Michele Bratcher Goodwin is a Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy. She is also faculty in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Department as well as the Program in Public Health. Professor Goodwin’s scholarship is hailed as “exceptional” in the New England Journal of Medicine. She has been featured in Forbes, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times and her scholarship is published or forthcoming in The Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, and Northwestern Law Review, among others.Trained in sociology and anthropology, she has conducted field research in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, focusing on trafficking in the human body for marriage, sex, organs, and other biologics. In addition to her work on reproductive health, rights, and justice, Professor Goodwin is credited with forging new ways of thinking in organ transplant policy and assisted reproductive technologies, resulting in works such as Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts (2006) and Baby Markets: Money and the Politics of Creating Families (2010). She serves on the executive committee and national board of the American Civil Liberties Union. She is a highly sought-after voice on civil liberties, civil rights, reproductive rights and justice, and cultural politics.

Ruth Colker is one of the leading scholars in the country in the areas of Constitutional Law and Disability Discrimination. She is the author of 16 books, two of which have won book prizes. She has also published more than 50 articles in law journals such as the Boston University Law Review, Columbia Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Journal, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the University of Virginia Law Review, and Yale Law Journal.

Jasmine E. Harris is a Professor of Law and Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall Research Scholar at the University of California—Davis School of Law. Professor Harris is an expert in disability law, antidiscrimination law, and evidence. She is a law and equality scholar with a particular focus on disability. Professor Harris combines approaches in law and the humanities to understand better the role that perception, aesthetics, and emotions play in group subordination. By accounting for aesthetic preferences, she argues, we can better design antidiscrimination laws to address structural biases and develop novel remedial pathways. Professor Harris’s recent articles have or will appear in such publications as the Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review (print and online), Yale Law Journal Forum, Cornell Law Review Online, American Journal of Law and Medicine, and the Journal of Legal Education.

D. J. Waldie is the author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out. His narratives about life in Los Angeles have appeared in Buzz magazine, Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, the Georgetown Review, Salon and Dwell magazine. His book reviews and opinion pieces appear in the Los Angeles Times. He is a contributing writer for Los Angeles magazine. D.J. Waldie lives a not-quite-middle-class life in Lakewood, in the house his parents bought in 1946.

Carolina A. Miranda is a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times where she reports on art and culture. She has also been a reporter for Time magazine and worked as an independent journalist, contributing to outlets such as NPR, ARTnews and Architect. She is a regular contributor for KCRW’s “Press Play” and was the founding co-chair of the Los Angeles Times Guild employee union.

David Kipen was born and raised in Los Angeles. He founded the nonprofit Boyle Heights lending library Libros Schmibros in 2010. Former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts, book editor/critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, and contributor to multiple volumes of California cultural history, Kipen teaches full-time in the UCLA writing program. A familiar voice on public radio, he also serves as book critic for Los Angeles magazine and is critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times.

Andrea Bernstein, who won a Peabody award for her work uncovering abuses of power in the Bridgegate scandal, is the author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power and the co-host of the Trump, Inc. podcast from WNYC and ProPublica.

Kristen Muller, as Southern California Public Radio’s Chief Content Officer, oversees the station’s programming, podcasting, and excellent local journalism. She leads an award-winning team of hosts, reporters, producers, and editors who are dedicated to informing, entertaining, and connecting the diverse communities of LA.

Kwame Anthony Appiah pens the Ethicist column for the New York Times, and is the author of the prize-winning Cosmopolitanism, among many other works. A professor of philosophy and law at New York University, Appiah lives in New York.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby draws on art historical, political, and personal references to create densely layered figurative compositions that, precise in style, nonetheless conjure the complexity of contemporary experience. Akunyili Crosby was born in Nigeria, where she lived until the age of sixteen. In 1999 she moved to the United States, where she currently lives. Her cultural identity combines strong attachments to the country of her birth and to her adopted home, a hybrid identity that is reflected in her work. Crosby is the recipient of a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship and was awarded Financial Times‘ Women of the Year, 2016. Recent solo exhibitions include Front Room: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, The Baltimore Museum of Art, alongside Prospect.4, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, New Orleans. Among her current projects is an outdoor mural for LA MOCA Grand Avenue, which will be on view until December 31, 2018. She lives in Los Angeles.

