David Kipen is author of The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History, and translator of Cervantes' The Dialogue of the Dogs. Until January 2010, he was the Literature Director of the National Endowment of the Arts. He also served from 1998 to 2005 as book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. His introductions to the WPA Guides to Los Angeles and San Francisco were recently published. In July of 2010 he opened Libros Schmibros, a lending library/used bookstore in the once majority-Jewish, now majority-Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights -- now in its new home above the Mariachi Plaza Gold Line station.

Dr. Gray Brechin is a visiting scholar at the U.C. Berkeley Department of Geography from which he received his Ph.D. in 1998. He is the founder of the Living New Deal, an effort to inventory and map the legacy of New Deal public works in the United States. He received an M.A. in Art History in 1976 from the U.C. Berkeley Department of Art History in 1976 with a special interest in architecture. He is the author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, a MacArthur prize-winning sociologist, is the Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education at Harvard. As a sociologist, she examines the culture of schools, the patterns and structures of classroom life, socialization within families and communities, and the relationship between culture and learning styles. She is the author of ten books, including Balm in Gilead, The Third Chapter and her most recent work, Exit: The Endings that Set Us Free.

Robin Kramer has been an active leader in Los Angeles civic affairs for over three decades. She was the first woman to hold the position of Chief of Staff to both Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Richard Riordan, and was a senior executive at the California Community Foundation, Broad Foundation and Coro Southern California. She is currently working as Senior Advisor to The Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands, chairs the Pitzer College Board of Trustees, and serves as one of five commissioners of the Port of Los Angeles, the economic engine for Southern California.

Gail Collins, the best-selling author of When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, is a national columnist for the New York Times. Her latest book is As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda. She lives in New York City.

Anne Taylor Fleming is a nationally recognized commentator, writer, and longtime essayist for the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, and Los Angeles Magazine where she writes a monthly column. Fleming is the associate director of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, and the author of three books: Motherhood Deferred, Marriage: A Duet and As If Love Were Enough. She has also won numerous awards for her TV essays.

Kathleen Dean Moore is an essayist and activist who writes about cultural and spiritual connections to wet wild places. Her award-winning books include Riverwalking, Holdfast, The Pine Island Paradox, and Wild Comfort. Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, her newest book, gathers calls from the world's moral leaders to honor our obligations to future generations. Moore, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University, publishes in both environmental ethics and popular journals such as Audubon, Discover, and Orion, where she serves on the Board of Directors.

Craig Childs is a writer who focuses on natural sciences, archaeology, and remarkable journeys into the wilderness. He has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed books on nature, science, and adventure. He is a commentator for NPR's Morning Edition, and his work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, Outside, and Orion. His subjects range from pre-Columbian archaeology to U.S. border issues to the last free-flowing rivers of Tibet and Patagonia. He has won several awards for his writing.

William Deverell is a professor of history at USC, where he specializes in the history of California and the American West and directs a scholarly institute that collaborates with the Huntington Library in Pasadena. He is the author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910. With Greg Hise, he is co-author of Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region. William is a Fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC.

Jeff Bridges is an Oscar-winning actor, performer, songwriter, and photographer. He is a co-founder of the End Hunger Network and the national spokesman for Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign. Bridges has been studying Buddhism with Bernie Glassman for over a decade.

Bernie Glassman founded the Zen Community of New York, which later became Zen Peacemakers, an international order of social activists. A longtime Zen teacher, he also founded the Greyston Mandala, a network of for-profits and not-for-profits creating jobs, housing, and programs to support individuals and their families on the path to self-sufficiency.

Rev. Danny Fisher is Coordinator of the Buddhist Chaplaincy Department at University of the West in Rosemead. Ordained as a lay Buddhist minister by the Los Angeles Buddhist Union, he is also a blogger for the websites Patheos and Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly Online. Called “a leading young Buddhist activist" by the Religion News Service, Danny also serves as a Climate Leader in Former Vice President Al Gore’s Climate Reality Leadership Corps.

Amy Wilentz is the author of The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier, Martyrs' Crossing, and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger. She is the recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award and a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She frequently writes for The New Yorker and The Nation, and currently teaches in the Literary Journalism program at U.C. Irvine. Her most recent book is Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter Form Haiti.

Jon Wiener is a professor of history at the University of California Irvine, where he specializes in recent American history. He is the author of many books, including Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower, and Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files, among others. His most recent work is How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America. He is a contributing editor to The Nation magazine, and hosts an afternoon drive-time radio program on KPFK-90.7 FM featuring interviews on politics and culture.

Sapphire is the author of two collections of poetry and the best-selling novel Push. The film adaption of her novel, Precious received the Academy Award for Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress, in addition to the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Awards in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at Sundance. In 2009 she was a recipient of a United States Artist Fellowship.

Brighde Mullins is a playwright and poet, whose work includes Monkey in the Middle, Fire Eater and Pathological Venus. Current theatre projects include a commission by the Pioneer Theatre Company and a site-specific piece with the Imaginists Theatre. She was the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard University (where she was also a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Playwriting), and served for fifteen years as the Director of the Reading Series in Contemporary Poetry at Dia Art Foundation in N.Y. She serves on the Board of PenWest, and is a Fellow at the Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities. She is the Director of the Master of Professional Writing Program at U.S.C.

Richard Ford is the author of The Bascombe Novels, which includes The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day—the first novel to win the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award—and The Lay of the Land, as well the short story collections Rock Springs and A Multitude of Sins, which contain many widely anthologized stories. He lives in Boothbay, Maine.

Michael Silverblatt is the host of KCRW's half-hour radio show Bookworm, where he introduces listeners to new and emerging authors along with writers of renown. He created Bookworm for KCRW-FM in 1989. The complete Bookworm archive can be heard at kcrw.com/bookworm.

Alison Bechdel is the author of the bestselling memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Time, New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. For twenty-five years, she wrote and drew the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a visual chronicle of modern life--queer and otherwise. Bechdel is guest editor of Best American Comics, 2011, and has drawn comics for Slate, McSweeney's, Entertainment Weekly, Granta, and The New York Times Book Review.

Deborah Vankin is a journalist and graphic novelist. As a Los Angeles Times staff writer, she covers the spectrum of arts & culture, entertainment and nightlife -- including books and comics, the art gallery and street art scenes, alternative comedy, indie film and pop culture in general. Her 2011 graphic novel "Poseurs" follows three teenagers, from very different corners of L.A., into the underworld of L.A. clubs and Hollywood parties. She's now working on a second graphic novel.

Terry Tempest Williams is a "citizen writer" who has testified before Congress on women's health issues, been a guest at the White House, camped in the remote regions of Utah and Alaska wildernesses and worked as "a barefoot artist" in Rwanda. She is the award-winning author of fourteen books, including Leap, An Unspoken Hunger, Refuge, and most recently, Finding Beauty in a Broken World. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society. She is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah.

Louise Steinman is curator of the award-winning ALOUD series and Co-Director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of two books, most recently, The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father's War, awarded the Gold Medal in Autobiography from ForeWord Magazine and the selection of several all-city and all-freshman reads programs. Her work appears in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and on her blog.