Alan Mandell, a Beckett scholar, has had a distinguished 75-year acting career and is an accomplished voice-over actor. He is a founding member of the famed San Francisco Actor’s Workshop and co-founder of the San Quentin Drama Workshop, which started in 1957 with a performance of Waiting for Godot inside the prison. Mandell toured Europe with original productions of Godot and Endgame directed by Beckett and has appeared on Broadway. Most recently, he appeared in Godot at the Mark Taper Forum in 2012. His films include The Marrying Man, Midnight Witness, John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Shortbus, and the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man.

Jeannette Seaver was born in Paris and began her career as a concert violinist. She met her future husband, Richard Seaver, in Paris when he was running the influential literary magazine Merlin. Together they formed Seaver Books at Viking Press and later, Arcade Publishing, where for over twenty years, they discovered new literary voices from other cultures, including Natalia Ginzburg, Ismail Kadare, Andrei Makine, and two Nobel Laureates-Octavio Paz and Mo Yan. In 2012, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, decorated Jeannette with the medal of Chevalier dans l'Ordre de la Legion d'Honneur. Following Richard Seaver's death, Arcade Publishing closed. In 2005, Arcade's backlist was acquired by Skyhorse Publishing, where Jeannette currently serves as Editor of Arcade Publishing, at Skyhorse. Jeannette is also the author of four cookbooks illustrated by her daughter, Nathalie Seaver.

Howard A. Rodman is a professor of screenwriting at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, Vice President of the Writers Guild of America, West, and has served as Artistic Director of the Sundance Screenwriting Labs. He wrote Savage Grace, August, and Joe Gould’s Secret. Rodman is on the executive committee of the Writers Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and is a Fellow of the Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria, where she attended medical school for two years at the University of Nigeria before coming to the United States. A 2003 O. Henry Prize winner, Adichie was shortlisted for the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing. Her work has been selected by the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association and the BBC Short Story Awards and has appeared in various literary publications, including Zoetrope and the Iowa Review. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and longlisted for the Booker. She now divides her time between the U.S. and Nigeria. Her newest book is Americanah: A Novel.

Faith Adiele is co-editor of the international anthology Coming of Age Around the World and the writer, narrator, and subject of My Journey Home, a PBS documentary about growing up with a Nordic-American mother and then traveling to Nigeria as an adult to find her father and siblings. Meeting Faith, her account of becoming Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun, won the PEN Beyond Margins Award for Best Memoir. A contributor to O: The Oprah Magazine, Essence, and Transition, Adiele has been featured on NPR and the Tavis Smiley show. She is currently an Associate Professor of Writing at California College of the Arts.

Anne Carson was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.

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.

Frank M. Hansen is a cartoonist, artist  and writer. He creates humorous cartoons for various print and digital publications around the globe and short educational animations to help make learning more fun.  He is currently working on a new strip based on a washed-up Hollywood mogul. In between the cartooning, he produces original abstract art designs using ink, paint, and markers on anything from canvas to cardboard. His work has been shown at Gallery Nucleus, WWA Gallery, and the Red Gate Gallery in London.

Milton Knight started drawing, painting, and animation at the age of two. His work has appeared in Graphic Classics, Heavy Metal, High Times, National Lampoon, and Nickelodeon Magazine. His comic titles include Hugo, Midnite the Rebel Skunk, and Slug and Ginger. Knight is currently exhibiting and teaching at The Colonnade Art Gallery and Studio in Pasadena, CA.

Cartoonist Sharon Rudahl began drawing comics for underground newspapers and the first Wimmen's Comix. Her work has been exhibited in museums in San Francisco, New York, and Europe. Recent projects include Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman, and major contributions to Paul Buhle and Harvey Pekar's Yiddishkeit, Studs Terkel's Working, and the upcoming Bohemians, to be published in 2013. She is currently drawing comics for a Lincoln For Beginners book, which will be published this year.

Zak Smith's paintings and drawings are held in major public and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Other than Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow, his books include the monograph Pictures of Girls, and We Did Porn—a book, including drawings and stories, about his experiences working in the adult film industry.

