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 and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her fiction has appeared in several 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 directs the MFA program in writing at the University of California, San Diego. She lives in Los Angeles and was recently named one of "20 Under 40" fiction writers by the New Yorker.

Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is the recipient of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Whiting Writers' Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and is a 2010 recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Grant. In 2007, Granta named her one of the best American novelists under thirty-five. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among others. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis.

Brighde Mullins' plays have been produced in New York, London, and San Francisco. Titles include:Monkey in the Middle, Fire Eater, Topographical Eden; Pathological Venus. She has received a Whiting Foundation Award; an NEA Fellowship and others. She has taught at Harvard University and at Brown University, and for fifteen years she curated the Reading Series at Dia Art Foundation in New York. She is currently the Director of the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC.

Rebecca Solnit is an essayist, historian, and activist whose work focuses on issues of environment, landscape, and place. Her books include Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West, A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and the Mark Lynton History Prize, and Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.

David L. Ulin is a book critic for the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of 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 California Book Award. He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, LA Weekly, Los Angeles, and National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." His most recent book, The Lost Art of Reading, is due out this fall.

Joan Schenkar is the author of the highly acclaimed, award-winning biography The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith; of the widely praised biography Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde; and of a collection of award-winning plays, Signs of Life: 6 Comedies of Menace. She lives and writes in Paris and Greenwich Village.

Kathleen Chalfant is a Tony-nominated, Drama Desk and Obie Award-winning actress. Her many credits include the Broadway hit Angels in America, the Off-Broadway Wit and Nine Armenians. Her films include Duplicity, The People Speak, The Last New Yorker, Murder and Murder, among numerous others, and the TV shows Law and Order, Rescue Me, Book of Daniel, The Guardian, and The Laramie Project, as well as numerous radio programs.

Hazel Rowley is the author of three previous biographies: Christina Stead: A Biography, a New York Times Best Book; Richard Wright: The Life and Times, a Washington Post Best Book; and Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beavoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, which has been translated into twelve languages. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Gail Eichenthal is the Program Director of Classical KUSC 91.5 FM, and the co-producer and co-host of the Saturday 8am KUSC arts magazine program, Arts Alive. For more than twenty years, she hosted and produced the national radio broadcasts of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Gail was previously an award-winning news reporter and anchor at KNX and CBS Radio. Gail's articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the LA Times Magazine, and Symphony Magazine