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.

Gail Collins joined The New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an Op-Ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times's editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish her latest book, When Everything Changed. She returned to the Times as a columnist in July 2007. Before joining the New York Times, Collins was a columnist at Newsday and the New York Daily News, and a reporter for United Press International.

Father Patrick Desbois is a Roman Catholic Priest and Advisor to the Vatican on Jewish relations. He has spent the last five years leading investigative teams to the Ukraine and Belarus in order to find the missing mass graves of the 1.5 million Jews killed outside their homes during the Holocaust. Father Desbois has interviewed over 900 surviving eye-witnesses and discovered over 800 killing sites in his effort to uncover this missing chapter of Holocaust history, discount Holocaust deniers and give the fallen a respectful burial. Father Desbois has received worldwide acclaim for his work including honorary doctorates from Hebrew University and Bar Ilan, and awards from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, B'nai Brith and the ADL. His book, Holocaust By Bullets, was recently awarded the National Jewish Book Award.

Frances Dinkelspiel is an award-winning journalist and the great-great granddaughter of Isaias Hellman. Her work has appeared in, The New York Times, People, The San Jose Mercury News, San Francisco Magazine and other venues. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, is a fellow at the University of Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy and Middle East Analyst for CBS News.

Michelle Goldberg is an investigative journalist and the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, a New York Times Bestseller which was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. A former senior writer at Salon.com, her work has appeared in Glamour, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, The Guardian (UK) and many other publications, and she has taught at NYU's graduate school of journalism. The Means of Reproduction won the 2008 J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award

Award-winning author and journalist Mark Arax is a co-author of The King of California-a Los Angeles Times bestseller-and author of In My Father's Name. He is a contributing writer at Los Angeles magazine and a former senior writer at the Los Angeles Times. He teaches nonfiction writing at Claremont McKenna College and lives in Fresno.

Ken Bernstein is Manager of the Office of Historic Resources for the City of Los Angeles' Department of City Planning, where he directs Los Angeles' historic preservation policies. In this capacity, he serves as lead staff member for the City's Cultural Heritage Commission, is launching a multi-year citywide survey of historic resources, and is working to create a comprehensive historic preservation program for Los Angeles. He previously served for eight years as Director of Preservation Issues for the Los Angeles Conservancy, where he directed the Conservancy's public policy and advocacy activities.

Adriene Biondo is the Commercial Chair Emeritus, and Residential Chair Emeritus of the Los Angeles Conservancy Modern Committee (Modcom). Adriene is working to establish a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (historic district) for the Granada Hills Eichler tract where she resides, and participated in writing National Register nominations that were unanimously approved for two Bay Area Eichler tracts. She helped pave the way for the Modcom program to nominate the remaining Case Study Houses for listing in the National Register of Historic Places and she a wide range of preservation efforts, including the preservation to date of the 1958 Johnie's Broiler in Downey, which has officially been declared eligible for the California Register.

William Deverell is an American historian with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth century American West. He has written works on political, social, ethnic, and environmental history. He is currently working on a book exploring the history of the post-Civil War American West. With David Igler of UC Irvine, he is co-editing The Blackwell Companion to California and with Greg Hise of USC, The Blackwell Companion to Los Angeles. William Deverell is the director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

Michael Diaz serves as the current chairperson of the Lincoln Heights HPOZ Board and is the founder of the Lincoln Heights Neighborhood and Preservation Association. His civic involvement is extensive and varied including serving as a board member of the Los Angeles Conservancy, as a commissioner of the Los Angeles Historical Records & Landmarks Commission, a member of the Northeast Community Plan Advisory Committee and the Lincoln Heights Neighborhood Council Steering Committee, as well as the founding president of the Latin-American Cinemateca of Los Angeles.

Larry Mantle is the host of KPCC's AirTalk, the longest continuously airing daily radio talk program in Southern California. A fourth-generation Angeleno, he has interviewed thousands of prominent guests on an extraordinary array of topics and is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards.