James Ellroy, a native of Los Angeles, is a master of noir crime fiction. Ellroy has up close and personal knowledge of the world of crime, his life shadowed by a gruesome event: the unsolved murder of his mother when he was a child. Nearly all of his writing is set in Los Angeles, in the rough, racist, pre-Miranda Los Angeles of the decade following the Second World War. He is the author of the L. A. Quartet novels: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L. A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He is also the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy—American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's a Rover. His memoir, My Dark Places, was named as Time magazine’s Best Book of The Year.

Walter Kirn is the author of bestselling Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade, as well as Thumbsucker and Up in the Air, both made into major films. His work has appeared in GQ, New York, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine.

Eric Liu is an author, educator, and civic entrepreneur. His first book, The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker, was a New York Times Notable Book featured in the PBS documentary Matters of Race. He is also the author of Guiding Lights, an Official Book of National Mentoring Month, and co-author of the bestselling Gardens of Democracy. Eric served as a White House speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and later as the President's deputy domestic policy adviser. He is a columnist for TIME.com and a regular contributor to TheAtlantic.com and lives in Seattle with his family.

Gregory Rodriguez is the Publisher & Executive Director of Zócalo Public Square, a nonprofit Los Angeles-based Ideas Exchange that blends live events and humanities journalism. He is also the founder and director of the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University. Formerly a longtime op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Rodriguez has written for publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Time, and The Atlantic. He is the author of Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America, one of the Washington Post's Best Books of 2007, and is currently at work on a new book on the American cult of hope.

Dalila Ali Rajah is an actress, published poet, dancer, spoken-word artist, and filmmaker. As co-creator, executive producer, and co-host of the successful late-night talk show, Cherry Bomb!, she helped guide the show from its beginnings on the Web to television on Canada’s OutTV. Her most recent project, Secrets & Toys, which she wrote, produced, and stars in, is currently on the festival circuit.

Zsa Zsa Gershick is the writer/director of the award-winning short film Door Prize, which has screened at more than 100 film festivals worldwide; the author of the plays Coming Attractions and Bluebonnet Court (winner of the GLAAD Award for Outstanding Los Angeles Theatre); and the books Gay Old Girls and Secret Service: Untold Stories of Lesbians in the Military. She is a Dramatists Guild member and a USC alumnus.

Hunter Lee Hughes began acting at age 12 in his hometown of Houston. Roles include ‘Bobby’ in the 25th-anniversary production of Thomas Babe’s A Prayer for my Daughter (directed by Dorothy Lyman), ‘Frank Colby’ in the television pilot Project: X (directed by Starling Price) and, most recently, the lead role of ‘Evan’ in the film Narcissist (directed by Eric Casaccio). Hunter has appeared in a number of projects for Fatelink Productions, which he founded, including Fate of the Monarchs, The Sermons of John Bradley, Winner Takes All, and the upcoming feature film, Guys Reading Poems.

Teacher, author, actor, and stand-up comic Paul Jacek received his theater training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts/West. A regular at the World Famous Comedy Store, he headlines nationwide and has been profiled in The New Yorker and in Edge magazine. He has written for and with Joan Rivers, Jack Burns, and Carl Reiner and is honored to be involved with Dear ONE.

Craig M. Loftin is the author of Masked Voices: Gay Men and Lesbians in Cold War America and the editor of Letters to ONE: Gay and Lesbian Voices in the 1950s and 1960s. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Southern California and currently teaches in the American Studies Department at Cal State Fullerton.

Beverly Mickins is an actor, writer, storyteller and singer. She has appeared onstage in New York and Los Angeles and was featured on Thirtysomething and Judging Amy. She is the creator and founder of L.A.’s longest-running storytelling venue Story Salon, for which she earned a Women in Theater Award. Featured on KABC and KNBC, Story Salon recently published The Story Salon Big Book of Stories, a compilation of 40 original stories. Beverly wrote and performed her successful solo show The Driving Piece and started the popular Party Pack series, which combines singing and storytelling. She can be heard regularly on Story Salon podcasts at www.StorySalon.com.

Debra Gerod is a partner at Gruen Associates, the planning and architectural firm selected for the Union Station master plan. During her tenure at Gruen Associates, Gerod has focused on the collaborative delivery of projects, primarily in the public sector. Her work includes large-scale, significant civic and cultural projects such as courthouses, embassies, performing arts centers, museums, libraries, and transportation projects.

Jenna Hornstock has served as acting as project manager for the Union Station Master Plan for the past three years at Metro implementing the new TOD Planning Grant program, as well as managing other strategic initiatives related to transit-oriented development planning. Prior to joining Metro, Ms. Hornstock spent nearly seven years at the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles (CRA/LA), most recently as Chief of Strategic Planning and Economic Development. She holds a Master's in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a BA in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley.

Eugene Moy is a past president and the current vice president of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, where he has been a member since 1976. He has conducted research and reviewed many scholarly publications on the history of Chinese in Southern California on behalf of the Historical Society. In 1981 he was part of the team that developed historical walking tours of Los Angeles Chinatown and has been continuously involved in conducting interpretive walking tours of Old and New Chinatown since that time. In addition, he currently serves as second vice president for the Chinese American Museum at El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument.  Professionally, he is retired after over 35 years in municipal planning and redevelopment, working for five different cities in Los Angeles County.  He is a native of Los Angeles, a graduate of Cal State Long Beach, and has resided with his family in Alhambra since 1986.

Marlyn Musicant; is the Senior Exhibitions Coordinator at the Getty Research Institute. She earned her M.A. in the History of Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture at the Bard Graduate Center. Her research specialties include twentieth-century industrial design and architecture—particularly German Modernism and the history of architecture and planning in Southern California. Musicant is an editor of Los Angeles Union Station, forthcoming from Getty Publications, and the curator of the exhibit of the same name on display in Central Library’s Getty Gallery. Musicant is a native Angeleno.

