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.

Four-time Emmy award-winning composer Laura Karpman maintains a vibrant career in film, television, videogame, concert and theater music. Her distinguished credits include scoring Kasi Lemmons’ Black Nativity, Spielberg’s miniseries Taken, the Showtime series Odyssey 5, and Masters of Science Fiction (both Emmy-nominated). Karpman has received two GANG awards and additional nominations for her videogame music which has been performed by orchestras internationally.

Commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Karpman collaborated with soprano Jessye Norman, and The Roots on Ask Your Mama, a multimedia opera based on a text by Langston Hughes. It received a sold-out premiere at Carnegie Hall in March 2009 and its West Coast premiere at The Hollywood Bowl and was revived at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Karpman is now working on an opera for Glimmerglass for 2016 and a work in collaboration with Rebecca Walker for the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus to premiere in 2015. She has just been awarded a grant from Opera America to develop an opera with NY Times columnist Gail Collins called Balls! based on the match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.

Janai Brugger’s extraordinary career as a soprano has taken her all over the world. Her numerous accomplishments include a debut at Ravinia Festival under the baton of James Conlon with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and winner of Placido Domingo’s Operalia competition in 2012. Brugger has performed in several operas with the Domingo Thornton Young Artist Program, including Le Nozee di Figaro, Rigoletto, and La Boheme, all of which were performed in Los Angeles. Her 2014-2015 season includes an appearance at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London.

Collaborative pianist Victoria Kirsch is a lover of poetry, both spoken and sung. She curates and performs a wide range of text-based musical programs in a variety of local, regional, and national venues. She also creates and performs exhibition-inspired concerts at local museums and galleries, including the USC Fisher Museum of Art, where she has presented yearly concerts since 2004 (Warhol’s World in Song, Yousuf Karsh: Hero of a Thousand Faces, Drawn To Language, The Poet’s Voice) as part of the campus-wide Visions and Voices program. Kirsch is the co-creator of This and My Heart, a theatrical concert program based on the works of Emily Dickinson, and serves as music director of OperaArts, a Coachella Valley-based organization featuring operatic concerts with piano and orchestra.

Taura Stinson is a veteran songwriter who has penned songs for Destiny’s Child, Kelis, Kelly Rowland, and Deborah Cox, among others, and has collaborated with numerous artists, including Raphael Saadiq, Dr. Dre, Kanye West, Andre 3000. Taura has also written and produced several songs for films such as Black Nativity and Epic, and more recently served as lead lyricist for the animated film Rio 2. She is currently part of a Folk & B duo called Art Peace with Chrissy DePauw, and they are eagerly awaiting the release of their debut album Free Music.

David Young followed his interest in music and the bass right into a performing and teaching career. Coming to Los Angeles in 1975, he has taught at a total of around a dozen schools, most consistently at the Colburn School in downtown Los Angeles. In his performing career, he has played with most every orchestra in Los Angeles, settling upon the Los Angeles Opera. Developing and narrating children’s concerts complement his enjoyment of things like lecturing about the wonders of opera.

Most widely known as the “Gangsta Gardener,” Ron Finley inadvertently started a horticultural revolution when he transformed the barren parkway in front of his South Central L.A. home into an edible oasis. Ron travels the world, speaking to people about the importance of growing their own food and reminding them that they have the power to design their own lives. By turning food prisons into food forests, the Ron Finley Project is transforming culture one garden at a time.

Elizabeth Medrano has a long track record of involvement in social and environmental justice work beginning in the mid-1990s. In her role as the Coordinator and Organizer for the Healthy School Food Coalition, a program of the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College, she focuses on organizing and training school populations on advocacy directed at full implementation of school food and nutrition motions adopted by the Los Angeles Board of Education. In 2012, Medrano authored the School Food Policy & Organizing Toolkit, and most recently, along with California Food Policy Advocates, she co-authored the School Food, Lessons Learned Report, which was released in 2014.

Neelam Sharma is the executive director of Community Services Unlimited, an organization she became acquainted with through her work with the Black Panther organization she founded in Britain in the mid-1980s. Upon relocating to the United States in 1997, her food justice work with CSU was birthed by her specific need to feed her family healthy food when she moved to South LA and was driven by her broader understanding of the basic human right to high-quality, culturally appropriate food as a critical element of social justice. She first became a community activist as a pre-teen in response to an attempt by fascists to organize in Southall, London, where she grew up. In addition to being an activist, Neelam loves dancing, reading, and storytelling and is excited about what the future has in store.