A Notable Book author, EMMY nominated TV reporter and screenwriter, Alex Abella was born in Cuba and grew up in New York City. Abella worked as a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle then switched to electronic media and joined KTVU-TV, Channel 2 News. There he became producer, writer and reporter and was nominated for an EMMY for Best Breaking News Story. Alex moved to Los Angeles in the late 1980s to pursue a writing career. While in Los Angeles he worked as assistant to a private investigator and as a Los Angeles Superior Court Interpreter. His experiences in the world of law and law enforcement inspired him to write a legal thriller, The Killing of the Saints, featuring a Cuban-American hero, Charlie Morell, who is a lawyer and private investigator. Alex's second novel, The Great American, recounts the true adventures of William Morgan, a U.S. Marine who fought in the mountains of Cuba with Fidel Castro. Abella's Shadow Enemies, is a non-fiction account of the plot by Adolf Hitler to unleash a wave of terror in the United States by sending Nazi agents to bomb stores, train stations and factories.

David Hajdu is the music critic for The New Republic and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has written for The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, BookForum, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, and other publications. Hajdu is the author of three books: Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (1996), Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña, and The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America (2008). His first two books were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and both books won the ASCAP Deems-Taylor Award. His books have also been finalists for the LAMBDA Literary Award and the Firecracker Book Award.

Gina B. Nahai is the author of Cry of the Peacock, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith (finalist for the Orange Prize in England and the IMPAC award in Dublin), and Sunday's Silence. Her novels have been translated into sixteen languages, and her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Magazine, and the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. She is a former consultant for the Rand Corporation, and has studied the politics of pre- and post-revolutionary Iran for the United States Department of Defense. She is professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.

Robert Scheer is the editor-in-chief of the political blog www.truthdig.com and the author of seven books, including Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power; With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War and America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals; with his son Christopher and Lakshmi Chaudhry, The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us about Iraq. Most recently, he wrote Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I and Clinton--and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush. Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts Magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Scheer can be heard on the political radio program Left, Right and Center on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica, Calif.
Scheer was raised in the Bronx, where he attended public schools and graduated from City College of New York. He studied as a Maxwell fellow at Syracuse University and was a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley, where he did graduate work in economics. Scheer is a contributing editor for The Nation as well as a Nation Fellow. He has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.

Samantha Power is the Anna Lindh Professor of Global Leadership and Public Policy Practice at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a foreign policy columnist at Time Magazine. In 2003, her book, A Problem from Hell: American and the Age of Genocide, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Prize for the best book in U.S. foreign policy.

Susan Jacoby's last book, Freethinkers, was championed by Philip Roth, Sam Harris, and the late Arthur Schlesinger. She is a regular commentator on NPR, and a contributor to the New York Times, among many others. She is the author of seven books, including Wild Justice, a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Norman Davies is the best-selling author of numerous historical works, including Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw; Microcosm: A Portrait of a Central European City; Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland's Present; The Isles: A History; Europe: A History; and God's Playground: A History of Poland. He is a Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Professor Emeritus at London University.

David Halberstam launched his career at the smallest daily newspaper in Mississippi, worked his way up to the New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting from Vietnam and then turned to longer-form writing, part of a generation of reporters who started as journalists but in mid-career became historians. His 2002 bestseller, War in a Time of Peace, was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction. He wrote 21 books covering such diverse topics as the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, the auto industry and a baseball pennant race.

Jeffrey Toobin is a staff writer at The New Yorker, senior legal analyst at CNN, and the authors of such best-sellers as Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election, A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal that Nearly Brought Down a President, and The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson.