Evelyn McDonnell is the author and co-editor of five books, including Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids and Rock ‘n’ Roll. She has worked as a pop music critic for the Miami Herald and as senior editor for the Village Voice. She’s won several awards, including an Annenberg Fellowship at USC and first place for enterprise by the South Florida Black Journalists Association. She is currently a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University.

Exene Cervenka is an American singer, songwriter, artist, and activist. Shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 1977, Exene met John Doe at a poetry workshop at Beyond Baroque. Together with guitarist Billy Zoom, they formed the seminal Los Angeles punk band, X. To this day, X continues to play nationally and internationally with all four original members: Cervenka, Doe, Zoom, and drummer D.J. Bonebrake. Over the years, Exene has published poetry, prose, and art books; exhibited her collages in museums and galleries; recorded and toured with her other bands; played solo shows with an acoustic guitar and her songs; and said "yes" to just about every insane, imaginative, worthwhile project other thinking humans have offered her.

Allison Wolfe formed the all-girl punk band Bratmobile with the intention of helping to create and expand a feminist music scene spearheaded by Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill. This feminist, DIY (do-it-yourself) music scene, soon to be coined "riot grrrl," had a goal of making the punk rock scene more feminist while simultaneously making academic feminism more "punk." Later recognized as a strain of third-wave feminism, riot grrrl spread throughout the 1990s, mostly in the US and UK, as a loose network of young, feminist, alternative music scene women who believed in fighting the power with cultural activism. After the demise of Bratmobile and riot grrrl, Allison continued to be active in bands such as Cold Cold Hearts, Deep Lust, Partyline, and Cool Moms. In 1999-2000, she also initiated Ladyfest, a non-profit, DIY feminist music festival. Allison currently resides in Los Angeles, where she is working on an oral history of riot grrrl book/film project.

Academy Award-winning actress and director Anjelica Huston continues her renowned family’s legacy in film, which began with her grandfather, Walter Huston, and her father, John Huston. Huston has received a multitude of awards for her work, including many honors from the National Society of Film Critics, two Independent Spirit Awards, and the Los Angeles and New York Film Critics Awards. Huston received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar® as well as a Golden Globe Award®. She recently starred as Broadway producer Eileen Rand in the musical drama television series Smash on NBC. A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York is the first installment of her two-part memoir. The second part of her story—Watch Me—picks up in Los Angeles in 1973 and will be published in fall 2014.

Colm Tóibín's many novels include The Blackwater Lightship; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Dublin IMPAC Prize; and Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award. His work has been translated into thirty languages, and he has been twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His most recent novel is The Testament of Mary, first performed as a solo show in Dublin and lauded in the New York Times as a beautiful and daring work. Toibin, who lives in Dublin and New York, has also published extensively as a journalist and travel writer.

The Americans perform original rock & roll rooted in traditional American music. Formed in Los Angeles in 2010, The Americans have toured all over the United States, twice accompanying GRAMMY and Oscar award winner Ryan Bingham. The band's newest album Home Recordings was released in January 2013.

Roy Choi is a classically trained chef from Los Angeles who cut his teeth in the kitchens of Le Bernardin, the Embassy Suites, and the Beverly Hilton before rediscovering his roots as an Angeleno and channeling his soul into a taco that tastes a lot like L.A. After launching Kogi BBQ in 2008, Choi fused the flavors of the city with Hawaiian-style picnics and opened A-Frame; Venice's Sunny Spot followed in 2011. L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food is Choi’s first book.

Evan Kleimanhas been the host of Good Food on KCRW for 15 years. The show reflects her wide-ranging interest in food and how humans interact with it. Evan’s food policy interest is expressed through her participation in the Los Angeles Food Policy Council and as a member of the Stewardship Council of the statewide organization Roots of Change. Evan Kleiman was chef-owner of Angeli Caffe on Melrose for 27 years. A cookbook author of six titles, she teaches and gives food tours of her native Los Angeles. Her latest project is Easy As Pie, an app for the iPhone/iPad.

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 recent fellow at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, FL. Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and on her Crooked Mirror blog.

Jack Miles is a Senior Fellow for Religious Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy and a Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies, at the University of California, Irvine. A MacArthur Fellow (2003-2007), Miles won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for God: A Biography, which has since been translated into sixteen languages. He is currently the general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions.

MK Asante is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, hip-hop artist, and professor of creative writing and film at Morgan State University. He received the Langston Hughes Award in 2009 and won the Jean Corrie Prize from the Academy of American Poets for his poetry collection Like Water Running Off My Back. Asante directed The Black Candle, a film he co-wrote with Maya Angelou, and directed and produced the award-winning film 500 Years Later.

Jeff Chang is the executive director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. Named by the Utne Reader as “one of the 50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World,” Jeff Chang has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature. He is the author of the award-winning Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. He was a co-founder of ColorLines, the SoleSides hip-hop crew, and CultureStr/ke. His latest book is Who We Be: The Colorization of America.

Photo credit: Lee Steffen

Greg Goldin has written widely about architecture and urban affairs for Los Angeles Magazine, L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, and Architect's Newspaper. He is the curator of Windshield Perspective, a Getty Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. now showing at A+D Architecture and Design Museum > Los Angeles. He is co-curator of Never Built: Los Angeles and co-author of the book of the same title.

