Robin Coste Lewis is a Provost’s Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies at USC. A Cave Canem fellow, she received her MFA from NYU and an MTS in Sanskrit from Harvard's Divinity School. A finalist for the International War Poetry Prize, the National Rita Dove Prize, and the Discovery Prize, her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies. She has taught at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College, and the NYU/MFA in Paris. Born in Compton, her family is from New Orleans. Her book of poems, Voyage of the Sable Venus, is forthcoming from Knopf.

Claudia Rankine is the author of four previous books, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. She currently serves as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Pomona College in California. She is a recent recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize, given annually by Poets & Writers, "to an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition."

Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include The Argonauts (forthcoming in May 2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets, The Red Parts: A Memoir and Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions. Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes and Jane: A Murder. She is the recipient of many awards, including an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She has taught on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts since 2005.

Adam Michnik is the founder and editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, a daily often referred to as "The New York Times of Eastern Europe." He is among Poland’s most prominent public figures, with a distinctive voice dedicated to dialogue, tolerance, and freedom. He spent a total of six years in prison between 1965 and 1986, detained by the Communist Polish regime for his dissident activities as a prominent "Solidarity" activist. In 1989, he participated in the Round Table Talks, which resulted in Poland’s nonviolent transition to democracy, and he served as a deputy in Poland’s first non-communist parliament (1989-1991). He is the author of several books and countless essays, analyses, and interviews. His four books in English include: Letters from Prison (1987); The Church and the Left (1993); Letters from Freedom ( 1998); In Search of Lost Meaning ( 2011); and The Trouble with History (2013). Among his many honors are the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award and the Order of the White Eagle –the highest distinction attainable in Poland. He regularly travels throughout the world, giving lectures on democracy, totalitarianism, and the paradoxes and dilemmas of contemporary politics. He lives in Warsaw.

Yasmine El Rashidi is an Egyptian writer. She is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and a contributing editor to the Middle East arts journal Bidoun. A collection of her writings on the Egyptian revolution, The Battle for Egypt, was published in 2011, and her essays feature in the anthologies Diaries of an Unfinished Revolution, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The New York Review Abroad: Fifty Years of International Reportage. Her writing on the revolution was nominated for an Amnesty International Media Award, and she was a 2013 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University's Lewis Centre for the Arts. She lives in Cairo.

Mike Shuster is an award-winning diplomatic correspondent and former roving foreign correspondent for NPR News. In recent years, Shuster has helped shape NPR’s extensive coverage of the Middle East as one of the leading reporters to cover this region—from Iraq to Iran and Israel. His 2007 week-long series The Partisans of Ali explored the history of Shi'ite faith and politics, providing a rare, comprehensive look at the complexities of the Islamic religion and its impact on the Western world. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his reporting, including an Overseas Press Club Lowell Thomas Award. He was NPR's senior Moscow correspondent in the early 1990s when he covered the collapse of the Soviet Union and a wide range of political, economic, and social issues in Russia and the other independent states of the former Soviet Union.

Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a novelist. He is the author of The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation, and The Tattooed Soldier. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Jesse Katz is the author of The Opposite Field, a memoir set in the immigrant suburb of Monterey Park. As a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, Jesse shared in two Pulitzer Prizes—for coverage of the 1994 Northridge earthquake and the 1992 L.A. riots. As a senior editor at Los Angeles magazine, he received the PEN Center USA’s award for literary journalism and the James Beard Foundation’s M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. RatPac Entertainment is producing a movie based on Jesse’s most recent story, "Escape from Cuba: Yasiel Puig’s Untold Journey to the Dodgers."

John Lahr, the author of twenty books, was senior drama critic of The New Yorker for over two decades. Among his books are Notes On a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr; Dame Edna Everage: Backstage with Barry Humphries; and Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton, which was made into a film. He has twice won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism and has twice been included in volumes of Best American Essays. His stage adaptations have been performed around the world. Lahr is the first critic ever to win a Tony Award for co-authoring the 2002 Elaine Stritch at Liberty. He divides his time between London and New York.

Armistead Maupin is the author of the Tales of the City series, of which The Days of Anna Madrigal is the ninth book and which includes: Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You, Michael Tolliver Lives, and Mary Ann in Autumn. Maupin is also the author of Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener (made into a feature film starring Robin Williams). Maupin lives in San Francisco and Santa Fe.

Zachary Mason, author of the novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey, is a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence. He is at work on two books for FSG: Metamorphica and Void Star. He was a finalist for the 2008 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. He lives in California.

Madeline Miller grew up in Philadelphia, has a BA and MA from Brown University in Latin and Ancient Greek, and has been teaching both for the past several years. She has also studied at the Yale School of Drama, specializing in adapting classical tales to a modern audience. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Song of Achilles is her first novel.

