Joseph O'Neill was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1964 and grew up in Mozambique, South Africa, Iran, Turkey, and Holland. For many years, he worked as a barrister in London. His works include the novels This is The Life, The Breezes, and Netherland (2006), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. He also wrote Blood-Dark Track, a memoir about his grandfathers who were both imprisoned during World War II, which was a New York Times Notable Book.

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, where he directed the Big Read and the Guadalajara Book Festival initiatives. 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 are forthcoming. In July of 2010 he opened a lending library/used bookstore in the Jewish-turned-Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, called Libros Schmibros.

Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award & Pulitzer Prize), and Specimen Days.

Tony Valenzuela is a longtime community activist and writer whose work has focused on LGBT civil rights, sexual liberation and gay men's health. He wrote, produced and performed his acclaimed one-man show, "The (Bad) Boy Next Door." He is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program of the California Institute of the Arts. Currently he is Executive Director of the Lambda Literary Foundation.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, the president of the PEN American Center, is the author of the prize-winning Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Raised in Ghana and educated in England, he has taught philosophy on three continents and is currently a professor at Princeton University, working in the Philosophy Department and the University Center for Human Values.

Jack Miles is Senior Fellow for Religious Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy and Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies, University of California, Irvine. A MacArthur Fellow (2003-2007), Miles won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for God: A Biography, which has since been translated into sixteen languages. A former member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board, he is currently general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions.

Ted Mann was the most uninhibited and unpredictable of all the people who ever worked at the Lampoon. And he was a good writer of tough, smart prose. He had serious issues on his mind, but first he and Tod Carroll created "O. C. and Stiggs," and he was one of the writers of Disco Beaver from Outer Space. Ted has since written and produced for Miami Vice, NYPD Blue, Judging Amy, John from Cincinnati, and Deadwood.

Rick Meyerowitz believes he is the most prolific contributor of illustrated articles to the National Lampoon magazine. He painted the poster for Animal House and was the creator of the magazine's trademark visual, "The Mona Gorilla." Shortly after 9/11, Rick and Maira Kalman cre­ated the most talked-about New Yorker cover of this century, "NewYorkistan." Rick is also the author of Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great.

Ellis Weiner is droll and cerebral. He says he lived in a state of constant fear that he wouldn't understand what the other Lampoon editors were talk­ing about. Ellis writes for television and has written or cowritten numerous books, among which are Drop Dead, My Lovely; The Joy of Worry (with Roz Chast); Yid­dish with Dick and Jane; and Oy! Do This Not That!: 100 Simple Swaps That Could Save Your Life, Your Money, or Your Mother from a Heart Attack, God Forbid. Ellis is a regular and very funny blogger on the Huffington Post.

Umberto Eco was born in 1932 in Alessandria, a small town in the Piedmont province of Italy. The town - Alessandria - was largely centered around a company that manufactured Borsalino hats, and being a Piedmontese town meant that the residents were born into a culture unique among those found in the rest of Italy. A mountainous area, the Piedmontese are used to a certain sense of independence, and in many ways they are marked by the phlegmatic nature of the nearby French rather than the fiery passions of the southern Italians. Eco often cites his upbringing among this culture as a source of the unique temperament in his writing: "Certain elements remain as the basis for my world vision: a skepticism and an aversion to rhetoric. Never to exaggerate, never to make bombastic assertions."

Mona Simpson worked as a journalist before attending graduate school where she published her first short stores in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, and Mademoiselle. While in New York, she worked as an editor at The Paris Review for five years while finishing her first novel, Anywhere But Here. After that, she wrote The Lost Father, A Regular Guy and Off Keck Road. Her work has been awarded several prizes: A Whiting Prize, a Guggenheim, an NEA grant, and most recently a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others.

Michelle Huneven is the author of three novels --Blame, Jamesland and Round Rock, all of which have been nominated for an LA Times Book Award. Her nonfiction writings include restaurant reviews for the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly, other food journalism and, with Bernadette Murphy, the Tao Gals Guide to Real Estate. She has received a General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers and a Whiting Writers' Award for fiction. Michelle currently teaches creative writing at UCLA.

Laura Trombley is an internationally renowned Mark Twain scholar, authoring several books and dozens of scholarly articles on Twain. She appeared in Ken Burns's Mark Twain documentary and, as a graduate student, discovered the largest known cache of Mark Twain letters.

In addition to her most recent book, Mark Twain's Other Woman, Laura's other works on Twain include Mark Twain in the Company of Women and Constructing Mark Twain: New Directions in Scholarship. In addition to being an author, Laura is also the president of Pitzer College. http://lauratrombley.org/

William Powers is one of the country's leading commentators on the information culture. A former staff writer for The Washington Post, his writing on media, technology and other subjects has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, McSweeney's, The Guardian and many other publications. He created The New Republic's first media column and for years wrote an influential weekly column for Atlantic Media's National Journal. He is a two-time winner of the National Press Club's Arthur Rowse Award for best American media commentary. Hamlet's Blackberry is his first book.

Aimee Bender is the author of four books, including The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures. Her latest, out in June, is a novel called The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Her stories have been published in Granta, The Paris Review, Tin House, Harper's and more, as well as heard on "This American Life". She has been translated into ten languages, and teaches creative writing at USC.

http://www.flammableskirt.com/

Glen David Gold's first novel, Carter Beats the Devil, has been translated into fourteen languages. His short stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney's, Playboy, and The New York Times Magazine. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Alice Sebold.

Jonathan Franzen is the author of The Corrections, winner of the 2001 National Book Award for fiction; the novels The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion; and two collections of essays, How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone.

Meghan Daum is the author, most recently, of Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House, a memoir about real estate addiction. Since 2005, she has been a weekly opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times. Meghan is also the author of the essay collection My Misspent Youth and the novel The Quality of Life Report. She has contributed to public radio programs such as "This American Life" and her articles and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among other publications.