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.

Jonathan Kirsch is the author of 13 books, including The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God; God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism; and The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible. His new book is The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat and a Murder in Paris. Kirsch is a lawyer specializing in intellectual property issues, the book editor of The Jewish Journal, and an adjunct professor on the faculty of the Professional Publishing Institute at New York University. He is a three-time president of PEN U.S.A.

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 (fall, 2013). 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.

Temple Grandin is the author of several best-selling books, which have sold more than a million copies, and one of the world’s most accomplished and well-known adults with autism. The HBO movie based on her life, starring Claire Danes, received seven Emmy Awards. Grandin is a professor at Colorado State University. Her new book is The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum.

Marisa Silver is the author of the short story collections Babe in Paradise, named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and Alone With You. She has written three novels, No Direction Home, The God of War, and most recently, Mary Coin. Silver made her fiction debut in The New Yorker has won the O. Henry Prize. Her work has been included in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as other anthologies.

Meghan O'Rourke is the author of the best-selling memoir The Long Goodbye and the poetry collections Once and Halflife. She is an award-winning cultural critic and a former editor at The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Slate.

Eric Lax is the author of Faith, Interrupted; Conversations with Woody Allen; Life and Death on 10 West (A New York Times Notable Book of the Year); The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat (A Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2004); and co-author, with A. M. Sperber, of Bogart (nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography). His biography Woody Allen was a New York Times and international bestseller and a Notable Book of the Year. His books have been translated into eighteen languages, and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine. He is an officer of PEN International.

Dr. Robert Peter Gale, M.D. is the author of more than twenty books, eight hundred scientific articles, and numerous pieces on medical topics and nuclear energy for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. For twenty years, Gale was on the faculty of the UCLA School of Medicine and has served as chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry. Dr. Gale was appointed by the Soviet Union government in 1986 to lead the medical relief efforts for victims of the Chernobyl nuclear power station accident, and in 2011, the Japanese government requested that Gale be in charge of treating radiation victims from the deadly Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Photo Credit: Jeremy Sutton Hibbert for Greenpeace. Image taken in Fukushima, Japan.

Hanna Rosin is a senior editor at The Atlantic and a founder of DoubleX, Slate’s women’s section. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, The New Republic, and The Washington Post, and is the recipient of a 2010 National Magazine Award.

Katherine Spillar is the executive vice president of the Feminist Majority Foundation and the Feminist Majority, national organizations working for women’s equality, empowerment, and non-violence. She is also the executive editor of Ms. Magazine. Under her oversight, Ms. won the prestigious “Maggie Award” for the best feature article for its investigation into the network of extremists connected to Scott Roeder, who murdered Dr. George Tiller. Spillar also led the magazine’s investigative report on human trafficking and working conditions akin to indentured servitude in the garment factories on the U.S. Territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, which led to the passage of labor and immigration reforms in Congress.  Spillar is a trained economist and researcher and a specialist in community organizing and speaks to diverse audiences nationwide on a broad range of domestic and international feminist topics.

Tani Ikeda is an award-winning director of narratives, documentaries, music videos, and commercial films. She is also co-founder of imMEDIAte Justice, a summer workshop and community outreach program for girls devoted to revolutionizing sex education through filmmaking. As the current executive director of imMEDIAte Justice, she was recently named one of the "25 Visionaries Who are Changing Your World" by the Utne Reader. Ikeda was selected as one of Film Independent’s 33 Emerging Filmmakers as a Project: Involve Directors Fellow. She tours the country speaking at universities and national conferences and has launched film production programs on the Quinault Reservation in Washington, a media justice camp for girls in Uganda, and a film summer camp in China.

Carol Downer is an American feminist lawyer. In 1972, Downer’s arrest, trial, and acquittal in a case dubbed "The Great Yogurt Conspiracy" brought national attention to the women’s health education project that she and her colleagues started, the Feminist Women’s Health Centers.  She is the co-author of A New View of a Woman’s Body and How to Stay Out of the Gynecologist’s Office.

Dr. Amy Parish is a biological anthropologist, primatologist, and Darwinian feminist. She taught at the University of Southern California in the Gender Studies, Arts and Letters, Public Health, and Anthropology departments for thirteen years. She is currently affiliated faculty at Georgetown University and a research associate at University College London.  She conducted ground-breaking research on patterns of female dominance and matriarchal social structure in one of our closest living relatives, the bonobo.  She is currently working on a book about love, marriage, and the experience of being a wife.