Erin Christovale is the Assistant Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She is also the curator of Black Radical Imagination with Amir George, which has screened both nationally and internationally in spaces such as MoMA PS1, MOCA Los Angeles, and the Museo Taller José Clemente Orozco. Exhibitions include a/wake in the water: Meditations on Disaster(2014) at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Memoirs of A Watermelon Woman (2016) and A Subtle Likeness (2016) at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, and S/Election: Democracy, Citizenship, Freedom (2016) at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and baby boy(2017) at Transmission Glasgow. She recently organized the 28th anniversary of "Alternative Endings, Radical Beginnings" with Vivian Crockett as part of Visual AIDS project, A Day With(Out) Art and Made in L.A. 2018, the Hammer Museum’s biennial showcasing artists from the greater Los Angeles area with Anne Ellegood.

Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the author of seven books, including Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation. She lives with her family and her animals in upstate New York.

Attica Locke’s latest novel Bluebird, Bluebird won the Edgar Award for best novel and was named a Best of 2017 book by the New York Times. Her other works include the novels Pleasantville, winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction; Black Water Rising, which was nominated for an Edgar Award; and The Cutting Season, a national bestseller and the winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. A former fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmaker’s Lab, Locke has worked as a screenwriter as well. Most recently, she was a writer and producer on the Fox drama Empire and worked with Ava Duvernay on the Netflix project em>Central Park Five. She is currently developing Bluebird, Bluebird into a TV series with FX. She serves on the board of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.

Miriam Pawel is the author of The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and winner of the California Book Award, and The Union of Their Dreams—Power, Hope and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement. She is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning editor and reporter who spent twenty-five years at Newsday and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in Southern California.

Kathleen L. Brown is a partner of the law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP and serves as a director of Sempra Energy, Stifel Financial Corp., Five Points Communities, and Renew Financial. She served as California state treasurer from 1991 to 1995. Ms. Brown currently serves on the boards of directors of the National Park Foundation and the Mayor’s Fund Los Angeles and on the Investment Committee for the Annenberg Foundation. She is on the Advisory Boards of the Stanford Center on Longevity and the UCLA Medical Center. Ms. Brown is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy.

Natalia Molina’s work lies at the intersections of race, gender, culture, and citizenship. She is the author of two award-winning books, Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 and How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. Her current book project examines eight decades of place-making, community formation, and gentrification in the historically multiethnic Los Angeles community of Echo Park. She is a Professor of History and Urban Studies at the University of California, San Diego.

Heather Ann Thompson is an award-winning historian at the University of Michigan. Her most recent book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize, the Ridenhour Book Prize, and the J. Willard Hurst Prize. She is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City and the editor of Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s. She served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States and has given congressional staff briefings on the subject.

Professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez is the Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA and one of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration. She is the author of the award-winning book, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol; and City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles. Currently, Professor Lytle Hernandez is the research lead for the Million Dollar Hoods project, which maps how much is spent on incarceration per neighborhood in Los Angeles County.

Steven J. Ross is a professor of history at the University of Southern California and director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life. He is the author of Hollywood Left and Right, recipient of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholars Award and nominated for a Pulitzer; Working-Class Hollywood, nominated for a Pulitzer and the National Book Award; Movies and American Society; and Workers on the Edge. He lives in Southern California.

Rob Eshman is the former Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Jewish Journal.

Benjamin Madley is a historian of Native America, the United States, and colonialism in world history. Born in Redding, California, Madley spent much of his childhood in Karuk Country near the Oregon border, where he became interested in the relationship between colonizers and indigenous peoples. He earned a Ph.D. in History at Yale University and writes about American Indians as well as colonization in Africa, Australia, and Europe. His first book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873, received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, the Raphael Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide, and the Heyday Books History Award among many others.

James Shapiro is the Larry Miller Professor of English at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1985.  His books include Shakespeare and the Jews (1996), recently republished in a 20th anniversary edition; 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), Contested Will (2010), the anthology Shakespeare in America (2014), and The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (2015). He has also co-authored and presented two BBC documentaries: Shakespeare: The King’s Man and The Mysterious Mr. Webster. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Board of Governors of the Folger Shakespeare Library is Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at New York’s Public Theater, and has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lisa Wolpe is an actress, director, teacher & playwright, and is the Artistic Director of Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, which she founded in 1993. Honors include the Shakespeare Theater Association’s “Sidney Berger Award”, “Sustained Excellence” awards from the L.A. Drama Critic and from Playwrights Arena, the Key to Harlem, a Congressional Certificate of Merit; NBC News’ “Local Hero”, Jacob Bronowski Award for Theater Excellence, Whittier College’s Distinguished Artist Award, Colorado Shakespeare “First Scholar” and UC Boulder’s “Roe Green Distinguished Scholar”. Acting credits include Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Shakespeare & Company, Orlando Shakespeare Festival, and San Diego Repertory Theater.