British-born Colin Thubron has spent his working life writing and traveling in the vast land mass of Asia. His earliest books were on Damascus, Lebanon, Jerusalem and Cyprus. In the eighties he traveled by car through the Soviet Union for Where Nights Are Longest and through China for Behind the Wall. His later travel books include The Lost Heart of Asia, on the republics of Central Asia; In Siberia; and Shadow of the Silk Road, the account of a journey from eastern China to the Mediterranean. He has published seven novels including A Cruel Madness and Turning Back the Sun. His many awards include the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs.

Born in England, to Indian parents, Pico Iyer grew up in Southern California. He is the author of seven works of non-fiction, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul. He has also written the novels Cuba and the Night and Abandon. Iyer has been an essayist for Time magazine, while also writing for The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The New York Times and National Geographic. His most recent book, The Open Road, describing more than 30 years of talking and traveling with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was a best-seller across the U.S. Iyer has been based for the past 20 years near Nara, in rural Japan, though he is always on the road.

Annie Murphy Paul is a magazine journalist and book author whose writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and The Best American Science Writing, among many other publications. A former senior editor at Psychology Today magazine, she was awarded the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. She is the author of The Cult of Personality, a cultural history and scientific critique of personality testing, and Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives. Origins was chosen as one of the Notable Books of 2010 by The New York Times Book Review.

Michael C. Lu, MD, MPH is an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology and public health at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and at the UCLA School of Public Health. He is a member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Select Panel on Preconception Care, and a lead investigator for the National Children's Study in Los Angeles. He has received numerous awards for his teaching, including Excellence in Teaching Awards from the Association of Professors of Gynecology and Obstetrics.

Rebecca Skloot is a science writer whose articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine; The Oprah Magazine; and others. She is guest editor of The Best American Science Writing 2011. Her debut book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks an instant New York Times bestseller and was named Best Book for 2010 by Amazon.com. It is currently being being adapted into a young adult book and an HBO film produced by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball.

Carolyn Kellogg is an LA-based book critic and the lead blogger for the LA Times book blog, Jacket Copy. She was a judge of the 2010 Story Prize and is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.

David Brooks started his op-ed column in The New York Times in September 2003. He has been a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly, and he is a weekly commentator on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He is the author of the bestseller Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is a Fellow and Deputy Director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations. She covered presidential politics and public affairs for ten years as a producer with ABC News and This Week with George Stephanopoulos, before leaving to write about women entrepreneurs in war zones including Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Her reporting on this topic has been published widely and she frequently appears on TV news shows as a policy expert on Afghanistan. She served as an informal advisor on the topic of women's economic empowerment for General McChrystal's staff in Afghanistan as well as economic officials at the American Embassy in Kabul.

Kai Ryssdal is the host of Marketplace on American Public Media. Before joining Marketplace, Kai was a reporter and substitute host for The California Report, a news and information program distributed to public radio stations throughout California. His radio work has won first place awards from the Radio and Television News Directors Association and the national Public Radio News Directors Association.

Before his career in public radio, Kai served in the United States Navy, was a Pentagon staff officer, and was a member of the United States Foreign Service.

Octavia Butler is the author of eleven novels, including Kindred, Dawn, and Parable of the Sower, and one collection of short fiction, Bloodchild. Butler is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, a lifetime achievement award in writing from PEN, and numerous other literary awards.

An independent writer, teacher, poet, lecturer, and consultant, Akasha Gloria Hull has been a professor of women's studies and literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of Delaware, and the University of the West Indies-Mona in Kingston, Jamaica. She holds B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees and also a honorary Doctor of Letters, awarded by Purdue University in 1992 "for pioneering work in the field of black feminist studies that has empowered others to hear and appreciate diverse voices." She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright, Rockefeller, Mellon and Ford Foundations, the American Association of University Women, and the National Humanities Center.

Her book, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (co-edited), garnered the National Institute's Women of Color Award. She is also the author of Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson; Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance; and Healing Heart: Poems. Her latest book, Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African-American Women (Inner Traditions, 2001) was praised in Publishers Weekly as "powerful, practical and nourishing gumbo . . . of the heart and spirit." She is currently completing the first novel of a projected trilogy set in the contemporary United States, the slavery South, and the 23rd century future.