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.

Mia Lehrer is the founder of Mia Lehrer + Associates, known for its wide spectrum of design and development of ambitious public and private projects, including urban revitalization developments, large urban parks, and complex commercial projects. She is internationally recognized for her progressive landscape designs, working with such natural landmarks as parks, lakes, and rivers, coupled with her advocacy for ecology and people-friendly public space. Lehrer believes that great landscape design coupled with sustainability has the power to enhance the livability and quality of life in our cities and, in doing so, improve by great measure the quality of our environment.

Sam Lubell is the West Coast Editor of the Architect’s Newspaper. He has written five books about architecture: Never Built: Los Angeles, Paris 2000+, London 2000+, Living West, and Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, New York Magazine, Architectural Record, Architect Magazine, Architectural Review, and several other publications. His exhibition Never Built: Los Angeles opens on July 27.

Alan Hess is an architect, historian, and author whose nineteen books on modern architecture and urbanism include monographs on Oscar Niemeyer, Frank Lloyd Wright, John Lautner, and the architectural histories of Las Vegas, Palm Springs, the Ranch House, and Googie architecture. Hess holds a Master of Architecture degree, was a National Arts Journalism Fellow at Columbia University's School of Journalism, and was the recipient of a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. As a preservationist, Hess qualified the oldest remaining McDonald’s drive-in restaurant, located in Downey, for the National Register of Historic Places.

Wanda Coleman was born in Watts and raised in South Central Los Angeles and has lived in California from San Francisco to the Mexican border. The author of 18 books of poetry and prose, she is featured inWriting Los Angeles and Black California. Coleman is an Emmy-winning scriptwriter and former columnist for Los Angeles Times Magazine. Her honors include Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and a 2004 C.O.L.A. Fellowship in literature from the Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles. Her most recent books include Ostinato Vamps; The Riot Inside Me: Trials & Tremors; Jazz & Twelve O'Clock Tales and a new collection of poems, The World Falls Away.

Major Jackson is an American poet, professor and the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company, Hoops, Leaving Saturn, which won the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Award Circle. He served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. He currently serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review and is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at the University of Vermont and is a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Brighde Mullins is a poet and playwright, whose works include The Bourgeois Pig; Monkey in the Middle; Fire Eater; and many others. She received a Guggenheim Award in 2012 and has also won awards from United States Artists, the NEA, and the Whiting Foundation for her plays. She teaches in and runs the Master of Professional Writing (MPW), a multi-genre graduate creative writing program at the University of Southern California.

Alice Quinn is Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America and an adjunct professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of the Arts. She was poetry editor at The New Yorker from 1987-2007 and at Alfred A. Knopf from 1976-1986. She is the editor of Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragmentsby Elizabeth Bishop. Her articles on and interviews with writers, poets, and artists have appeared in Artforum, the Canadian National Post, The Forward, Poetry Ireland, The New Yorker, and The New Yorker Online. She is currently editing the journals and notebooks of Elizabeth Bishop.

Eve Ensler is an internationally bestselling author and an award-winning playwright whose theatrical works include The Vagina Monologues, Necessary Targets, and The Good Body. She is the author of Insecure at Last, a political memoir, and I Am an Emotional Creature. Ensler is the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised over $90 million for local groups and activists and inspired the global action "One Billion Rising."

Jody Williams, who received the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for her work to ban landmines, is the founding chair of the Nobel Women’s Initiative, launched in January 2006. She is the recipient of fifteen honorary degrees and was named one of the hundred most powerful women in the world in 2004 by Forbes. She is a Campaign Ambassador for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which she helped found in 1992. Williams holds the Sam and Cele Keeper Endowed Professorship in Peace and Social Justice at the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston. In 2012–13, she became the inaugural Jane Addams Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Social Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Pat Mitchell is one of media's most accomplished professionals. From network correspondent to producing award-winning documentaries as an executive in charge of original productions for Ted Turner’s cable networks, she was named Newsweek's 150 Women Who Shake the World and has been recognized with 44 Emmy awards, five Peabody’s, and two Academy Award nominations. Mitchell became the first women President/CEO of PBS and is currently President/CEO of The Paley Center for Media, whose mission is to optimize the power of media to inform, inspire, entertain, and empower. Mitchell is a sought-after speaker and has been honored numerous times for her achievements. She serves on many non-profit and corporate boards

Temple Grandin is the author of several best-selling books, which have sold more than a million copies, and one of the world’s most accomplished and well-known adults with autism. The HBO movie based on her life, starring Claire Danes, received seven Emmy Awards. Grandin is a professor at Colorado State University. Her new book is The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Torch and Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, a collection of writings from her "Dear Sugar" column in The Rumpus. Her memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as the inaugural title for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. Her stories and essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Allure, The Rumpus, The Missouri Review, The Sun, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere.

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor at High Country News, where she writes about politics, the environment, and natural resources. Her work has also appeared in Mother Jones, The Atlantic, Sierra, Audubon, the LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times.