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and is currently an art and culture columnist for KCET|Artbound.