Ayelet Waldman is the author of Daughter's Keeper and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Salon.com, New York, Elle, Vogue, and other publications. She and her husband, the novelist Michael Chabon, live in Berkeley, California, with their four children.

http://www.ayeletwaldman.com/

Susan Straight's novels include the forthcoming Take One Candle Light a Room and Highwire Moon, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the California Book Award. Her essays and stories have appeared in Harper's, Salon.com, The Los Angeles Times, and on NPR's "All Things Considered", among other outlets. She is also the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Edgar Award. Straight was born in Riverside, where she lives with her three daughters and teaches at the University of California.

Bill Boyarsky (writer) is a political columnist for Truthdig.com and blogs for LA Observed. He was a lecturer at the USC Annenberg School for Communication for several years and teaches there periodically. In his 30 years with the Los Angeles Times, Boyarsky was a political writer, featured columnist, and city editor. He was a member of reporting teams that won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of two biographies of Ronald Reagan, and authored Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics as well as Los Angeles: City of Dreams. Together with his wife, Nancy, he coauthored Backroom Politics. He lives in Los Angeles.

Peter Jones (Filmmaker) began his career as a broadcast journalist. In 1987, he formed Peter Jones Productions, originally specializing in documentary films related to the history of the motion-picture industry. His special on Judy Garland won a 1997 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational Series. "Stardust: The Bette Davis Story", had its U.S. premiere on Turner Classics Movies in 2006, garnering Jones and his team an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Nonfiction Special and an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming. He lives in the hills overlooking the city the Chandlers invented.

Patt Morrison is a writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of the daily Patt Morrison public affairs program on KPCC. She has won six Emmys and six Golden Mike awards as founding host and commentator on Life & Times Tonight, the nightly news and current affairs program on KCET. Her one-on-one television interview subjects include Salman Rushdie, Henry Kissinger, Frank Gehry, Ray Bradbury, Joan Didion, and many more.

www.pattmorrison.com

Sebastian Junger is the New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Storm and A Death in Belmont. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and has been awarded a National Magazine Award and an SAIS Novartis Prize for journalism. He lives in New York City.

John Sacret Young began his television work on the Emmy winning Best Drama series, Police Story, and has since created, written, or Executive Produced six additional series and multiple pilots, mini-series and movies of the week. He co-created with William Broyles, Jr., wrote, and executive produced the ground-breaking series, China Beach. For his work on the show, John received five Emmy and four Writer's Guild Award nominations. The WGA honored him with the Award for an episode he also directed. The West Wing brought him two more Emmy and two more WGA nominations. John won his second WGA Award for the mini-series, A Rumor of War. He's also written and produced feature films and has been honored with two Christopher Awards for the Academy Award nominated Testament starring Jane, and the film Romero with Raul Julia. John's original mini-series about the Gulf War, Thanks of a Grateful Nation, was honored with his second Humanitas Prize as a writer. Young's book, REMAINS: Non-Viewable was a Los Angeles Times best seller.

Thomas Levenson is a professor of science writing at MIT and the acclaimed author of three works of nonfiction, including Einstein in Berlin, Measure for Measure, and Ice Time. He is also the producer of 10 documentaries, for which he has won numerous awards. Levenson lives outside of Boston.

Edmund White's novels include Fanny: A Fiction, A Boy's Own Story, Farewell Symphony, and A Married Man. He is also the author of a biography of Jean Genet, a study of Proust, The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris, and most recently, his memoir, My Lives. Having lived in Paris for many years, he is now settled in New York, and teaches at Princeton University.

Michael Silverblatt is the host of "Bookworm" the country's premier literary talk-show. As host and guiding spirit of the half-hour radio show, Silverblatt introduces listeners to new and emerging authors along with writers of renown. A New York native, Silverblatt graduated from the State University of New York in Buffalo. He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s where he worked in motion picture public relations and script development. He created "Bookworm" for KCRW-FM in 1989.

Anchee Min was born in Shanghai in 1957. During the Cultural Revolution, she was ordered by Communist officials to denounce Pearl Buck as an American imperialist. At seventeen, she was sent to a labor collective, where a talent scout for Madame Mao's Shanghai Film Studio recruited her to work as a movie actress. Min moved to the United States in 1984. Her first book, the memoir Red Azalea, became an international bestseller and was published in twenty countries.

K.C. Cole is currently on the faculty at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism. Previously, she was science correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and many other publications. Cole is also the author of seven nonfiction books, including Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos; The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered Over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything; and The Universe and the Teacup, the Mathematics of Truth and Beauty. She has been honored with numerous prizes, including the American Institute of Physics Science Writing prize and the Los Angeles Times award for best explanatory journalism.

Barbara Isenberg is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and Time magazine and has written for such publications as Esquire, Talk and London's Sunday Times. She received a Distinguished Artist Award from the Los Angeles Music Center, has been a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute and is associate director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC. Her books include Making It Big: The Diary of a Broadway Musical and State of the Arts: California Artists Talk About Their Work, and Conversations with Frank Gehry.

Kenneth Turan is film critic for the Los Angeles Times and NPR's Morning Edition as well as the director of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. He has been a staff writer for the Washington Post and TV Guide and the Times' book review editor. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, he is the coauthor of Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke. He teaches film reviewing and non-fiction writing at USC and is on the board of directors of the National Yiddish Book Center. His books include Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made as well as Never Coming to a Theater Near You and Now In Theaters Everywhere. His latest book is Free For All: Joe Papp, the Public and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told, co-written with Joseph Papp.

Kit Rachlis was born in Paris and raised in New York City. He earned a B.A. in American studies from Yale in 1975. He has served as music editor and arts editor of the Boston Phoenix (1977-1984), executive editor of New York's Village Voice (1984 -1988), editor-in-chief of the LA Weekly (1988-1993), and senior editor at The Los Angeles Times Magazine and the paper's senior projects editor (1994-2000). In 2000, he became editor-in-chief of Los Angeles. During his tenure, the magazine was nominated for a National Magazine Award five times and received more city and regional magazine awards than any other magazine. Rachlis's writing has appeared in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll and Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island.

Tim O'Brien has been hailed as "the best American writer of his generation" (San Francisco Examiner). The author of eight books, O'Brien received the National Book Award in Fiction in 1979 for his novel Going After Cacciato. In 2005 The Things They Carried was named by the New York Times as one of the twenty best books of the last quarter century. It was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The French edition of The Things They Carried received the prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, and the title story was selected by John Updike for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. In the Lake of the Woods, published in 1994, was chosen by Time magazine as the best novel of that year. The book also received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians. O'Brien's other works include If I Die in a Combat Zone, Northern Lights, Tomcat in Love and July, July. His short fiction has appeared in numerous journals, including The New Yorker, Atlantic, Esquire, Playboy, and Harper's.

http://www.illyria.com/tobhp.html

Robert P. Crease writes the "Critical Point" column for Physics World. He is the chairman of the philosophy department at Stony Brook University and lives in New York City. He is the author of, among other books, The Prism and the Pendulum.