Russ Kick is the editor of the three-volume, 1,600-page set The Graphic Canon: The World's Great Literature as Comics and Visuals, which NPR called "easily the most ambitious and successfully realized literary project in recent memory."  Russ' earlier books for The Disinformation Company (such as You Are Being Lied To) have sold over half-a-million copies. He has written regularly for the Village Voice, and Utne Reader named him one of "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World." He's currently working on a Walt Whitman volume of The Graphic Canon, as well as editing the first comprehensive anthology of classic and contemporary poetry about death and dying.

Ben Ehrenreich is the author of two novels, Ether and The Suitors and many articles, stories, and essays. He notes Bolaño as having influenced him as a writer.

Barbara Kennedy Epler is editor-in-chief, president and publisher of New Directions, an independent publisher founded in 1936. Among her many responsibilities are acquiring new authors, such as W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño, as well as other great writers like Laszlo Krasnahorkhai, Victor Pelevin, Inger Christensen, Yoel Hoffmann, Yoko Tawada,  and Javier Marías. New Directions publishes about 40 new books a year and maintains more than 1,000 titles on their backlist, publishing a great deal of fiction and poetry in translation as well as American experimental poets.

Mónica Maristain is an editor, journalist, and writer. She was born in Argentina and has lived in Mexico for the past 13 years. She has written for numerous national and international publications, including the Argentine magazines Clarín, Página 12 and La Nación, as well as Playboy. In 2010 she contributed to the anthology I’ll Write It Tomorrow: Authors of the 60s and published Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. The interview is included in New Direction’s posthumous publication (Roberto Bolaño) Between Parenthesis. Maristain is the author of the Bolaño biography El Hijo de Mister Playa: Uma semblanza de Roberto Bolaño.

David Shook studied endangered languages in Oklahoma and poetry at Oxford. His debut poetry collection, Our Obsidian Tongues, explores the multiplicity of voices that inhabit Mexico City. His many translations include Roberto Bolaño’s Infrarealist manifesto, Mario Bellatin’s novellas, and Víctor Terán’s poetry from the Isthmus Zapotec. He served as Translator in Residence for the Poetry Parnassus, where he premiered his poetry documentary Kilómetro Cero, covertly filmed in Equatorial Guinea. Shook grew up in Mexico City but now lives in Los Angeles, where he edits Molossus and Phoneme Books.

Héctor Tobar has worked as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times for nearly twenty years. He shared a Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of the 1992 riots and then served as the national Latino Affairs correspondent, the Buenos Aires bureau chief, and the Mexico City bureau chief. He is currently a book critic for the Los Angeles Times and is the author of three books: Translation Nation, The Tattooed Soldier, and the award-winning The Barbarian Nurseries. His non-fiction novel about the story of the Chilean miners is forthcoming.  The son of Guatemalan immigrants, Tobar is a native of the city of Los Angeles.

John Freeman is the editor of Granta magazine, and author of two books, The Tyranny of E-mail and How to Read A Novelist (forthcoming). Freeman is also a poet and critic whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, Zyzzyva, and The Believer. Between 2006 and 2008, he served as president of the National Book Critics Circle. He currently teaches at Columbia University and City University of New York

Nadifa Mohamed was born in Somalia and moved to Britain in 1986. Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy (2010), is a semi-biographical account of her father’s life in Yemen in the 30s and 40s. It was longlisted for the Orange Prize, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the PEN/Open Book Award, among others, and won the Betty Trask Award. Her new novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls, is forthcoming.

Ross Raisin was born in West Yorkshire. His debut novel, God's Own Country (2008), won a Betty Trask Award and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2009, as well as being shortlisted for both the Guardian First Book Award and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His second novel, Waterline, was published in 2011.  His short stories have appeared in Granta, Prospect, Esquire, Dazed & Confused, and the Sunday Times.

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.

Caroline Kennedy is the author and editor of ten bestselling books on American history, politics, and poetry. She is active in the efforts to improve New York City's public schools and serves as president of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.

Eloise Klein Healy is the author of seven books of poetry and three spoken word recordings. She was the founding chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles, where she is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing Emerita.  Healy is the founding editor of ARKTOI Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press. Her most recent collection of poems is A Wild Surmise: New & Selected Poems & Recordings. In December 2012, Healy was appointed the first poet laureate of The City of Los Angeles.