Barry Miles is the author of many seminal books on popular culture, including the authorized biography of Paul McCartney, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now; Ginsberg: A Biography; William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible; Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats; and The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963. He also co-edited the revised text edition of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.

David L. Ulin is a book critic for the Los Angeles Times and, from 2005-2010, was the paper's book editor. He is the author of The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a 2002 California Book Award. His essays and criticism have appeared in many publications.

Jeanne Theoharis is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She is the author of numerous books and articles on the civil rights and Black Power movements, the politics of race and education, social welfare, and civil rights in post-9/11 America. Her newest book is The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.

Ericka Huggins is a former Black Panther Party member, political prisoner, human rights activist, poet, and teacher. She has lectured throughout the United States on the restoration of human rights, whole-child education, family reunification, restorative justice, and the role of spiritual practice in sustaining activism and promoting social change. She teaches relaxation and resiliency skills for educators and youth in elementary and secondary schools, as well as juvenile and adult prisons and jails, and is currently a professor of sociology at Laney College in Oakland, California.

Robin D. G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. His books include the prize-winning Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America; Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labors Last Century, written collaboratively with Dana Frank and Howard Zinn; and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. His most recent book is Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times.

Evelyn McDonnell is the author and co-editor of five books, including Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids and Rock ‘n’ Roll. She has worked as a pop music critic for the Miami Herald and as senior editor for the Village Voice. She’s won several awards, including an Annenberg Fellowship at USC and first place for enterprise by the South Florida Black Journalists Association. She is currently a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University.

Exene Cervenka is an American singer, songwriter, artist, and activist. Shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 1977, Exene met John Doe at a poetry workshop at Beyond Baroque. Together with guitarist Billy Zoom, they formed the seminal Los Angeles punk band, X. To this day, X continues to play nationally and internationally with all four original members: Cervenka, Doe, Zoom, and drummer D.J. Bonebrake. Over the years, Exene has published poetry, prose, and art books; exhibited her collages in museums and galleries; recorded and toured with her other bands; played solo shows with an acoustic guitar and her songs; and said "yes" to just about every insane, imaginative, worthwhile project other thinking humans have offered her.

Allison Wolfe formed the all-girl punk band Bratmobile with the intention of helping to create and expand a feminist music scene spearheaded by Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill. This feminist, DIY (do-it-yourself) music scene, soon to be coined "riot grrrl," had a goal of making the punk rock scene more feminist while simultaneously making academic feminism more "punk." Later recognized as a strain of third-wave feminism, riot grrrl spread throughout the 1990s, mostly in the US and UK, as a loose network of young, feminist, alternative music scene women who believed in fighting the power with cultural activism. After the demise of Bratmobile and riot grrrl, Allison continued to be active in bands such as Cold Cold Hearts, Deep Lust, Partyline, and Cool Moms. In 1999-2000, she also initiated Ladyfest, a non-profit, DIY feminist music festival. Allison currently resides in Los Angeles, where she is working on an oral history of riot grrrl book/film project.

Albie Sachs’ career in human rights activism started at the age of seventeen when as a second-year law student at the University of Cape Town, he took part in the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign. He started practice as an advocate at the Cape Bar at age 21. The bulk of his work involved defending people charged under racist statutes and repressive security laws. Many faced the death sentence. He himself was raided by the security police, subjected to banning orders restricting his movement, and eventually placed in solitary confinement without trial for two prolonged spells of detention.

In 1966, he went into exile, first studying and teaching law in England, then working in Mozambique as a law professor and legal researcher. In 1988 his car was blown up by a bomb by South African security agents, and he lost an arm and sight in one eye. After recovering from the bomb, he devoted himself full-time to preparations for a new democratic Constitution for South Africa. In 1990 he returned home and, as a member of the Constitutional Committee and the National Executive of the African National Congress, took an active part in the negotiations, which led to South Africa becoming a constitutional democracy. After the first democratic election in 1994, he was appointed by President Nelson Mandela to serve on the newly established Constitutional Court.

Renee Montagne is co-host of NPR's Morning Edition, the most widely heard radio news program in the U.S. She has hosted the news magazine since 2004, broadcasting from NPR West in Culver City, California. She hosted All Things Considered with Robert Siegel for two years in the late 1980s, and previously worked for NPR's Science, National, and Foreign desks.

Montage has traveled the world widely, covering stories in Afghanistan and the Vatican. In 1990, she traveled to South Africa to cover Nelson Mandela's release from prison and continued to report from South Africa for three years. In 1994, she and a team of NPR reporters won a prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of South Africa's historic presidential and parliamentary elections.

Joe Sacco's acclaimed books include Palestine, which was serialized as a comic book from 1993 to 1995, the first collection of which won an American Book Award in 1996 Safe Area Gorazde, and Footnotes in Gaza, as well as a best-selling collaboration with Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.

Gene Luen Yang began drawing comic books in the fifth grade. He was an established figure in the indie comics scene when he published his first book with graphic novel publisher First Second, American Born Chinese, which is now in print in over ten languages. Yang won the Printz Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His latest book is the graphic novel diptych Boxers & Saints.

