Gary Snyder is a poet, author, scholar, cultural critic, and Professor Emeritus of UC Davis. He graduated from Reed college in Portland, Oregon (where his roommates were poets Lew Welch and Philip Whalen) in 1951. In the Bay Area, Snyder associated with Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and others who were part of the remarkable flowering of west coast poetry during the fifties. In 1956 he moved to Japan to study Zen Buddhism and East Asian culture. For the last thirty-eight years, he has lived in the northern Sierra Nevada. He divides his time between environmental and cultural issues with a focus on the Sierra Nevada ecosystem, and teaching with a focus on creative writing, ethnopoetics, and bioregional praxis. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose. He has been awarded the Pulitzer prize for poetry (1975) as well as the Bollingen Prize (1997). His selected poems No Nature was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992.

Lew Welch attended Reed College in Oregon, where he met future Beat poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. While at graduate school at the University of Chicago in 1951, he suffered a nervous breakdown. He left school and went into psychotherapy while working as an advertising copywriter. (He came up with the famous slogan "RAID KILLS BUGS DEAD.") He moved to San Francisco to pursue his work as a poet, supporting himself as a cabdriver and became an active participant in Beat culture, living at various times with Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and appearing as the character, Dave Wain in Jack Kerouac's novel, Big Sur. Welch published and performed widely during the 1960s, and taught a poetry workshop as part of the University of California Extension in San Francisco from 1965 to 1970 and as poet-in-residence at Reed College in January 1971. On May 23rd 1971, he left behind a note and walked out of Snyder's house in the mountains carrying a revolver. His body was never found. Lew Welch is included in many Beat Generation retrospectives or anthologies, and his book of collected poems, Ring of Bone, was first published in 1973.

Melissa Fay Greene is an author of non-fiction, whose award-winning books focus on social inequalities and how individual lives are transformed by the search for justice. Her book Praying for Sheetrock, the story of a courthouse gang on the rural coast of Georgia and the black community that tried to dislodge it, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has also written The Temple Bombing, Last Man Out, and There is No Me Without You.

Seth Greenland is the author of the novels The Bones, Shining City and the forthcoming The Angry Buddhist. His play Jungle Rot won the Kennedy Center/American Express Fund for New American Plays Award and the American Theatre Critics Association Award. He was a writer/producer on the two most recent seasons of the HBO series Big Love.

Francisco Goldman is the author of The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman, and The Divine Husband and the non-fiction book, The Art of Political Murder. He is currently Allan K. Smith Professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and also directs the Premio Aura Estrada/Aura Estrada Prize.

Rachel Kushner is the author of Telex from Cuba, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award in Fiction in 2008 and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and winner of the California Book Award. Kushner's writing has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, the New York Times, Fence, Bomb, The Believer, Cabinet and Grand Street. She is co-editor of Soft Targets journal and currently at work on her second novel.

John Sayles's previous novels include Pride of the Bimbos, Los Gusanos, and the National Book Award-nominated Union Dues. He has directed seventeen feature films, including Matewan, Lone Star, and Eight Men Out, and received two Academy Award nominations. His latest film, Amigo, was completed in 2010.

Howard A. Rodman is a professor of screenwriting at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, serves on the Board of the Writers Guild of America, West, and has been Artistic Director of the Sundance Screenwriting Labs. He wrote Savage Grace, August, and Joe Gould's Secret. Rodman is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and of the Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities.

Jamaica Kincaid, writer, novelist and professor started her writing career at the New Yorker, where she became a staff writer and featured columnist for nine years. She won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts for her first book, At the Bottom of the River. Her book A Small Place, inspired the 2001 documentary, Life and Debt. Kincaid was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. She began her academic career at Harvard University holding joint appointments in the English and African-American Studies departments. She is currently a professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College.

Brighde Mullins is an award-winning playwright and poet. Her 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 at Ann Hamilton's Tower. She is currently the Director of the Master of Professional Writing Program at U.S.C.

Ramón Garcia is the author of a book of poetry Other Countries. He has published poetry in a variety of journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry 1996, Ambit, The Floating Borderlands: Twenty-Five Years of U.S.-Hispanic Literature, Crab Orchard Review; Poetry Salzburg Review, Los Angeles Review and Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. He is a Professor in Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Northridge.

Alicia Partnoy is a survivor of Argentina's detention camps during the dictatorship in the late 1970s. Best known for The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival, Partnoy also published the poetry collection Little Low Flying/Volando Bajito. Poems from her Revenge of the Apple/Venganza de la Manzana rode the metro in New York, Dallas, and Washington D.C., are sung by "Sweet Honey in the Rock" and were translated into several languages, including Hebrew. Partnoy edited You Can't Drown the Fire: Latin American Women Writing in Exile, and co-edited Chicana/Latina Studies: the Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social. Her most recent book is the translation of Gail Wronsky's poetry collection So Quick Bright Things.

Susan Salter Reynolds has been a book critic and features writer at the Los Angeles Times for twenty years. Prior to that she was an assistant editor at The New York Review of Books.

Chuck Rosenthal is the author of eight novels: The Loop Trilogy, Loop's Progress, Experiments with Life and Deaf, and Loop's End; Elena of the Stars, Avatar Angel, the Last Novel of Jack Kerouac, My Mistress Humanity, The Heart of Mars; and Coyote O'Donohughe's History of Texas. He has published a memoir, Never Let Me Go, and most recently a travel book, Are We Not There Yet? Travels in Nepal, North India, and Bhutan. Rosenthal teaches fiction writing at Loyola Marymount University. He is the manager of the Glass Table Artists' Collective and Managing Editor of What Books Press.

Gail Wronsky is the author, coauthor, or translator of nine books of poetry and prose, including Dying for Beauty, Poems for Infidels, and Volando Bajito, among others. She teaches creative writing at Loyola Marymount University.

Gronk is a nationally renowned painter and performance artist from Los Angeles. During the 1970's, he was one of the founding members of ASCO, an avant-garde multi-media arts collective in Los Angeles. He is best known for his murals and his very physical approach to painting. Much of his recent work has been done as temporary, mural-scale, site-specific paintings, the latest for the Fowler Museum at UCLA in April 2010.

Jacques d'Amboise joined the New York City Ballet at fifteen, became a principal dancer at seventeen, and remained so for the next thirty-five years. He has appeared in the films Seven Brothers, Carousel, The Best Things in Life Are Free, Watching Ballet, and Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1976, he founded the National Dance Institute, an arts education program, and is the author of Teaching the Magic of Dance.

Sasha Anawalt is director of USC Annenberg Arts Journalism Programs, including the Masters degree in Specialized Journalism (The Arts) program. She also directs the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program and the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater. In October 2009, she co-directed and co-produced with Douglas McLennan the first-ever National Summit on Arts Journalism. Anawalt wrote the best-selling cultural biography, The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company. She was chief dance critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, LA Weekly and on KCRW, National Public Radio. Her reviews and features have been published widely.

Joyce Carol Oates has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, (nominated for the National Book Award ), and The Falls. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award and the National Book Award. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.

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.