Molly Pulda is a Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities at USC. She is working on a manuscript about secrecy in contemporary literature and culture.

Charles M. Blow has been the visual Op-Ed columnist at the New York Times since 2008, is a CNN commentator and has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and HBO. Prior to working at The Times, he was Art Director of National Geographic Magazine, and a graphic artist at The Detroit News. Blow lives in Brooklyn with his three children.

Jesmyn Ward is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University. She is the author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, the latter of which won the 2011 National Book Award and was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her memoir, Men We Reaped, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi, and lives there now.

Robin Coste Lewis is a Provost’s Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies at USC. A Cave Canem fellow, she received her MFA from NYU and an MTS in Sanskrit from Harvard's Divinity School. A finalist for the International War Poetry Prize, the National Rita Dove Prize, and the Discovery Prize, her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies. Born in Compton, her family is from New Orleans. Her book of poems, Voyage of the Sable Venus, is forthcoming from Knopf.

Kim Bancroft is a longtime teacher turned editor and writer. Kim has edited several memoirs, including Ariel: A Memoir, by Ariel Parkinson; The Morning the Sun Went Down, by Darryl Babe Wilson; and Ruth’s Journey: A Survivor’s Memoir, by Ruth Glasberg Gold. Most recently, she edited Literary Industries, the 1890 memoir of her great-great-grandfather Hubert Howe Bancroft, historian, and founder of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley (Heyday, 2013). She is also the author of The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher.

Malcolm Margolin is executive director of Heyday, an independent nonprofit publisher and unique cultural institution, which he founded in 1974. Margolin is the author of several books, including The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco–Monterey Bay Area, named by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the hundred most important books of the twentieth century by a western writer. He has received dozens of prestigious awards, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fred Cody Award Lifetime Achievement from the San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, and a Cultural Freedom Award from the Lannan Foundation. He helped found the Bay Nature Institute and the Alliance for California Traditional Artists.

Vincent Medina, Jr, a member of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area, works for Heyday Books, where he focuses on sharing the stories of the larger California Indian world. He authors the lively multimedia blog Being Ohlone in the 21st Century, and is active in the revitalization of the Chochenyo language, the indigenous language of the eastern shores of the San Francisco Bay that many linguists had long labeled "extinct." Using wax cylinder recordings and ethnographic notes, he has helped bring the language into modern times. Vincent is currently in college and lives in San Lorenzo, California, which is part of his Jalquin Ohlone ancestral homeland.

James Ellroy, a native of Los Angeles, is a master of noir crime fiction. Ellroy has up close and personal knowledge of the world of crime, his life shadowed by a gruesome event: the unsolved murder of his mother when he was a child. Nearly all of his writing is set in Los Angeles, in the rough, racist, pre-Miranda Los Angeles of the decade following the Second World War. He is the author of the L. A. Quartet novels: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L. A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He is also the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy—American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's a Rover. His memoir, My Dark Places, was named as Time magazine’s Best Book of The Year.

Walter Kirn is the author of bestselling Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade, as well as Thumbsucker and Up in the Air, both made into major films. His work has appeared in GQ, New York, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine.

Francisco Goldman is the author of Say Her Name- winner of the Prix Femina Etranger and four other books. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Cullman Center Fellow at the NY Public Library, and a Berlin Fellow at the American Academy, among other awards and honors. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Believer, and numerous other publications. Every year he teaches one semester at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and then hightails it back to Mexico City.

Rubén Martínez, an Emmy-winning journalist and poet, is the author of several books, including Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail and The New Americans. His most recent book is Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West. He holds the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing at Loyola Marymount University.

Laurel Braitman is a contributing writer for Pop Up Magazine, The New Inquiry, Orion, and other publications. She holds a Ph.D. in the history of science from MIT and is a Senior TED Fellow. Her newly published book is Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves.

Kathryn Bowers was a staff editor at The Atlantic and a writer and producer at CNN International. She has edited and written popular and academic books and teaches a course at UCLA on medical narrative. Bowers co-authored Zoobiquity with Barbara Natterson-Horowtiz.

Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, M.D., earned her degrees at Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco. She is a cardiology professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and serves on the medical advisory board of the Los Angeles Zoo as a cardiovascular consultant. Her writing has appeared in many scientific and medical publications. Natterson-Horowitz co-authored Zoobiquity with Kathryn Bowers.

As KPCC's Science Reporter, Sanden Totten covers everything from space exploration and medical technology to endangered species and the latest earthquake research. Totten is the co-producer of Brains On!, a podcast for kids and curious adults about the scientific mysteries of the universe, and has won several honors, including the Radio and TV News Association’s Golden Mike for “Best Radio Medical and Science Reporting,” the National Entertainment Journalism's award for “Best Radio News Story,” and a 2011 Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT.