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.

Arts educator and independent filmmaker Ben Caldwell is the founder of KAOS Network, a community arts center in Leimert Park that provides training on digital arts, media arts and multimedia. Caldwell’s films often trace historical and cultural connections. “Eyewitness: Reflections of Malcolm X & the O.A.A.U.” (2006) presents the Harlem reunion of ex-members of the Organization of Afro-American Unity. “La Buena Vida” (The Good Life) (2008), filmed over the course of three years while Caldwell taught at the California Institute of the Arts, documents the cultural exchanges between a group of hip hop artists and musicians from Los Angeles and their counterparts in Havana, Cuba.

Ayana A. H. Jamieson is a writer, editor, and organizer. She is a lecturer for State University of New York, Empire State College’s Center for Distance Learning. She is the founder of the Los Angeles-based Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, a community organization that highlights the ongoing creative, scholarly, community, and social justice work inspired by speculative fiction author Octavia E. Butler. Jamieson was one of the organizers of “Ferguson is the Future — Incubating Alternative Worlds Through Arts, Activism, and Scholarship” symposium at Princeton University. Her current book project is Octavia Butler’s biography based on Butler’s own published and unpublished writing and her Southern California origins.

Douglas Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and (2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection. His third poetry collection, Patter (2014), examines miscarriage, infertility, and parenthood. Kearney’s second book, The Black Automaton (2009) was a National Poetry Series selection. A collection of opera libretti—Someone Took They Tongues.—is forthcoming. He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Poetry, nocturnes, Pleiades, Iowa Review, Boston Review, and Indiana Review; and various anthologies. He teaches at CalArts.

A close friend of Octavia Butler during her years in Seattle, Nisi Shawl is a founder of the Carl Brandon Society and a member of Clarion West’s Board of Directors. Cynthia Ward she coauthored Writing the Other: A Practical Approach. Her story collection Filter House co-won the 2009 Tiptree Award. Shawl edited Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars. She co-edited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler; and Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. Shawl’s Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair is due out in August.

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of essays on myth-making and black presences in film, literature, and visual art, and co-editor of The Encyclopedia Project. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Viz. InterArts: Interventions, Body Forms: On Queerness and the Essay, the Reanimation Library’s Word Processor series and in Letters to the Future: An Anthology of Experimental Writing by Black Women, among others. She is currently working on a novel, The Curator. Bryant teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts.

DJ Lynnée Denise is a DJ, writer, and scholar who creates work informed and inspired by underground cultural movements, the 1980s, migration studies, theories of escape, and electronic music of the African Diaspora. Denise has received support from the Jerome Foundation, The Astrae Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Idea Capital, Residency BiljmAIR (Netherlands), and The Rauschenberg Artists as Activists Grant.

Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize; and Cleopatra: A Life. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named a 2011 Library Lion by the New York Public Library, she lives in New York City.

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.

Roberta Kaplan is a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and is litigating the case against Mississippi’s gay marriage ban. She lives in New York with her wife and son.

Lillian Faderman is an internationally known scholar of lesbian history and literature, as well as ethnic history and literature. Among her many honors are six Lambda Literary Awards, two American Library Association Awards, and several lifetime achievement awards for scholarship. She is the author of The Gay Revolution and the New York Times Notable Books, Surpassing the Love of Men and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers.