Maxine Hong Kingston is Senior Lecturer for Creative Writing at the University of California, Berkeley. For her memoirs and fiction, The Fifth Book of Peace, The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, and Hawai’i One Summer, she has earned numerous awards, among them the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the title of “Living Treasure of Hawai’i.” In July 2014, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama.

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. His stories have appeared in Best New American Voices, TriQuarterly, Narrative, and the Chicago Tribune and he is the author of the academic book Race and Resistance. His first novel, The Sympathizer won the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. His nonfiction book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War will be published in April 2016. He teaches English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

William Finnegan is the author of Cold New World, A Complicated War, Dateline Soweto, and Crossing the Line. He has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist and has won numerous journalism awards, including two Overseas Press Club awards since 2009. A staff writer at the New Yorker since 1987, he lives in Manhattan.

David Rensin has written or co-written 17 books, seven of them NY Times bestsellers. They include All for a Few Perfect Waves, an oral/narrative biography of rebel surfing icon Miki Dora; The Mailroom, an oral history of what it’s like to start at the bottom dreaming of the top in Hollywood; and Devil at My Heels, the autobiography of WWII/Olympian Louis Zamperini. He lives and surfs in Ventura, California.

Kate Tempest grew up in southeast London, where she still lives. She has gained acclaim as a poet, playwright, rapper, and recording artist. Her long poem Brand New Ancients, conceived as a performance piece, won the Ted Hughes Award for Poetry in 2013. In 2014, her album Everybody Down was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, and she was selected as one of this decade’s Next Generation Poets by the Poetry Book Society. She is also the author of the collection Hold Your Own. This is her first novel.

Neelanjana Banerjee is the Managing Editor of Kaya Press, a small publishing house dedicated to innovative Asian diasporic literature. She is co-editor of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (the University of Arkansas Press) and The Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles (Tia Chucha Press). She teaches fiction with Writing Workshops Los Angeles and is a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Emily Ansara Baines is the author of The Unofficial Downton Abbey Cookbook and The Unofficial Hunger Games Cookbook. She received her BA in Creative Writing from USC and her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Emily’s work has appeared in Narrative, Jezebel, The Huffington Post, The Independent, The Bold Italic, XOJane, Bird’s Thumb, and Hello Giggles. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, who is very supportive while she works away on her collection of linked stories.

Bridget Chiao Clerkin lives in Irvine with her husband and three children.

Emily Dorff, originally from Florida, is a second-year poet in the MFA program at UC Riverside. She holds a BA from Georgetown University and is a poetry editor for the Santa Ana River Review.

Alex Dupree is a musician and third-year MFA student in poetry at UC Irvine. Before moving to LA, he lived all over Texas and in some parts of New Mexico. He’s now working on a collection of poems titled “Body & Repair.”

Howard Ho is a writer/composer. He studied Musicology and Communications at UCLA and earned his Master of Professional Writing at USC, where he was Stage and Screen Editor of the Southern California Review. This past year, he was a member of the Playground-LA Writers Pool and the Vagrancy Playwrights’ Group. His short works have been produced by the Company of Angels and New Musicals, Inc. He has written and composed two musicals, which received readings through Kaya Press and East West Players. His articles have been published by the Los Angeles Times and YOMYOMF. He is a member of Cold Tofu Improv and Playwrights’ Arena.

Cecilia Latiolais is a 2nd-year fiction candidate in UC Riverside’s MFA program and received her BA from the University of Michigan. She is working on a collection of short stories that center around controlling the mind, female body, and sexuality. She plans to continue exploring LA until it falls into the Pacific.

Niko Nelson is a poet from the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her BA in Literary Studies from The New School and her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Niko is the founder of a literary skateboard magazine OUTLAWiNG, and her work has appeared in journals and magazines like Empty Mirror Ms.Fabulous, JustGo and Art Nouveau. This June, Niko will embark on a tour of the US and Canada to read from her latest work, featuring poems about big cities and mental states.

Benjamin S. Sneyd is an Appalachian writer from Northeast Tennessee. He most frequently writes about place, culture, and identity. His work has appeared in Burningword Literary Journal, Spry Literary Review, and elsewhere. He has worked as an intern at The Oxford American, an editorial assistant for Toad Suck Review, a general reader for Spry Literary Review, an assistant editor at The Tusculum Review, and is the editor-in-chief of Fannin Street: a journal of brave writing. He received his BA in English from Tusculum College and is currently finishing an MFA in writing at the California Institute of the Arts.

Casey Taylor is a prose writer who recently completed her Master of Professional Writing degree at the University of Southern California. She graduated with a degree in English from Stanford University and has also studied at Oxford and the University of Salamanca. Originally from Oregon, she now lives in South LA with her husband and an overweight black cat.

Jacqueline Young is a poet from Apple Valley, CA. Her work is miniature and observational, descending from the Imagist and Objectivist movements from the early 20th century. She holds a BA in English and MA in Education from Mount Holyoke College and is currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing at California Institute of the Arts.

John McWhorter teaches linguistics, music history, philosophy and American Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of The Power of Babel, Doing Our Own Thing, Our Magnificent Bastard Tounge, What Language Is, and the upcoming Words On The Move, and his academic specialty is language change and contact. His academic books on language include Defining Creole and Language Interrupted. He also writes on race as well as language for Time, CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Beast, and a monthly column on language for The Atlantic. McWhorter has published four audiovisual courses with the Teaching Company and has appeared often on National Public Radio (and twice at TED).

Mark Z. Danielewski was born in New York City and lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of House of Leaves, The Whalestoe Letters, Only Revolutions, The Fifty Year Sword, and The Familiar.

