Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and author of three books of short stories: The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Love and Obstacles. He was the recipient of a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship and a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation. His new memoir is The Book of My Lives.

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 Jewish-Polish Reconciliation (forthcoming, fall, 2013). Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books and on her Crooked Mirror blog.

Marisa Silver is the author of the short story collections Babe in Paradise, named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and Alone With You. She has written three novels, No Direction Home, The God of War, and most recently, Mary Coin. Silver made her fiction debut in The New Yorker has won the O. Henry Prize. Her work has been included in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as other anthologies.

Meghan O'Rourke is the author of the best-selling memoir The Long Goodbye and the poetry collections Once and Halflife. She is an award-winning cultural critic and a former editor at The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Slate.

Mohsin Hamid is the author of Moth Smoke and New York Times bestseller The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which has been published in over 30 languages, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was named by The Guardian as one of the books that defined the decade. Hamid contributes to Time, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications. Hamid grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, where he currently resides.

David Treuer is an Ojibwe Indian from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, and the author of three novels, a book of criticism, Native American Fiction; A User's Manual, and several essays and stories which have appeared in Esquire, TriQuarterly, The Washington Post, the LA Times, and Slate.com. Treuer is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the 1996 Minnesota Book Award, and fellowships from the NEH, Bush Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His book, The Translation of Dr Apelles was named a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post, Time Out, and City Pages.

Nathan Englander is the author of the novel The Ministry of Special Cases and the story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,, which earned him a PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic,and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Storiesand The O. Henry Prize Stories.

David L. Ulin is the book critic for the Los Angeles Times and, from 2005-2010, was the paper's book editor. He is the author of The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a 2002 California Book Award. His essays and criticism have appeared in many publications.

Tom Wolfe is the author of more than a dozen books, among them The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full, and I Am Charlotte Simmons. A native of Richmond, Virginia, he earned his B.A. at Washington and Lee University and a Ph.D. in American studies at Yale. He received the National Book Foundation’s 2010 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in New York City.

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.

Tom Wolfe’s words are performed by René Auberjonois, the esteemed Tony-winning actor whose career has spanned film, television, Broadway, and regional stages, as well as many audio recordings and broadcasts. Audiences best know him from his years on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Boston Legal, and innumerable film and television appearances.

Gavin Newsom is the 49th lieutenant governor of the state of California, following his two terms as the youngest mayor elected in San Francisco in over one hundred years. Previously, he founded fifteen small businesses in the San Francisco Bay area and now hosts The Gavin Newsom Show on Current TV. His newest book is Citizenville: Connecting People and Government in the Digital Age.

Patt Morrison is a writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and she hosted the daily Patt Morrison public affairs program on KPCC. She has won six Emmys and ten Golden Mike awards for Life & Times Tonight on KCET and for her KPCC show, which won three Golden Mike Awards for Best Public Affairs Show in its six-year run. She’s the author of the best-selling Rio LA, Tales from the Los Angeles River, and her interview subjects include Salman Rushdie, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and Ray Bradbury.

Hanna Rosin is a senior editor at The Atlantic and a founder of DoubleX, Slate’s women’s section. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, The New Republic, and The Washington Post, and is the recipient of a 2010 National Magazine Award.

Katherine Spillar is the executive vice president of the Feminist Majority Foundation and the Feminist Majority, national organizations working for women’s equality, empowerment, and non-violence. She is also the executive editor of Ms. Magazine. Under her oversight, Ms. won the prestigious “Maggie Award” for the best feature article for its investigation into the network of extremists connected to Scott Roeder, who murdered Dr. George Tiller. Spillar also led the magazine’s investigative report on human trafficking and working conditions akin to indentured servitude in the garment factories on the U.S. Territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, which led to the passage of labor and immigration reforms in Congress.  Spillar is a trained economist and researcher and a specialist in community organizing and speaks to diverse audiences nationwide on a broad range of domestic and international feminist topics.

Tani Ikeda is an award-winning director of narratives, documentaries, music videos, and commercial films. She is also co-founder of imMEDIAte Justice, a summer workshop and community outreach program for girls devoted to revolutionizing sex education through filmmaking. As the current executive director of imMEDIAte Justice, she was recently named one of the "25 Visionaries Who are Changing Your World" by the Utne Reader. Ikeda was selected as one of Film Independent’s 33 Emerging Filmmakers as a Project: Involve Directors Fellow. She tours the country speaking at universities and national conferences and has launched film production programs on the Quinault Reservation in Washington, a media justice camp for girls in Uganda, and a film summer camp in China.

