Dorothy Lamb Crawford has lived and worked in music throughout her career, teaching and lecturing, performing as a singer, directing opera, and hosting broadcast interviews with musicians. She is author of Evenings On and Off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939-1971 and(with John C. Crawford) Expressionism in Twentieth-Century Music.

Emil Draitser was born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1937. He began his writing career first as a freelancer, contributing satirical articles for Soviet newspapers and magazines. His work appeared in leading Soviet Russian journals under a pen name, though he was eventually blacklisted for writing an article critical of an important Soviet official, which prompted him to leave for the United States. He immigrated to Los Angeles in 1974, where he earned a Ph.D. in Russian literature from UCLA. His first book published in the United States, Forbidden Laughter: Soviet Underground Humor (1980) garnered national attention. His essays and short stories have since been published in the Los Angeles Times, Partisan Review, North American Review, and many other American and Canadian periodicals.

The son of one of the men who raised the American flag on Iwo Jima, James Bradley is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Flyboys and Flags of Our Fathers. He lives in New York.

Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. His novel My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages. He lives in Istanbul.

Rita Dove, former U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and musician, lives in Charlottesville, where she is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. His novel My Name Is Red won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages. He lives in Istanbul.

Eva Hoffman grew up in Cracow, Poland, where she studied music intensively before emigrating in her teens to Canada and then the United States. After receiving her B.A. from Rice University and her Ph. D. in English and American literature from Harvard University, she worked as senior editor at The New York Times, serving for a while as the newspaper's regular literary critic. She is the author of five works of non-fiction: Lost in Translation, Exit Into History, Shtetl, After Such Knowledge, and Time as well as two novels -- The Secret and Appassionata (published in the UK as Illuminations). She has studied psychoanalysis, and has written and lectured internationally on issues of exile, memory, Polish-Jewish relations, politics and culture. She has taught literature and creative writing at various universities, including the University of East Anglia, MIT and Columbia. She has written and presented radio programs, and has received the prestigious Prix Italia for Radio. Her literary awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She holds an honorary doctorate from Warwick University, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She currently lives in London, and works as visiting professor at Hunter College, CUNY.

Jonathan Gold is the LA Weekly's restaurant critic and the author of Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles. He has been restaurant critic for California, the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles magazine and Gourmet, where he was the first food writer ever to be nominated for a general national award in criticism, and he has won James Beard Awards for both magazine and newspaper restaurant reviews. Gold also contributes to the radio shows "Good Food" and "This American Life." In 2007 he became the first food writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

William Grimes was the restaurant critic of the New York Times from 1999 to 2003. He is the author of Straight Up Or On the Rocks and My Fine Feathered Friend, and the coauthor of the New York Times Guide to New York City Restaurants 2004.

Irene Khan, the first woman, first Asian, and first Muslim to serve as the Secretary General of Amnesty International, has brought a strong focus to socioeconomic rights and violence against women around the world. She spent 20 years at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and was appointed in 1995 as the Chief Mission to India, becoming the youngest United Nations representative. Khan was awarded the Pilkington "Woman of the Year" Award in 2002, as well as the Sydney Peace Prize in 2006.

Christopher Hitchens is the author of more than ten books, including God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything; A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq; Why Orwell Matters; The Trial of Henry Kissinger; and Letters to a Young Contrarian. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and has written prolifically for American and English periodicals, including The Nation, The London Review of Books, Granta, Harper's, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, New Left Review, Slate, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek International, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Washington Post. He is also a regular television and radio commentator.