Jill Leovy is a reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times, where she has worked for fifteen years. She's the recipient of numerous journalism awards, including, as a member of a six-reporter team, the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. In 2007, Leovy created an innovative blog project called "The Homicide Report" that covered every single one of the 845 murders in Los Angeles that year.

Warren Olney is the host and executive producer of Which Way, LA? and To the Point. WWLA is the signature daily local news program on 89.9 KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com. Olney reaches a national audience with To the Point, distributed by Public Radio International and several other public radio markets nationwide. Olney and both of his programs have been honored with nearly 40 national, regional, and local awards for broadcast excellence since its inception. Most recently, Olney received the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award for his broad achievements in television news, as well as his storied career over 20 years on public radio, both locally and nationally.

Patton Oswalt is the author of the New York Times bestseller Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. He has released five TV specials, and five critically acclaimed comedy albums, including two Grammy-nominated releases, My Weakness Is Strong and Finest Hour. Oswalt has also appeared on many television shows and in more than twenty films, including Young Adult, Big Fan, and Ratatouille. Oswalt was the host of the 29th Independent Spirit Awards and the 18th Annual Webby Awards. He lives in Los Angeles.

Matt Oswalt is a writer and director who took his talents writing sketches for Nickelodeon and created the very NSFW and dark web series Puddin’ starring Eddie Pepitone. Having accompanied his brother Patton on numerous outings to the New Beverly over the years, from a double feature of Withnail and I/ Get Carter to a haunting screening of Salò that left them both shaken, he not only witnessed firsthand but got caught up in his brother's obsession with film.

Jeff Chang has written extensively on culture, politics, the arts, and music. He is the author of the award-winning Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, and co-founder of ColorLines, the SoleSides hip-hop crew, and CultureStr/ke. His latest book is Who We Be: The Colorization of America. Named by the Utne Reader as one of the "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World," Chang has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature and currently serves as the executive director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University.

Justin Simien, one of Variety magazine’s "10 Directors to Watch", is the writer and director of the critically acclaimed film Dear White People, which won the Special Jury Award for "Breakthrough Talent" at Sundance 2014. In addition to producing and directing online companion pieces for The Help, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and Middle of Nowhere campaigns, he has also written, produced and directed for Take Part TV and the Streamy-nominated web series INST MSGS.

Erin Aubry Kaplan is a journalist, columnist, author, blogger, and teacher who has been writing about black issues since 1992. She has been a staff writer for the LA Weekly and an opinion columnist for the L.A. Times, the first African American to hold the position. She has contributed to many publications and nonfiction anthologies. Her collection of essays and reportage, Black Talk, Blue Thoughts and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches From a Black Journalista, was published in 2011 by Northeastern University Press. Her second book, about the cultural legacy of Barack Obama, is due out in 2015.

Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction; A Gesture Life; Aloft; and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Selected by The New Yorker as one of the "20 Writers for the 21st Century," Lee is a professor at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a Shinhan Distinguished Visiting Professor at Yonsei University.

Charles Yu is the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which was a New York Times Notable Book and named one of the best books of the year by Time magazine. He received the National Book Foundation’s "5 Under 35" Award for his story collection Third Class Superhero. His work has been published in The New York Times, Playboy, and Slate, among other periodicals. His most recent book is Sorry Please Thank You, and he is at work on his new novel, titled The Book of Wishing, forthcoming from Pantheon Books.

For more than four decades—from Santana's earliest days as a groundbreaking Afro-Latin-blues-rock fusion outfit in San Francisco— Carlos Santana has been the visionary force behind artistry that transcends musical genres and generational, cultural, and geographical boundaries. To date, Santana has won 10 Grammy® Awards, including a record-tying nine for a single project, 1999’s Supernatural, as well as three Latin Grammys. Santana’s new album, Corazón, was released in May 2014 and is his first Latin music album of his career. The arc of Santana’s performing and recording career is complemented by a lifelong devotion to social activism and humanitarian causes.

