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.

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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.

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.