Charles Hatfield, Professor of English at California State University, Northridge, teaches comics, children's literature, media, and cultural studies. He is the author of Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby and Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature and co-editor of the newly released The Superhero Reader.

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 recent fellow at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, FL. Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and on her Crooked Mirror blog.

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, at 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.

D. Graham Burnett teaches at Princeton University, where he holds an appointment as Professor of History and History of Science, and affiliations with the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (I-HUM), the School of Architecture, and the Princeton Environmental Institute. He is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow. Burnett studies the relationship between power and knowledge and writes on human beings’ changing understanding of nature, art, and technology. He is the author of five books, including Trying Leviathan, winner of the New York City Book Award, which surveys changing ideas of natural order across the hundred years that stretched from the writings of Linnaeus to those of Darwin; and The Sounding of the Whale, his study of the remarkable cultural and scientific life of cetaceans in the last century, a period that saw these animals go from industrial commodities to avatars of the Age of Aquarius. Graham Burnett is also an editor at Cabinet, the Brooklyn-based quarterly of art and culture.

Dr. Amy Parish is a biological anthropologist, primatologist, and Darwinian feminist, who has conducted ground-breaking research on patterns of female dominance and matriarchal social structure in one of our closest living relatives, the bonobo. Formerly a professor at the University of Southern California for 13 years, she has now affiliated with faculty at Georgetown University and is a research associate at University College London. Parish is currently working on a book about love, marriage, and the experience of being a wife.

Photo credit: Mike Baird

A. Scott Berg is the author of four previous bestselling biographies, including Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, for which he received the National Book Award; Goldwyn: A Biography; Lindbergh, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and the best-selling biographical memoir of Katharine Hepburn, Kate Remembered.

Jim Newton is a veteran journalist who began his career as a clerk to James Reston at the New York Times. Since then, he has worked as a reporter at the Atlanta Constitution and as a reporter, bureau chief, and editor at the Los Angeles Times, where he presently is the editor at large and the author of a weekly column. He is also an educator and author of two biographical books, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made, and most recently, Eisenhower: The White House Years.

Greg Goldin has written widely about architecture and urban affairs for Los Angeles Magazine, L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, and Architect's Newspaper. He is the curator of Windshield Perspective, a Getty Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. now showing at A+D Architecture and Design Museum > Los Angeles. He is co-curator of Never Built: Los Angeles and co-author of the book of the same title.

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.

Mia Lehrer is the founder of Mia Lehrer + Associates, known for its wide spectrum of design and development of ambitious public and private projects, including urban revitalization developments, large urban parks, and complex commercial projects. She is internationally recognized for her progressive landscape designs, working with such natural landmarks as parks, lakes, and rivers, coupled with her advocacy for ecology and people-friendly public space. Lehrer believes that great landscape design coupled with sustainability has the power to enhance the livability and quality of life in our cities and, in doing so, improve by great measure the quality of our environment.

Sam Lubell is the West Coast Editor of the Architect’s Newspaper. He has written five books about architecture: Never Built: Los Angeles, Paris 2000+, London 2000+, Living West, and Julius Shulman Los Angeles: The Birth of a Modern Metropolis. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, New York Magazine, Architectural Record, Architect Magazine, Architectural Review, and several other publications. His exhibition Never Built: Los Angeles opens on July 27.

Alan Hess is an architect, historian, and author whose nineteen books on modern architecture and urbanism include monographs on Oscar Niemeyer, Frank Lloyd Wright, John Lautner, and the architectural histories of Las Vegas, Palm Springs, the Ranch House, and Googie architecture. Hess holds a Master of Architecture degree, was a National Arts Journalism Fellow at Columbia University's School of Journalism, and was the recipient of a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. As a preservationist, Hess qualified the oldest remaining McDonald’s drive-in restaurant, located in Downey, for the National Register of Historic Places.

William Deverell is a professor of history at the University of Southern California, where he specializes in the history of California and the American West and directs a scholarly institute that collaborates with the Huntington Library in Pasadena. He is the author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910. With Greg Hise, he is co-author of Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region. William is a Fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC.

Donald C. Jackson is the author of Building the Ultimate Dam: John S. Eastwood and the Control of Water in the American West and Pastoral and Monumental: Dams, Postcards, and the American Landscape (June 2013). In 2004 he co-authored with Norris Hundley Jr. the article “Privilege and Responsibility: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster,” published in California History. Jackson is a Professor of History at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, and was recently in residence as a Trent R. Dames Fellow at The Huntington Library.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, activist, and author of thirteen books about ecology, environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and memory. Her books include A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories; Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and most recently, the bestselling volume of 19 essays and 22 innovative maps, titled Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. Solnit has received many awards for her writing, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award for her book River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.

Patt Morrison is a writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times and she hosted the daily Patt Morrison public affairs program on KPCC. She has won six Emmys and ten Golden Mike awards for Life & Times Tonight on KCET, and for her KPCC show, which won three Golden Mike Awards for Best Public Affairs Show in its six-year run. She’s the author of the best-selling Rio LA, Tales from the Los Angeles River, and her interview subjects include Salman Rushdie, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Ray Bradbury.