Primarily known as an actor, a director, and a performer, Cheech Marin is also an avid art collector. His collection of Chicano art is lent to art institutions worldwide, and he has authored numerous books inspired by his collection. In addition to art books, Marin is also the author of three children’s books. His work on behalf of Latinos has been recognized with the 2000 Creative Achievement Award from the Imagen Foundation and the 1999 ALMA Community Service Award from the National Council of La Raza and Kraft Foods.

Colm Tóibín is the author of seven novels, including The Blackwater Lightship; The Master (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize); and Brooklyn (winner of the Costa Book Award); as well as two story collections and several books of essays, including Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar. The stage production of his novel The Testament of Mary, starring Fiona Shaw, ran on Broadway in 2013, earning three Tony nominations. Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York, where he is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia. His newest book is Nora Webster: A Novel.

Rachel Kushner is the author of two novels, Telex from Cuba and The Flamethrowers. Both received rave reviews, were shortlisted for the National Book Award, and were New York Times bestsellers.

Sarah Thornton is a non-fiction writer and sociologist of art. 33 Artists in 3 Acts, her long-awaited follow-up to Seven Days in the Art World, a witty account of the machinations of the art world, which was an international hit. Thornton has written regularly for The Economist and many other publications. She lives in London but travels widely.

Allison Agsten has served as Curator of Public Engagement at the Hammer Museum since 2010, where she directs an innovative new curatorial program focused on creating an exchange between visitors and the museum through works of art. Agsten previously worked at LACMA, where she developed a number of pioneering digital projects, and prior to that, at CNN, where she was a producer regularly covering the arts.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her books include Book of Ages, a finalist for the National Book Award; New York Burning, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Name of War, winner of the Bancroft Prize; and The Mansion of Happiness, which was short-listed for the 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Alex Cohen is co-host of KPCC's "Take Two" show. Prior to that, she was the host of KPCC's "All Things Considered." She has also hosted and reported for NPR programs, including "Morning Edition," "All Things Considered," and "Day to Day," as well as American Public Media's "Marketplace" and "Weekend America." Prior to that, she was the L.A. Bureau Chief for KQED FM in San Francisco. She has won various journalistic awards, including the LA Press Club’s Best Radio Anchor prize. Alex is also the author of Down and Derby: The Insider’s Guide to Roller Derby.

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the novels Home, Gilead (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and Housekeeping, and four books of nonfiction, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Mother Country, The Death of Adam, and Absence of Mind. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Michael Silverblatt is the host of KCRW's half-hour radio show Bookworm, where he introduces listeners to new and emerging authors along with writers of renown. He created Bookworm for KCRW-FM in 1989. The complete Bookworm archive can be heard at kcrw.com/bookworm.

David Finkel is the award-winning author of The Good Soldiers. A staff writer for The Washington Post, he is also the leader of the Post’s national reporting team. Finkel received the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2006 and the MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2012. He lives in Maryland with his wife and two daughters.

Albert "Skip" Rizzo is a clinical psychologist and Director of Medical Virtual Reality at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. He is also a research professor with the USC Department of Psychiatry and at the USC Davis School of Gerontology. Rizzo conducts research on the design, development, and evaluation of Virtual Reality systems targeting the areas of clinical assessment, treatment, and rehabilitation across the domains of psychological, cognitive, and motor functioning in both healthy and clinical populations. This work has focused on PTSD, TBI, Autism, ADHD, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, and other clinical conditions. In his spare time, he listens to music, rides his motorcycle, and thinks about new ways that VR can have a positive impact on clinical care by dragging the field of psychology, kickin’, and screamin’, into the 21st Century.

Thomas Curwen is an award-winning staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, where he has worked as the editor of the Outdoors section, as a writer-at-large and editor for the features sections, and as the deputy editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for mental health journalism, and in 2008 he was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.