Alexa Koenig, JD, PhD, is the Executive Director of the Human Rights Center and a Lecturer-in-Residence at UC Berkeley where she teaches classes on human rights and international criminal law. In addition to co-authoring Hiding in Plain Sight, she is the editor, with Keramet Reiter, of Extreme Punishment: Comparative Studies in Detention, Incarceration and Solitary Confinement (Palgrave MacMillan 2015) and a contributor to The Guantánamo Effect: Exposing the Consequences of U.S. Detention and Interrogation Practices (UC Press 2009).

Victor Peskin is an Associate Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University and a Research Fellow at the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center. Peskin is a co-author of the recently released, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Pursuit of War Criminals from Nuremberg to the War on Terror (University of California Press). He is also the author of International Justice in Rwanda and the Balkans: Virtual Trials and the Struggle for State Cooperation (Cambridge University Press 2008), which was named a Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title. Peskin’s current work focuses on the politics of accountability in Kosovo and the role of the International Criminal Court in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Peskin received his doctorate in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Eric Stover is Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center and Adjunct Professor of Law and Public Health at UC Berkeley. In the early 1990s, Stover took part in conducting the first research on the social and medical consequences of land mines in Cambodia and other post-war countries. His research helped launch the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, which received the Nobel Prize in 1997. During the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, he served on several medico-legal investigations as an “Expert on Mission” to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.  He conducted a survey of mass graves throughout Rwanda for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1995. His books include A Village Destroyed, May 14, 1999: War Crimes in Kosovo (with Fred Abrahams and Gilles Peress); My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity (edited, with Harvey Weinstein); and The Witnesses: War Crimes and the Promise of Justice in The Hague.

David France is the author of Our Fathers, a book about the Catholic sexual abuse scandal, which Showtime adapted into a film. He coauthored The Confession with former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey. He is a contributing editor for New York and has written as well for The New York Times. His documentary film How to Survive a Plague was an Oscar finalist, won a Directors Guild Award and a Peabody Award and was nominated for two Emmys, among other accolades.

Dr. Mark H. Katz has delivered care to persons with HIV for 30 years. Since 1985, he has been affiliated with Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles. From 1992-2006, he was the Regional HIV Physician Coordinator for the Southern California Kaiser region. In addition to his HIV outpatient work, he is currently a hospitalist at the West LA Medical Center and the Physician Lead at West LA for Clinician-Patient Communication, inspiring providers to be more empathic communicators. He has long been an educator as well as a physician activist–through work with organizations such as LA Shanti and Being Alive (for which he conducted a monthly medical update from 1988 through 1997). He is the recipient of many honors, but his greatest professional reward, he says, is "continually having the opportunity to be involved in the care of people who face the challenge of HIV with such grace and determination." Dr. Katz is at work on a series of essays and recollections about the HIV epidemic.

A graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program of the California Institute of the Arts, Tony Valenzuela is the Executive Director of Lambda Literary, the nation’s leading nonprofit organization advancing LGBTQ literature. He is a longtime community activist and writer whose work has focused on LGBT civil rights, HIV/AIDS, and gay men’s health. He is credited with having ruptured the conventional wisdom in HIV/AIDS prevention among gay men by launching an international debate regarding sexual health beyond condom use. Out Magazine has listed him among the "Out 100." He wrote, produced, and performed his acclaimed one-man show, The (Bad) Boy Next Door, a second-generation AIDS narrative that toured in a dozen cities in the U.S. He has continued to publish essays, fiction, and journalism and is currently working on a memoir.

Rebecca Solnit is a prolific writer, and the author of many books including Savage Dreams, Storming the Gates of Paradise, and the best-selling atlases Infinite City and Unfathomable City, all from UC Press. She received the Corlis Benefideo Award for Imaginative Cartography from the North American Cartographic Information Society for her work on the previous atlases.

Christopher Hawthorne is architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. Before coming to the Times he was architecture critic for Slate and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Washington Post, Metropolis, Architect, Domus, I.D., Print, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and Architectural Record, among many other publications. He is the author, with Alanna Stang, of The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture, published by Princeton Architectural Press.

Ericka Huggins is an educator, Black Panther Party member, former political prisoner, ally, and poet. For 35 years, Ericka Huggins has lectured in the United States and internationally, Restorative Justice practices and the role of spiritual practice in creating social change. In 2016, in recognition of the 50th Anniversary of the Black Panther Party, Ericka speaks about the importance of inclusive grassroots movements. Ericka was a professor of Sociology and African American Studies from 2011 through 2015 in the Peralta Community College District. At Merritt College, home of the Black Panther Party, she co-created and taught a course, “The Black Panther Party-Strategies for Organizing The People”.

In the summer of 1969, Phyllis J. Jackson dropped out of college and joined the Black Panther Party at the National Headquarters in Berkeley, California. Today, she is an associate professor of art history at Pomona College, specializing in the arts and cinema of Africa and the African diaspora. Dr. Jackson continues the BPP legacy of “Each One, Teach One” by offering mind-decolonizing courses, such as Black Aesthetics and the Politics of Representation, Whiteness: Race, Sex, and Representation, Black Women, Feminism(s) and Social Change, or Cinema Against War, Imperialism and Corporate Power. She co-directed the 1996 documentary Comrade Sister: Voices of Women in the Black Panther Party and is working on a book entitled AutoBiography of an Image: A Black Woman’s Journey Through the Visual Landscape.

