Gary Snyder is a poet, author, scholar, cultural critic, and Professor Emeritus of UC Davis. He graduated from Reed college in Portland, Oregon (where his roommates were poets Lew Welch and Philip Whalen) in 1951. In the Bay Area, Snyder associated with Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and others who were part of the remarkable flowering of west coast poetry during the fifties. In 1956 he moved to Japan to study Zen Buddhism and East Asian culture. For the last thirty-eight years, he has lived in the northern Sierra Nevada. He divides his time between environmental and cultural issues with a focus on the Sierra Nevada ecosystem, and teaching with a focus on creative writing, ethnopoetics, and bioregional praxis. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose. He has been awarded the Pulitzer prize for poetry (1975) as well as the Bollingen Prize (1997). His selected poems No Nature was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992.

Lew Welch attended Reed College in Oregon, where he met future Beat poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. While at graduate school at the University of Chicago in 1951, he suffered a nervous breakdown. He left school and went into psychotherapy while working as an advertising copywriter. (He came up with the famous slogan "RAID KILLS BUGS DEAD.") He moved to San Francisco to pursue his work as a poet, supporting himself as a cabdriver and became an active participant in Beat culture, living at various times with Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and appearing as the character, Dave Wain in Jack Kerouac's novel, Big Sur. Welch published and performed widely during the 1960s, and taught a poetry workshop as part of the University of California Extension in San Francisco from 1965 to 1970 and as poet-in-residence at Reed College in January 1971. On May 23rd 1971, he left behind a note and walked out of Snyder's house in the mountains carrying a revolver. His body was never found. Lew Welch is included in many Beat Generation retrospectives or anthologies, and his book of collected poems, Ring of Bone, was first published in 1973.

Jacques d'Amboise joined the New York City Ballet at fifteen, became a principal dancer at seventeen, and remained so for the next thirty-five years. He has appeared in the films Seven Brothers, Carousel, The Best Things in Life Are Free, Watching Ballet, and Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1976, he founded the National Dance Institute, an arts education program, and is the author of Teaching the Magic of Dance.

Sasha Anawalt is director of USC Annenberg Arts Journalism Programs, including the Masters degree in Specialized Journalism (The Arts) program. She also directs the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program and the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater. In October 2009, she co-directed and co-produced with Douglas McLennan the first-ever National Summit on Arts Journalism. Anawalt wrote the best-selling cultural biography, The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company. She was chief dance critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, LA Weekly and on KCRW, National Public Radio. Her reviews and features have been published widely.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is a Fellow and Deputy Director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations. She covered presidential politics and public affairs for ten years as a producer with ABC News and This Week with George Stephanopoulos, before leaving to write about women entrepreneurs in war zones including Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Her reporting on this topic has been published widely and she frequently appears on TV news shows as a policy expert on Afghanistan. She served as an informal advisor on the topic of women's economic empowerment for General McChrystal's staff in Afghanistan as well as economic officials at the American Embassy in Kabul.

Kai Ryssdal is the host of Marketplace on American Public Media. Before joining Marketplace, Kai was a reporter and substitute host for The California Report, a news and information program distributed to public radio stations throughout California. His radio work has won first place awards from the Radio and Television News Directors Association and the national Public Radio News Directors Association.

Before his career in public radio, Kai served in the United States Navy, was a Pentagon staff officer, and was a member of the United States Foreign Service.

Joan Schenkar is the author of the highly acclaimed, award-winning biography The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith; of the widely praised biography Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde; and of a collection of award-winning plays, Signs of Life: 6 Comedies of Menace. She lives and writes in Paris and Greenwich Village.

Kathleen Chalfant is a Tony-nominated, Drama Desk and Obie Award-winning actress. Her many credits include the Broadway hit Angels in America, the Off-Broadway Wit and Nine Armenians. Her films include Duplicity, The People Speak, The Last New Yorker, Murder and Murder, among numerous others, and the TV shows Law and Order, Rescue Me, Book of Daniel, The Guardian, and The Laramie Project, as well as numerous radio programs.