Joseph O'Neill was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1964 and grew up in Mozambique, South Africa, Iran, Turkey, and Holland. For many years, he worked as a barrister in London. His works include the novels This is The Life, The Breezes, and Netherland (2006), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. He also wrote Blood-Dark Track, a memoir about his grandfathers who were both imprisoned during World War II, which was a New York Times Notable Book.

David Kipen is author of The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History, and translator of Cervantes' The Dialogue of the Dogs. Until January 2010, he was the Literature Director of the National Endowment of the Arts, where he directed the Big Read and the Guadalajara Book Festival initiatives. He also served from 1998 to 2005 as book critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. His introductions to the WPA Guides to Los Angeles and San Francisco are forthcoming. In July of 2010 he opened a lending library/used bookstore in the Jewish-turned-Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, called Libros Schmibros.

Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award & Pulitzer Prize), and Specimen Days.

Tony Valenzuela is a longtime community activist and writer whose work has focused on LGBT civil rights, sexual liberation and gay men's health. He wrote, produced and performed his acclaimed one-man show, "The (Bad) Boy Next Door." He is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program of the California Institute of the Arts. Currently he is Executive Director of the Lambda Literary Foundation.

Ted Mann was the most uninhibited and unpredictable of all the people who ever worked at the Lampoon. And he was a good writer of tough, smart prose. He had serious issues on his mind, but first he and Tod Carroll created "O. C. and Stiggs," and he was one of the writers of Disco Beaver from Outer Space. Ted has since written and produced for Miami Vice, NYPD Blue, Judging Amy, John from Cincinnati, and Deadwood.

Rick Meyerowitz believes he is the most prolific contributor of illustrated articles to the National Lampoon magazine. He painted the poster for Animal House and was the creator of the magazine's trademark visual, "The Mona Gorilla." Shortly after 9/11, Rick and Maira Kalman cre­ated the most talked-about New Yorker cover of this century, "NewYorkistan." Rick is also the author of Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great.

Ellis Weiner is droll and cerebral. He says he lived in a state of constant fear that he wouldn't understand what the other Lampoon editors were talk­ing about. Ellis writes for television and has written or cowritten numerous books, among which are Drop Dead, My Lovely; The Joy of Worry (with Roz Chast); Yid­dish with Dick and Jane; and Oy! Do This Not That!: 100 Simple Swaps That Could Save Your Life, Your Money, or Your Mother from a Heart Attack, God Forbid. Ellis is a regular and very funny blogger on the Huffington Post.

Barbara Ehrenreich is a renowned social critic and most recently the author of Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, as well as eight other books. Her much discussed essays and articles have appeared in major newspapers and magazines around the country. The recipient of several prestigious writing awards, she is currently a regular essayist for Time Magazine and a columnist for The Guardian in Great Britain. She holds a Ph.D. in biology from Rockefeller University.

Dr. Amy Parish is a Biological Anthropologist, Primatologist, and Darwinian Feminist who has taught at University of Southern California in the Gender Studies, Arts and Letters, and Anthropology programs and departments since 1999. She received her undergraduate training at University of Michigan and her graduate school education at University of California-Davis and then taught at University College London. She conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Giessen in Germany on the topic of reciprocity.

Isabel Wilkerson, formerly James M. Cox Professor of Journalism at Emory University, is Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University. In 1994, while Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times, she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Wilkerson has also won a George S. Polk Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Journalist of the Year award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

Laura Trombley is an internationally renowned Mark Twain scholar, authoring several books and dozens of scholarly articles on Twain. She appeared in Ken Burns's Mark Twain documentary and, as a graduate student, discovered the largest known cache of Mark Twain letters.

In addition to her most recent book, Mark Twain's Other Woman, Laura's other works on Twain include Mark Twain in the Company of Women and Constructing Mark Twain: New Directions in Scholarship. In addition to being an author, Laura is also the president of Pitzer College. http://lauratrombley.org/

A native of California, Stephen G Breyer taught at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and served as assistant special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation before being appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in 1980 and becoming its Chief Judge in 1990. President Clinton nominated him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and he took his seat August 3, 1994. He currently serves as an Honorary Chair for the World Justice Project.

Henry Weinstein teaches law and journalism at the University of California, Irvine. He was a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times from 1978 to 2008, specializing in the coverage of law and labor, and did a considerable amount of investigative reporting. Weinstein has won numerous journalistic awards, including, in 2006, the John Chancellor Award for Excellence, presented annually by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Attica Locke is a writer whose first novel, Black Water Rising, was nominated for a 2010 Edgar Award, a 2010 NAACP Image Award, as well as a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Attica is also a screenwriter who has written movie and television scripts for Paramount, Warner Bros, Disney, Twentieth Century Fox, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, HBO, Dreamworks and Silver Pictures. She was a fellow at the Sundance Institute's Feature Filmmakers Lab and is a graduate of Northwestern University.

http://www.atticalocke.com/

Danzy Senna's debut novel, Caucasia, was the LA Times Book of The Year and became an instant national bestseller. Her second novel Symptomatic was published in 2003, and her latest work is the memoir: Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History, in which she reconstructs a long-buried family mystery that illuminates her own childhood, her enigmatic father, and the power and failure of her parents' interracial union.