Jeanne Theoharis is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She is the author of numerous books and articles on the civil rights and Black Power movements, the politics of race and education, social welfare, and civil rights in post-9/11 America. Her newest book is The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.

Ericka Huggins is a former Black Panther Party member, political prisoner, human rights activist, poet, and teacher. She has lectured throughout the United States on the restoration of human rights, whole-child education, family reunification, restorative justice, and the role of spiritual practice in sustaining activism and promoting social change. She teaches relaxation and resiliency skills for educators and youth in elementary and secondary schools, as well as juvenile and adult prisons and jails, and is currently a professor of sociology at Laney College in Oakland, California.

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 Labors 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.

During this program, we paid tribute to Los Angeles' unofficial poet laureate, Wanda Coleman, with an evening of readings and shared memories. Honoring what she did for poetry and who she was in Los Angeles: a shy larger-than-life figure who, for decades, reminded us how to be our own most authentic selves, who made us remember histories of poetry and oppression and music. We will miss her, and we will celebrate her. We will remember her. Musical accompaniment was provided by David Ornette Cherry.

Richard Rodriguez is a journalist, essayist, and contributor to Harper’s Magazine, Mother Jones, the Los Angeles Times, and Time. He is the author of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez; Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Brown: The Last Discovery of America, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. For many years he was an essayist on PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. He is currently a contributing writer and editor for New American Media, a nonprofit news network.

Rubén Martínez, an Emmy-winning journalist and poet, is the author of several books, including Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail and The New Americans. His most recent book is Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West. He holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University.

Photo credit: Timothy Archibald, 2013

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.

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist who left her native country at the age of 17 to study art in the United States. She graduated from UC Berkeley in 1982. Upon returning to her country as an adult, Neshat encountered a reality far from the one of her memory. This discord inspired meditations on memory, loss, and contemporary life in Iran that are central to her work. Her video and installation works explore the political and social conditions of Iranian and Muslim life, particularly focusing on women and feminist issues. Neshat's many awards include: the First International Prize, Venice Biennale (1999); Edinburgh International Film Festival (2000); International Center of Photography (2002); and the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005).

Christy MacLear is the Founding Executive Director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, which fosters the legacy of Rauschenberg's life, work, and philosophy that art can change the world. MacLear's career is defined by projects that intersect business strategy and culture. She was the inaugural Executive Director of the Philip Johnson Glass House; directed the Museum Campus in Chicago that created a lakefront park; and managed strategic planning for the Walt Disney Company's new town, Celebration.

Michael Connelly is the bestselling author of twenty-five novels and one work of nonfiction. A former newspaper reporter who worked the crime beat at the Los Angeles Times and the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, Connelly has won numerous awards for his journalism and his fiction. His novels include The Black Echo, awarded the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992. In 2002, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the movie adaptation of Connelly’s 1998 novel Blood Work. In March 2011, the movie adaptation of his The Lincoln Lawyer hit theaters worldwide. His most recent #1 New York Times bestsellers include The Black Box, The Drop, The Fifth Witness, The Reversal, The Scarecrow, and The Brass Verdict. His next book is a Lincoln Lawyer novel titled The Gods of Guilt.

Miles Corwin, a former crime reporter for The Los Angeles Times, is the author of three nonfiction books: The Killing Season, a national bestseller, And Still We Rise, the winner of the PEN West award for nonfiction and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; and Homicide Special, a Los Angeles Times bestseller. His novel Kind of Blue was named one of the Top Ten First Crime Novels by Booklist. Midnight Alley is the second book in the Ash Levine series.

Joe Sacco's acclaimed books include Palestine, which was serialized as a comic book from 1993 to 1995, the first collection of which won an American Book Award in 1996 Safe Area Gorazde, and Footnotes in Gaza, as well as a best-selling collaboration with Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.

Gene Luen Yang began drawing comic books in the fifth grade. He was an established figure in the indie comics scene when he published his first book with graphic novel publisher First Second, American Born Chinese, which is now in print in over ten languages. Yang won the Printz Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His latest book is the graphic novel diptych Boxers & Saints.

Charles Hatfield, Professor of English at California State University, Northridge, teaches comics, children's literature, media, and cultural studies. He is the author of Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby and Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature and co-editor of the newly released The Superhero Reader.

Goli Taraghi is an Iranian-born, U.S.-educated author who returned to Tehran to study and work in international relations and, later, to teach philosophy. Her work is inspired by growing up in the privileged, old-money neighborhood of Shemiran in Tehran and later, as an exile in Paris and various visits to post-revolution Tehran. Taraghi has been honored as a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in France and has won the Bita Prize for Literature and Freedom, given by Stanford University in 2009. She is included in Reza Aslan’s anthology of modern literature from the Middle East, Tablet & Pen; in the anthology Words Without Borders: The World through the Eyes of Writers; and in the PEN anthology of contemporary Iranian Literature edited by Nahid Mozaffari, Strange Times, My Dear. She is a bestselling author in Iran, where her books are often censored.

Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, is the author, most recently, of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. His first book, No God But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam has been translated into thirteen languages and named by Blackwell as one of the hundred most important books of the last decade. He is also the author of How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization and the End of the War on Terror (published in paperback as Beyond Fundamentalism), as well as the editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. Aslan is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at UC Riverside.

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.