Kevin Roderick is a journalist, editor, blogger, and author living in Los Angeles. He is the creator and publisher of LA Observed, a widely cited news website that Forbes rated as Best of the Web. He is a contributing writer on politics and media atLos Angeles magazine, an award-winning radio commentator, and is often asked by the media to talk about Southern California issues. Currently, he is the director of the UCLA Newsroom at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, is the author, most recently, of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. His first book, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, has been translated into thirteen languages and named by Blackwell as one of the hundred most important books of the last decade. He is also the author of How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization and the End of the War on Terror (published in paperback as Beyond Fundamentalism), as well as the editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. Aslan is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at UC Riverside.

Jack Miles is a Senior Fellow for Religious Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy and a Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies the University of California, Irvine. A MacArthur Fellow (2003-2007), Miles won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for God: A Biography, which has since been translated into sixteen languages. He is currently the general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions.

George Packer is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of two novels and three works of nonfiction including The Assassins' Gate, which will be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in November 2005, and Blood of the Liberals (FSG, 2000), which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is also the editor of the anthology The Fight for Democracy. He lives in Brooklyn.

Mike Shuster is a diplomatic correspondent and roving foreign correspondent for NPR. He is based in NPR's Los Angeles bureau. When he is not traveling outside the U.S., he covers issues of nuclear non-proliferation and weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and the Pacific Rim. Shuster took up his current post in 1994, using New York as a base. He moved to Los Angeles in 2000. In the past two years, he has contributed many reports to NPR's extensive coverage of the Middle East, traveling four times to Israel since September 2000. He has also reported from Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq. Shuster's reports have also focused on India and Pakistan, the Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, and the Congo.

Nathan Englander was born in New York in 1970. His short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Englander’s story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, earned him a PEN/Malamud Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. He lives in New York City.

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in LA. Everywhere else he is an author and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. He writes the award-winning Tommywood column (www.tommywood.com) that appears in The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. Recently he served as American Film and TV editor of the 2nd Edition of The Encyclopedia Judaica.

Michael Pollan is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and the author of four books, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, Second Nature, A Place of My Own, and The Omnivore's Dilemma. The recipient of numerous journalistic awards, including the Reuters-I.U.C.N. Global Award in Environmental Journalism, Pollan served for many years as executive editor of Harper's. His articles have been anthologized in Best American Science Writing, Best American Essays , and the Norton Book of Nature Writing. At Berkeley, he serves as Director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism. He earned his college degree at Bennington College, studied at Oxford University (Mansfield College), and received a master's in English from Columbia University in 1981.

Barry Glassner is a sociologist with his finger on the pulse of American culture. His provocative research has found many Americans' concerns to be largely unfounded. He has studied scary stories in the media; scares about adolescents, crime, minority groups, and related social issues; false fears in marketing and politics; and fear and the power of exploiting it for product sales and political careers. His recent work examines the sources of Americans' assumptions about what and where to eat and the chefs, nutritionists, restaurant critics, journalists, and food marketers who perpetuate those views. USC's Executive Vice Provost, his articles have appeared in American Sociological Review, Social Problems, American Journal of Psychiatry, and Journal of Health and Social Behavior, among other journals.

Miriam Pawel is the author of The Union of Their Dreams, widely acclaimed as the most nuanced history of Cesar Chavez’s movement. She is a Pulitzer-winning editor who spent twenty-five years working for Newsday and the Los Angeles Times. She was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and lives in Southern California.

Luis Valdez is a playwright and founding artistic director of El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Workers’ Theater), the internationally renowned theater company founded on the picket lines of the Delano grape strike in 1965 and still in operation in San Juan Bautista, CA, where it is the longest running Chicano Theater in the United States. Valdez’s involvement with Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the early Chicano Movement left an indelible mark that remained embodied in all his work even after he left the UFW. Valdez’s influential Zoot Suit was the first Chicano play on Broadway. His numerous feature film and television credits include, among others, La Bamba, Cisco Kid, and Corridos: Tales of Passion and Revolution. Valdez is the recipient of countless awards, including the prestigious George Peabody Award for excellence in television, the Presidential Medal of the Arts, the Governor’s Award OF the California Arts Council, and Mexico’s prestigious Aguila Azteca Award given to individuals whose work promotes cultural excellence and exchange between US and Mexico.

Laura Pulido is a Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She researches race, political activism, Chicana/o Studies, critical human geography, and Los Angeles. Pulido has done extensive work in the field of environmental justice, social movements, labor studies, and radical tourism.

Shane Bauer is an award-winning investigative journalist and photographer. His articles have appeared in Mother Jones, The Nation, Salon.com, the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and many other publications. In 2013, Shane received the John Jay/Henry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting.

Josh Fattal, a graduate of Berkeley's program in environmental economics and policy, is an activist and organizer focused on sustainable development. Along with Shourd and Bauer, he has spoken at universities, human rights conferences, and private events to share the experience of imprisonment in Iran.

Sarah Shourd is a writer and human rights activist with the organization United4Iran. She is a regular contributor to Huffington Post and has written for the New York Times, CNN.com, Newsweek/Daily Beast, and other publications.

Arun Rath is the new weekend host of All Things Considered. Previously, Rath was a reporter, producer, and editor, most recently as a senior reporter for the PBS series Frontline and The World® on WGBH Boston, where he specialized in national security and military justice. He has produced three films forFrontline, the latest being an investigation of alleged war crimes committed by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq. Rath also reports on culture and music for the PBS series Sound Tracks.