Gina B. Nahai is the author of Cry of the Peacock, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith (finalist for the Orange Prize in England and the IMPAC award in Dublin), and Sunday's Silence. Her novels have been translated into sixteen languages, and her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Magazine, and the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. She is a former consultant for the Rand Corporation, and has studied the politics of pre- and post-revolutionary Iran for the United States Department of Defense. She is professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.

Robert Scheer is the editor-in-chief of the political blog www.truthdig.com and the author of seven books, including Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power; With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War and America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals; with his son Christopher and Lakshmi Chaudhry, The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us about Iraq. Most recently, he wrote Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I and Clinton--and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush. Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts Magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Scheer can be heard on the political radio program Left, Right and Center on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica, Calif.
Scheer was raised in the Bronx, where he attended public schools and graduated from City College of New York. He studied as a Maxwell fellow at Syracuse University and was a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley, where he did graduate work in economics. Scheer is a contributing editor for The Nation as well as a Nation Fellow. He has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.

Dagoberto Gilb was born in the city of Los Angeles, his mother a Mexican who crossed the border illegally, and his father a Spanish-speaking Anglo raised in East Los Angeles. He studied philosophy and religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and graduated with both bachelor's and master's degrees. After that, he began his life as a construction worker, eventually joining the union in Los Angeles; a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. As a class-A journeyman carpenter, his employment for the next twelve years was on high-rise buildings, including MOCA. His books include The Magic of Blood (1993), which won the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Award, ,i>The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1994), A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Woodcuts of Women (2001), and Gritos (2003). Gilb recently published, as its editor, Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature (2006). He is now a tenured professor in the Creative Writing Program at Texas State University, in San Marcos, Texas.

John Burnham Schwartz is the author of the novels Claire Marvel, Bicycle Days and Reservation Road, which is being made into a motion picture based on his screenplay, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, and Jennifer Connelly. His books have been translated into more than fifteen languages and his writing has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and Vogue. He lives with his wife and son in Brooklyn, New York.

Born in mainland China, Ha Jin grew up in a small rural town in Liaoning Province. He served in the People's Liberation Army, staying at the northeastern border between China and the former Soviet Union. He studied American literature at Shandong University, and did graduate work in the U.S. at Brandeis University, from which he earned a Ph.D. in English. After the Tiananmen massacre, he realized it would be impossible to write honestly in China, so he decided to immigrate. Ha Jin was awarded the National Book Award for Waiting and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Waiting and War Trash. His other books include The Crazed, The Bridgegroom and Oceans of Words. He is a professor of English at Boston University.

Seth Faison spent 12 years living in China, mostly as a journalist. He traveled by train, truck and boat, exploring almost every province in China. Faison became a reporter and covered the Tiananmen student movement and massacre for the South China Morning Post. He joined the New York Times in 1991, specializing in Asian Organized Crime and people smuggling. He was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for spot news coverage of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. In 1995, he was named Bureau Chief in Shanghai, where he served five years, writing about the deep social and economic change underway, and earned a reputation as a writer skilled at capturing the moods and flavors of China.