Luis Alberto Ambroggio is an internationally known Hispanic-American poet and author of seventeen collections of poetry, amongst them: Todos somos Whitman/We are all Whitman (2014), Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems 1987-2006 (2009), introduction by Pulitzer Prize winner Oscar Hijuelos, and The Wind’s Archeology (2011; 2013 International Latino Best Book Award). He is an appointed Member of the North American and the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, with numerous recognitions and awards. His poetry, translated into several languages, has been included in the Archives of Hispanic Literature of the Library of Congress.

Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and books of translations; and five works of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars and Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain. His latest prose book, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, chronicles travels in Malaysia, China and Mongolia, and the Middle East. His writings have been translated into twenty-five languages, and his honors include a Chevalier from the French government in the Order of Arts and Letters. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to over forty countries. He serves on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, and in April 2012, President Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.

Sholeh Wolpé is a poet, writer, editor, and literary translator whose work transcends the boundaries of language, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. Born in Iran, she spent most of her teen years in Trinidad and the UK before settling in the United States. A recipient of the 2014 PEN/Heim Translation Fund award, 2013 Midwest Book Award, and 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation prize, Wolpé is the author of three collections of poetry and two books of translations and is the editor of three anthologies. She lives in Los Angeles.

A virtuoso of Tar and Setar, Sahba Motallebi is an internationally renowned musician. A member of the Iranian National Orchestra, Sahba has been awarded the best Tar player by the Iranian Music Festival for four consecutive years. She has traveled around the globe, presenting Persian music to enthusiasts in numerous countries. To date, Sahba has released a number of CDs and has composed numerous theatrical pieces. She is a graduate of CalArts in world performance music, and has been an ambassador of classical Persian music in the United States, performing in prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl.

Cynthia Hawkins is the owner of Hawkins House of Burgers in Watts, where her commitment to serving "only the best" fresh ingredients for decades has led her restaurant to be celebrated as one of the best burger joints in the U.S. Cynthia is the youngest in a family of successful entrepreneurs and grew up helping her parents manage their "50s style" malt shop, later converted to Slater Market- a neighborhood grocery store- before taking over the space and reinventing it as Hawkins House of Burgers. Cynthia’s restaurant has been featured on the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods and has received rave reviews from Los Angeles Magazine, LA Weekly 99 Essential Restaurants, Zagat, LAist, and Ask Men, among others.

Ricardo Jordan Diaz is the Chef and Founder of Colonia Restaurant Group. Diaz grew up in the restaurant business, and at the age of nine, he was already washing dishes every weekend at his family’s Mexican seafood chain “El 7 Mares”. After opening a number of family locations, he set out on his own to recreate the Latin dining experience. Starting with a few Dorados restaurants in the late nineties, Diaz went on to found Cook’s Tortas in 2007, Guisados in 2010, Bizarra Capital in 2012, Colonia Taco Lounge in 2013, Colonia Publica in 2014 and become Executive Chef of Santa Monica’s Tacoteca that same year. His goal is to expose patrons to the wonderful variety and extensive ingredients that Latin cuisine offers in its home countries.

Josh Kun is a professor in the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. He is the author of the new book To Live and Dine in L.A.: Menus and the Making of the Modern City(Angel City Press) based on the special collections of the Los Angeles Public Library. His first collaboration with the Library was Songs in the Key of Los Angeles, an examination of the early sheet music of the city that resulted in an award-winning book, as well as new recordings, public concerts, and an online web series with KCET Artbound. He is also the author of the American Book Award-winning Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America, co-author of And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Our Vinyl, and co-editor of Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border, among other volumes.

Tracy K. Smith is the author of three acclaimed books of poetry: The Body's Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets and an Essence Literary Award; and most recently, Life on Mars, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. Other honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a Whiting Writers' Award, and an Academy of American Poets Fellowship. A Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University, she lives in Princeton with her family.

Lynell George is an L.A.-based journalist and essayist who covers art, culture, social issues, and identity politics. Formerly a longtime staff writer at both the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly, her work has also appeared in Vibe, Essence, The Smithsonian, Black Clock and Boom: A Journal of California. George has taught journalism at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and is currently an art and culture columnist for KCET|Artbound.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of six collections of poetry, including After, Given Sugar, Given Salt, The Lives of the Heart, and The October Palace, as well as a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She edited and co-translated The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, and Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems. In 2004, Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor formerly held by such poets as Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop. In 2012, she was elected Chancellor of the Academy. Her newest work, published spring of 2015, is a volume of poetry titled The Beauty and a book of essays titled Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World.

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 will be a spring 2015 writer-in-residence at the Warsaw Bauhaus. Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books and on her Crooked Mirror blog.

Jennifer Clement has studied literature in New York and Paris. Among many honors for her work, the internationally acclaimed novel Prayers for the Stolen was awarded the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) Fellowship for Literature as well as the Sara Curry Humanitarian Award. She is also the author of the memoir Widow Basquiat and the novels A True Story Based on Lies, a finalist for the Orange Prize, and The Poison That Fascinates, as well as several books of poetry. Clement’s work has been translated into twenty languages. She lives in Mexico City and was President of PEN Mexico from 2009 to 2012.

Magdalena Edwards is a writer based in Los Angeles and born in Santiago, Chile. Her essays and lyrical experiments have appeared recently in The Millions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review Daily. Her work as a staff writer for Chile's leading newspaper El Mercurio led to graduate studies at UCLA in Comparative Literature, with an emphasis on twentieth-century poet-translators from the Americas, including Elizabeth Bishop, Octavio Paz, and Manuel Bandeira. Edwards occasionally translates poetry and prose from Spanish and Portuguese, and she is an editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is working on a book about love.