Norma (Armour) Mtume, M.H.S, M.A. M.F.T., served as Minister of Health and later as the Minister of Finance in the Black Panther Party. She is a native Angeleno, recently retired Co-founder, and Chief Financial and Operations Officer for SHIELDS for Families, a 24-year-old social-service nonprofit serving families in South Los Angeles. Mtume co-founded two other social service agencies and three free community clinics during her career. She is currently a part-time Instructor in the College of Medicine at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles.

Melina Abdullah is Professor and Chair of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and immediate past campus president and current Council for Affirmative Action Chair for the California Faculty Association (the faculty union). Dr. Abdullah earned her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in Political Science and her B.A. from Howard University in African-American Studies. She was appointed to the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission in 2014 and is a recognized expert on race relations. She is an organizer at the Los Angeles branch of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Bryan Shih is a photojournalist and former contributor to the Financial Times and National Public Radio in Japan. His work on the Panthers led to his selection for the New York Times inaugural portfolio review in 2013 and garnered him one of the highest rankings among entries in the LensCulture 2015 Portrait Awards competition. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Japan and is a graduate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he completed an audio-visual thesis on “Islamic Converts in Prison.”

A professor of classics at Cambridge University, Mary Beard is the author of the best-selling The Fires of Vesuvius and the National Book Critics Circle Award–nominated Confronting the Classics. A popular blogger and television personality, Beard gave the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. She lives in England.

Nina Revoyr is the author of five novels, including The Age of Dreaming, a finalist for the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Wingshooters, winner of an Indie Booksellers’ Choice Award, one of O: Oprah Magazine’s “Books to Watch For,” and a Booklist Editors’ Choice for 2011; and Southland, which was a Los Angeles Times "Best Book" of 2003 and was recently named by the LAist as one of "20 Novels That Dared to Define a Different Los Angeles." Her most recent novel, Lost Canyon, was described by Booklist as “a gripping tale of unintended adventure and profound transformation” and was one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s "Recommended Reads" for 2015. She is also co-editor, with poet X.J. Kennedy and poet and former National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia, of the college textbook Literature for Life: A Thematic Introduction to Reading and Writing. Revoyr is the executive vice president and chief operating officer of a large nonprofit organization serving children affected by violence and poverty in Central and South Los Angeles. She has been a Visiting Professor at Cornell University, Occidental College, and Pitzer College, and an Associate Faculty member at Antioch University, where she has taught a seminar on James Baldwin.

Melvin L. Rogers is the Scott Waugh Chair in the Division of the Social Sciences and Associate Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at UCLA. He is the author of The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality and the Ethos of Democracy as well as editor and contributor to John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (forthcoming in 2016). He has published numerous scholarly articles in such places as American Political Science Review, Political Theory, European Journal of Political Theory, Boston Review, and Dissent. Presently he is at work on a project titled Democracy and Faith: Race and the Politics of Redemption in American Political Thought as well as a co-editing (with Jack Turner) a volume titled African American Political Thought: A Collected History.

Brian DeShazor, former Director of the Pacifica Radio Archives and award-winning radio broadcaster, is host/producer of From the Vault, now in its 10th season on the Pacifica network. Brian is a champion of public radio as a historic medium to be preserved and made publicly accessible and has been recognized for his work by the National Archives, the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board, the National Radio Preservation Task Force, and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. In 2010 he received the Bader lifetime achievement award from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. His over 700 radio productions include: John Hersey’s Hiroshima with Tyne Daly and Ruby Dee and The Quentin Crisp Memorial.

Maxine Hong Kingston is Senior Lecturer for Creative Writing at the University of California, Berkeley. For her memoirs and fiction, The Fifth Book of Peace, The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, and Hawai’i One Summer, she has earned numerous awards, among them the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the title of “Living Treasure of Hawai’i.” In July 2014, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama.

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. His stories have appeared in Best New American Voices, TriQuarterly, Narrative, and the Chicago Tribune and he is the author of the academic book Race and Resistance. His first novel, The Sympathizer won the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. His nonfiction book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War will be published in April 2016. He teaches English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

Adam Hochschild is the author of seven books. King Leopold’s Ghost was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as was his recent To End All Wars. Bury the Chains was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN Center USA Literary Award.

Jon Wiener is a contributing editor to The Nation magazine and a professor of history at the University of California – Irvine, where he specializes in recent American history. His books include: Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower, Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files; Professors, Politics and Pop; and Come Together: John Lennon in His Time. Wiener hosts an afternoon drive-time radio program on KPFK-90.7 FM featuring interviews on politics and culture.

Sarah Bakewell was a bookseller and a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library before publishing her highly acclaimed biographies The Smart, The English Dane, and the best-selling How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. In addition to writing, she now teaches the Masters of Studies in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, University of Oxford. She lives in London.

David L. Ulin is the author or editor of eight previous books, including The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and the Library of America’s Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the former book critic and book editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Helen Macdonald is a writer, poet, illustrator, historian, and naturalist and an affiliated research scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses. She also worked as a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. She is the author of the bestselling H Is for Hawk, as well as a cultural history of falcons, titled Falcon, three collections of poetry, and the monthly "On Nature" column for the New York Times Magazine. As a professional falconer, she assisted with the management of raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia.

Louise Steinman is the curator of the award-winning ALOUD series and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of three books: The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War; The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance; and The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation. She was a 2015 Fellow at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida. Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and on her Crooked Mirror blog.