L.A. native Richard Montoya is an actor, director, and member of the Latino/Chicano comedy troupe, Culture Clash. Culture Clash was founded in Los Angeles in 1984 and is still an active troupe. Montoya‘s work is often a reflection on issues of race and cultural identity; he is interested in the “multicultural experiment.”

Myriam Gurba is the author of the Edmund White Award-winning novella and short story collection Dahlia Season and the chapbook Wish You Were Me. Gurba's writing appears in anthologies published by City Lights, Seal, and other fine presses. In 2011, Gurba toured with the lezzendary (legendarily lesbian) literary roadshow Sister Spit. She is not above striking Faustian deals as long as they firmly place her in the same tax bracket as Warren Buffett. She teaches remedial high school classes in Long Beach and is the kind of teacher kids trust enough to ask for a tampon.

Erin Aubry Kaplan is a journalist and essayist who was born and raised in Los Angeles. She has been a staff writer at the LA Weekly and a weekly opinion columnist for the L.A. Times, the first African American opinion columnist in the paper's history. She has contributed to many publications, including Salon.com, Essence, Oxford American and Ms. Magazine. A collection of her journalism and essays, Black Talk, Blue Thoughts and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista, was published in 2011. She teaches nonfiction in the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles.

Philip Littell has written a lot of words that have been set to music, collaborating with a veritable roll-call of classical composers: Previn, Susa, Kernis, Tork, and many more. Meanwhile he has been producing work for the less legitimate musical theater with collaborator Eliot Douglass (No Miracle: A Consolation, The Night Market, The Wandering Whore), and Libby Larsen (Billy The Kid And What He Did), has translated Moliere and Feydeau, and clowned in cabaret and sung in clubs, while continuing to work as an actor. He has two epic/historical travesty plays in hand and ready to go.

Héctor Tobar has worked as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times for nearly twenty years. He shared a Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of the 1992 riots, and then served as the national Latino Affairs correspondent, the Buenos Aires bureau chief, and the Mexico City bureau chief. He currently writes a weekly column for the paper and is the author of three books, Translation Nation, The Tattooed Soldier, and most recently, The Barbarian Nurseries. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of the city of Los Angeles.

Besides teaching writing and theatre, Brenda Varda is the founder of Wordspace in Los Angeles, a cultural hub for writers in all genres. Wordspace creates workshops and development opportunities that allow writers to experiment and connect with new audiences. In creating her own works for the theatre (Unknown, The Met, Sacred Fools, UCIRA), Varda looks to create narratives that reframe contemporary identities while still providing reference to common cultural experiences. Her MFA thesis work, Fables du Theatre, a fantasy of three theatrical fables produced in collaboration with a fictional theatre company (Immanence Theatre Ensemble), was produced at Unknown Theatre in 2008 and nominated for an LA Weekly Award.

Alie Ward is a former writer for the LA Times and columnist for the LA Weekly, and now covers cocktails for KCET and CookingChanneltv.com. She's the co-creator and co-host for Cooking Channel's Classy Ladies with Alie & Georgia as well as an on-camera contributor to Cooking Channel's Unique Sweets. She tells stories around town at Upright Citizens Brigade, The Meltdown and Public School and after 13 years in Los Angeles she knows to wear SPF 70 -- and take Fountain.

Eli Broad is a renowned business leader who built two Fortune 500 companies from the ground up over a five decade career in business. He is the founder of both SunAmerica Inc. and KB Home (formerly Kaufman and Broad Home Corporation). Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe, are devoted to philanthropy as founders of The Broad Foundations, which they established to advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science and the arts. Over the past four decades, the Broads have built two of the most prominent collections of postwar and contemporary art worldwide: The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection and The Broad Art Foundation.

Jim Newton is a veteran journalist who began his career as 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.

Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) published 36 science fiction novels and 121 short stories over a three decade writing career, in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power. Toward the end of his life, his work turned to deeply personal, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God. Eleven novels and short stories have been adapted to film, notably, Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly.

Jonathan Lethem is the critically acclaimed author of eight novels, including Motherless Brooklyn and his latest, Chronic City. He has published and spoken widely on Dick and is the editor of the Library of America editions of Dick's novels. His new book of essays, The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. is due out this fall.

David L. Ulin is a book critic for the Los Angeles Times. From 2005-2010 he served as the Times' 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 are widely published.

Pamela Jackson is an independent scholar, editor, and archivist who holds degrees in Rhetoric and Library and Information Studies from the University of California Berkeley and Los Angeles, respectively. Her 1999 dissertation, The World Philip K. Dick Made, initiated a decade's study of Dick's Exegesis. She is also a graduate of Berkeley High School, Philip K. Dick's only alma mater.

Laura Leslie is the oldest of Philip K. Dick's three children and grew up in the small town of Pt. Reyes Station, California in the house that informed much of Dick's writing from 1960 - 1964 such as The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time Slip, and the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. She has been responsible for his estate since his death in 1982. She works closely with her sister, Isa Dick Hackett, to steward the legacy of their late father. She recently organized the manuscript material left by their late father and has created an extensive catalog. Ms. Leslie has worked in the information technology services industry for over two decades.

Isa Dick Hackett, daughter of Philip K. Dick, is co-founder along with her sister Laura Leslie and CEO of Electric Shepherd Productions, LLC, the company dedicated to the stewardship and adaptation of the Philip K. Dick library. Ms. Hackett served as an Executive Producer on Adjustment Bureau, based on Philip K. Dick's short story The Adjustment Team. She is also credited for her work on Richard Linklater's adaptation of A Scanner Darkly and for her guidance on and participation in the DVD special features for Blade Runner: The Final Cut, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly.

Charles C Mann's most recent book, 1491, won the U.S. National Academy of Sciences' Keck award for the best book of the year. A correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, Science, and Wired, he has covered the intersection of science, technology, and commerce for many newspapers and magazines here and abroad. In addition to 1491, he has co-written four other books: The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in 20th-Century Physics,The Aspirin Wars: Money, Medicine, and 100 Years of Rampant Competition, Noah's Choice: The Future of Endangered Species, and @ Large: The Strange Case of the Internet's Biggest Invasion. He has also written for HBO and the television show Law and Order.

Richard Rodriguez, a journalist and writer, is the author of an autobiographical trilogy that examines, respectively, class, ethnicity, and race in America. He is finishing a book on the "ecology of monotheism"--the influence of the desert for the experience of God for the Jew, the Christian, and the Muslim.