Sydney Barile is a poet and visual artist currently working toward a Master of Fine Art in Creative Writing at the California Institute of the Arts. She has a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Southern California—where she received the Beau J. Boudreaux Poetry Award. Sydney is in the process of completing her first book—a collection of autobiographical poems (confessional, narrative, and lyrical) that speak to the experience of growing up and navigating the space between adolescence and full adulthood. She lives in Los Angeles.

Justin Evans has or will very shortly publish fiction, satire, and/or essays in Bird's Thumb, Santa Monica Review, The Essay Daily, The Point Magazine, and Open Set. He is almost done writing Jerusalem/September, a novel about anarchists and arms manufacturers in Los Angeles. Spoiler alert: it doesn't end well for anyone. If the novel is okay, they might let him graduate from Otis College's MFA program this summer, and he will self-publish The Hate Journals of the Hobo Mawk: Volume I: Some Remarks as a chapbook and ebook.

Melissa Gutierrez is a second-year student in the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC, where she is currently studying poetry. Her work has appeared in The Oddity and Nameless Magazine.

Michael Mitchell is a second-year student in the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC, with an emphasis on writing for stage and screen. He is currently working on his thesis, a full-length feature screenplay, as well as a historical novel, and recently had his first short story published in FORTH Magazine.

Originally from Michigan, Nicole Olweean is a first-year poet in the University of California Riverside's MFA program. Her work has appeared in Fishladder, Menacing Hedge, and Bird's Thumb.

Niela Orr is an essayist and freelance writer. Her writing has appeared in The Baffler, The Hollywood Reporter, Salon, and KCET’s Artbound, among others. She is currently at work on her thesis project; There Is No Nineteenth Floor, a collection of creative nonfiction investigating liminal space and pop culture across sites as disparate as demolished housing projects in South Philadelphia and the on-stage void evident at a rap hologram performance. She lives in Los Angeles.

Sean Pessin earned an M.A. in English at California State University, Northridge, where he now teaches part-time. He is currently finishing his M.F.A. at Otis College of Art and Design. His work has appeared in Used Gravitrons, Interfictions Online, The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, The New Short Fiction Series, and in the Northridge Review. In general, Sean’s works feature the strange and the queer while being highly conscious of fabulist storytelling traditions.

Paula Tang is a writer from Walnut Creek, California, and is a fiction candidate at the University of California Riverside's MFA program. She is a world traveler and a voracious eater and is working on her first book, a novel in stories currently titled Big Baby Little China.

Julian Smith-Newman is a third-year MFA student in Fiction at UC Irvine. With Meriwether Clarke, he is the 2015 editor of Faultline, UCI’s journal of arts and letters. He is currently completing his first collection of stories.

Amanda Rusher Foushee is in her third year in the Graduate Program in Writing at UC Irvine. She will read from her thesis project, a novel currently titled East.

Sandy Tolan is the author of Me & Hank and The Lemon Tree. As co-founder of Homelands Productions, Tolan has produced dozens of radio documentaries for NPR and PRI. He has also written for more than forty magazines and newspapers. His work has won numerous awards, and he was a 1993 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and an I. F. Stone Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He is an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Kelly McEvers is a national correspondent based at NPR West. She previously ran NPR's Beirut bureau, where she earned many awards, including a George Foster Peabody award, for her 2012 coverage of the Syrian conflict. She recently made a radio documentary about being a war correspondent with renowned radio producer Jay Allison of Transom.org. In 2008 and 2009, McEvers was part of a team that produced the award-winning Working series for American Public Media's business and finance show Marketplace.

Thomas McGuane is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the author of ten novels, three works of nonfiction, and two other collections of stories. His titles include:The Bushwacked Piano, The Cadence of Grass, Driving on the Rim, Gallatin Canyon, Keep the Change, The Longest Silence, Ninety-two in the Shade, Nobody’s Angel, Nothing but Blue Skies, Panama, Some Horses, Something to Be Desired, The Sporting Club, and To Skin a Cat. McGuane lives in McLeod, Montana.

David L. Ulin is a book critic for the Los Angeles Times and, from 2005-2010 was the paper's book editor. He is the author of The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and 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 2002 California Book Award. His essays and criticism have appeared in many publications.

Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. His most recent book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize as well as the Lincoln and Bancroft Prizes.

Randall Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He is the author of six books, including, most recently, For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law. He is a member of the bars of the Supreme Court of the United States and the District of Columbia and a recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Race, Crime, and the Law.

Scott McCloud is the award-winning author of Understanding Comics (a 215-page comic book about comics that explains the inner workings of the medium, translated into 16 languages); Making Comics; Zot!; and many other fiction and non-fiction comics spanning 30 years. An internationally-recognized authority on comics and visual communication, technology, and the power of storytelling, McCloud has lectured at Google, Pixar, Sony, and the Smithsonian Institution. The Sculptor is his most recent book.

Elvis Mitchell is the host of the pop culture radio show The Treatment on KCRW 89.9 FM and film curator of year-round programming for Film Independent. Previously, he hosted the TCM interview program Under the Influence and was also a chief film critic for Movieline. Prior to this, Mitchell served as the film critic at The New York Times and was the entertainment critic for NPR’s Weekend Edition. He produced and co-created The Black List, Volume One, the NAACP Image Award-winning documentary focusing on achievement in the African American community. He was also nominated by the WGA for his work on "The AFI Lifetime Achievement Award: Sidney Poitier."