Carol Downer is an American feminist lawyer. In 1972, Downer’s arrest, trial, and acquittal in a case dubbed "The Great Yogurt Conspiracy" brought national attention to the women’s health education project that she and her colleagues started, the Feminist Women’s Health Centers.  She is the co-author of A New View of a Woman’s Body and How to Stay Out of the Gynecologist’s Office.

Dr. Amy Parish is a biological anthropologist, primatologist, and Darwinian feminist. She taught at the University of Southern California in the Gender Studies, Arts and Letters, Public Health, and Anthropology departments for thirteen years. She is currently affiliated faculty at Georgetown University and a research associate at University College London.  She conducted ground-breaking research on patterns of female dominance and matriarchal social structure in one of our closest living relatives, the bonobo.  She is currently working on a book about love, marriage, and the experience of being a wife.

Nick Flynn is the author of three memoirs, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, The Ticking Is The Bomb, and most recently, The Reenactments. Flynn has worked as a ship’s captain, electrician, and caseworker for the working poor. His film credits include work as a field poet and artistic collaborator on Darwin’s Nightmare, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and executive producer/collaborator on Being Flynn. Each spring, he teaches poetry, nonfiction, and collaboration at the University of Houston, and the rest of the year, he is in, or near, Brooklyn.

Elvis Mitchell is the host of the pop culture radio show The Treatment on KCRW 89.9 FM and film curator of the Film Independent at LACMA film series. Previously, he hosted the TCM interview program Under the Influence and was also the chief film critic for “Movieline” and a visiting lecturer at Harvard in Visual and Environmental Studies and African American Studies. Prior to this, Mitchell served as the film critic at the New York Times and was the entertainment critic for NPR’s Weekend Edition. He produced and co-created The Black List, Volume One, a documentary focusing on achievement in the African American community, and was nominated by the WGA for his work on The AFI Lifetime Achievement Award on Sidney Poitier.

Bernard Cooper is an author of The Bill From My Father, and the recipient of many awards, including the PEN/USA Ernest Hemingway Award, O. Henry Prize, a Guggenheim grant, and a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in literature.  His work has appeared in several anthologies, magazines, and literary reviews, including five volumes of The Best American Essays, Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, Story, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. He has contributed to National Public Radio's "This American Life", and Los Angeles Magazine. Mr. Cooper currently teaches in writing programs at Bennington College and USC.

George Saunders, a MacArthur Genius Grant fellow, is the acclaimed author of several collections of short stories, including Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, as well as a collection of essays and a book for children. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University. His most recent work is a collection of short stories, Tenth of December.

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.

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is a poet, high school teacher, and native Angelino. She is creator and host of Beyond Baroque’s reading series Hitched, co-founder of The Splinter Generation, and was nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Award. Her work has been published in The Los Angeles Review, PALABRA, and Writers at Work's Poem of the Month.

Mia Carli was born in Corona, CA. She studied English and Political Science at Loyola Marymount University and is now getting her M.F.A. in Poetry at the University of Iowa.

Paul Lieber produces and hosts Why Poetry on KPFK radio in L.A. and Santa Barbara. His poetry collection, Chemical Tendencies, published by Tebot Bach, was a finalist in the MSR poetry contest and received an honorable mention in the Allen Ginsberg Contest. His poems have appeared in the Patterson Review, Askew, Alimentum, New York Quarterly, Solo and many other journals. Paul works as an actor and has performed on and off-Broadway and in numerous films and TV shows.

Angela Peñaredondo was born in the Philippines and grew up in Los Angeles and San Francisco. She is a recipient of a UCLA Community Access Scholarship in Poetry and a Fishtrap Fellowship. She has been featured in various literary venues such as The World Stage, Avenue 50, West Hollywood Book Fair and The Los Angeles Poetry Festival’s Night and the City. Currently, she is working on a collection of poetry and will soon start a graduate program in creative writing this year.

Verónica Reyes is a Chicana jota from East LA. Her poems give voice to her Mexican-American communities. She was a resident at Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center and a NEA fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poetry has been published in Calyx, Feminist Studies, ZYZZYVA, North American Review and The New York Quarterly.

Rolland Vasin, third-generation American writer (pen name Vachine) is published in the journals Open Minds Quarterly, Gnome, and Found and Lost and is an active open-mic-reader at venues from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Big Sur, California. He has featured at Los Angeles’ World Stage, The Rapp Saloon, and Cobalt Cafe, among others, and dabbles in improvisational theater and stand-up comedy for which we was recognized as the Laugh Factory’s 1992 3rd Funniest CPA in Los Angeles. As a day job, Rolland's CPA corporation audits youth and family charities.