Andrew Solomon is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the 2001 National Book Award; and of the critically acclaimed novel A Stone Boat. He is a lecturer in psychiatry at Cornell University and a special advisor on LGBT affairs at the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry. His journalism frequently appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications.

Thomas Curwen is an award-winning staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, where he has worked as the editor of the Outdoors section, a writer-at-large and editor for the features sections, and as the deputy editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for mental health journalism, and in 2008 he was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

Photo credit: Annie Leibovitz

Alice McDermott is the author of seven novels, including A Bigamist's Daughter, That Night, and At Weddings and Wakes, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize as well as her first novel to be a New York Times bestseller. Her 1998 novel Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction. Her most recent works are That Night, Charming Billy, and After This. Her articles, reviews, and stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Redbook, and elsewhere. She is currently the Richard A. Macksey Professor for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins.

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 Fellowship in 2012 and has also won awards from United States Artists, the NEA, and the Whiting Foundation for her plays. She teaches in and directs the Master of Professional Writing (MPW), a multi-genre graduate creative writing program at the University of Southern California.

Photo credit: Jamie Schoen, Epic Photography

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in over thirty-five countries, is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. In addition to The Handmaid's Tale, her novels include: Cat's Eye, shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, shortlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize; and her most recent, The Year of the Flood. She lives in Toronto.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels: Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award. Her fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including the New Yorker, Tin House, the Georgia Review, and the Best American Short Stories 2004 and 2009. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and an NEA Fellowship, she was named one of the "20 Under 40" fiction writers by The New Yorker. She teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Otis College of Art and Design.

Photo credit: Jean Malek

Henry Jenkins is Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He has written and edited more than fifteen books on media and popular culture, including Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture with Sam Ford and Joshua Green. His other published works reflect the wide range of his research interests, touching on democracy and new media, the “wow factor” of popular culture, science-fiction fan communities, and the early history of film comedy. His most recent book, Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick for the Literature Classroom, was written with Wyn Kelley, Katie Clinton, Jenna McWilliams, Erin Reilly, and Ricardo Pitts-Wiley.

Wyn Kelley teaches in the Literature Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the author of Melville's City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York and of Herman Melville: An Introduction. She also co-author Reading in a Participatory Culture: Re-Mixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom with Henry Jenkins and Ricardo Pitts-Wiley. She is the former Associate Editor of the Melville Society journal Leviathan, and editor of the Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville. A founding member of the Melville Society Cultural Project, she has collaborated with the New Bedford Whaling Museum on lecture series, conferences, exhibits, and a scholarly archive. She serves as Associate Director of MEL (Melville Electronic Library), an NEH-supported interactive digital archive for reading, editing, and visualizing Melville’s texts.

Ricardo Pitts-Wiley is the co-founder of the Mixed Magic Theatre, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to presenting a diversity of cultural and ethnic images and ideas on the stage. While serving as Mixed Magic Theatre’s director, Pitts-Wiley gained national and international acclaim for his page-to-stage adaptation of Moby Dick, titled Moby Dick: Then and Now. This production, which was presented at the Kennedy Center for the Arts in Washington, DC, is the centerpiece of a national teacher's study guide and is featured in the book, Reading in A Participatory Culture. In addition to his work as an adapter of classic literature, Pitts-Wiley is also the composer of over 150 songs and the author of 12 plays with music, including: Waiting for Bessie Smith, Celebrations: An African Odyssey, and The Spirit Warrior’s Dream.

Randall Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and is a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. The author of six books, he won the Robert F. Kennedy book award for Race, Crime and the Law. A member of the bars of the Supreme Court of the United States and the District of Columbia, a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Kennedy is also a Charter Trustee of Princeton University.

Erwin Chemerinsky is the founding dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law. He has authored seven books and more than 200 law-review articles. He has argued several cases before the Supreme Court and various circuits of the United States Court of Appeals.

A. Scott Berg is the author of four previous bestselling biographies, including Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, for which he received the National Book Award; Goldwyn: A Biography; Lindbergh, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and the best-selling biographical memoir of Katharine Hepburn, Kate Remembered.

Jim Newton is a veteran journalist who began his career as a clerk to James Reston at the New York Times. Since then, he has worked as a reporter at the Atlanta Constitution and as a reporter, bureau chief, and editor at the Los Angeles Times, where he presently is the editor at large and the author of a weekly column. He is also an educator and author of two biographical books, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made, and most recently, Eisenhower: The White House Years.

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.

Jonathan Kirsch is the author of 13 books, including The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God; God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism; and The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible. His new book is The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat and a Murder in Paris. Kirsch is a lawyer specializing in intellectual property issues, the book editor of The Jewish Journal, and an adjunct professor on the faculty of the Professional Publishing Institute at New York University. He is a three-time president of PEN U.S.A.

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 (fall, 2013). 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.