Howard A. Rodman wrote Savage Grace starring Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne, nominated for Best Screenplay at the 2009 Spirit Awards, and August, starring Josh Hartnett and David Bowie. He also wrote Joe Gould’s Secret, based on the memoir by famed New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell. He is the author of the novel, Destiny Express, set in the pre-war German filmmaking community. He is the president of the Writers Guild of America, West; a professor of screenwriting at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts; an Artistic Director of the Sundance Screenwriting Labs; and a member of the National Film Preservation Board. In 2013, in recognition of his contributions, he was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France.

Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator, historian, and naturalist and an affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses. She also worked as a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. She is the author of the bestselling H Is for Hawk, as well as a cultural history of falcons, titled Falcon, three collections of poetry, and the monthly "On Nature" column for the New York Times Magazine. As a professional falconer, she assisted with the management of raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia.

Louise Steinman is the curator of the award-winning ALOUD series and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of three books: The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War; The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance; and The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation. She was a 2015 Fellow at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida. Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and on her Crooked Mirror blog.

Arts educator and independent filmmaker Ben Caldwell is the founder of KAOS Network, a community arts center in Leimert Park that provides training on digital arts, media arts and multimedia. Caldwell’s films often trace historical and cultural connections. “Eyewitness: Reflections of Malcolm X & the O.A.A.U.” (2006) presents the Harlem reunion of ex-members of the Organization of Afro-American Unity. “La Buena Vida” (The Good Life) (2008), filmed over the course of three years while Caldwell taught at the California Institute of the Arts, documents the cultural exchanges between a group of hip hop artists and musicians from Los Angeles and their counterparts in Havana, Cuba.

Ayana A. H. Jamieson is a writer, editor, and organizer. She is a lecturer for State University of New York, Empire State College’s Center for Distance Learning. She is the founder of the Los Angeles-based Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, a community organization that highlights the ongoing creative, scholarly, community, and social justice work inspired by speculative fiction author Octavia E. Butler. Jamieson was one of the organizers of “Ferguson is the Future — Incubating Alternative Worlds Through Arts, Activism, and Scholarship” symposium at Princeton University. Her current book project is Octavia Butler’s biography based on Butler’s own published and unpublished writing and her Southern California origins.

Douglas Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and (2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection. His third poetry collection, Patter (2014), examines miscarriage, infertility, and parenthood. Kearney’s second book, The Black Automaton (2009) was a National Poetry Series selection. A collection of opera libretti—Someone Took They Tongues.—is forthcoming. He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Poetry, nocturnes, Pleiades, Iowa Review, Boston Review, and Indiana Review; and various anthologies. He teaches at CalArts.

A close friend of Octavia Butler during her years in Seattle, Nisi Shawl is a founder of the Carl Brandon Society and a member of Clarion West’s Board of Directors. Cynthia Ward she coauthored Writing the Other: A Practical Approach. Her story collection Filter House co-won the 2009 Tiptree Award. Shawl edited Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars. She co-edited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler; and Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. Shawl’s Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair is due out in August.

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of essays on myth-making and black presences in film, literature, and visual art, and co-editor of The Encyclopedia Project. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Viz. InterArts: Interventions, Body Forms: On Queerness and the Essay, the Reanimation Library’s Word Processor series and in Letters to the Future: An Anthology of Experimental Writing by Black Women, among others. She is currently working on a novel, The Curator. Bryant teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts.

DJ Lynnée Denise is a DJ, writer, and scholar who creates work informed and inspired by underground cultural movements, the 1980s, migration studies, theories of escape, and electronic music of the African Diaspora. Denise has received support from the Jerome Foundation, The Astrae Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Idea Capital, Residency BiljmAIR (Netherlands), and The Rauschenberg Artists as Activists Grant.

Michael Cunningham is the author of seven novels, including A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, and By Nightfall, as well as Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. He lives in New York.

Aimee Bender is author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (NY Times Notable Book), An Invisible Sign of My Own (LA Times Pick of the Year), Willful Creatures (The Believer’s “Best Books of the Year”), The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (SCIBA Award, Alex Award), and The Color Master (NY Times Notable Book). Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, Tin House, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and has been heard on PRI’s “This American Life” and “Selected Shorts.” She has received two Pushcart Prizes as well as nominations for the TipTree Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. She lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at USC.

Simon Winchester is the acclaimed author of many books, including The Professor and the Madman, The Men Who United the States, Atlantic, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and Krakatoa, all of which were New York Times bestsellers and appeared on numerous best and notable lists. In 2006, Mr. Winchester was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty the Queen. He resides in western Massachusetts.

Tom Lutz is the founding editor-in-chief of Los Angeles Review of Books and the author of Crying, Doing Nothing, and the forthcoming Wanderlust: Around the World in 80 Anecdotes.

Sandra Cisneros is the author of two highly celebrated novels, a story collection, two books of poetry, and, most recently, Have You Seen Marie? She is the recipient of numerous awards, including National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Lannan Literary Award, the American Book Award, the Thomas Wolfe Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Cisneros is the founder of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral and Macondo Foundations, which serve creative writers.

Reyna Grande is an award-winning author of the novels Across a Hundred Mountains, Dancing with Butterflies, and most recently, the memoir, The Distance Between Us, which was a National Book Circle Critics Award finalist. Born in Guerrero, Mexico, Reyna entered the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant at age 10, and later went on to become the first person in her family to graduate from college. Grande currently teaches creative writing at UCLA Extension and is at work on her next novel. She is the recipient of many awards, including an American Book Award, the El Premio Aztlán Literary Award, and the Latino Book Award.