Colin Beavan is the author of Operation Jedburgh: D-Day and America's First Shadow War and Fingerprints: The Origins of Crime Detection and the Murder Case that Launched Forensic Science. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Mens' Journal, and many other national magazines. Beavan has appeared on NPR's All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, and many other nationally syndicated NPR and commercial radio shows. He lives in New York City.

Bell Hooks is the author of fifteen books, including Killing Rage, Ain't I a Woman, and Bone Black: Memories of a Girlhood. She is a distinguished Professor of English at City College in New York. 'She writes with a deep sense of urgency about the existential and psychocultural dimensions of African-American life, especially those spiritual and intimate issues of love, hurt, pain, envy, and desire usually probed by artists...Her books help us not only to decolonize our minds, souls and bodies; on a deeper level, they touch our lives.' (Cornel West)

Steven Ehrlich, FAIA, RIBA, learned early on, the significance of how architecture responds to culture and environment. Six years in Africa (including two years with the Peace Corps as their first architect in Marrakech, Morocco, and teaching at Ahmadu BelloUniversity in Nigeria) taught Ehrlich the sustainable wisdom of indigenous architecture.

Selected in 2003 as the California AIA Firm of the Year, Ehrlich Architects has won seven National AIA Awards. Current projects include the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and the School of Earth and Space Exploration both for Arizona State University, the Art Building at the University of California, Irvine, five residential towers in Taipei, Taiwan, and a large villa in Dubai.

Michael Maltzan was born in 1959 in Levittown, on Long Island, New York. He holds both a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Architecture from Rhode Island School of Design, where he received the Henry Adams AIA Scholastic Gold Medal. He received a Master of Architecture degree with a Letter of Distinction from Harvard University in 1988.

Jane Mayer is the co-author of two best-selling narrative non-fiction books, Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, and Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, both of which received glowing reviews and were book-of-the-month-club selections, and the latter of which was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a Washington-based staff writer for The New Yorker, specializing in political and investigative reporting. Before that, she was a senior writer and front page editor for The Wall Street Journal, as well as the Journal's first female White House correspondent.

Tamim Ansary is the author of the memoir West of Kabul, East of New York, and has been a major contributing writer to several secondary school history textbooks. Born in Afghanistan, he now lives in San Francisco, where he is director of the San Francisco Writers Workshop and writes a column for Encarta.com.

George Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at UC Berkeley and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is author of The New York Times bestseller Don't Think of an Elephant! Moral Politics, Whose Freedom?, and many books and articles on cognitive science and linguistics.

After a long and varied business career spanning 30 years of work in every medium from film to television to newspapers to the internet, Harry Brant Chandler now devotes most of his attentions to his photography and his civic work. His photographs have been shown at the California Museum in Sacramento and will be the focus of an upcoming show in September 2009 at the Autry National Center of the American West, in Los Angeles. A fifth generation Southern Californian, he has served on the boards of several public and private Internet companies, the New Media Council, the Internet Local Advertising Council, MOCA photography board, LACMA?s Tech Advisors and the Music Center's Center Theater Group.

Dr. Kevin Starr is the state librarian emeritus of California and University Professor and professor of history at USC. Starr has written ten books, six of which are part of his "Americans and the California Dream" series. He has also written Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2003 and California, A History, a Modern Library Chronicles book. His writing has won him a Guggenheim Fellowship, membership in the Society of American Historians, the Gold Medal of the Commonwealth Club of California, and the Lifetime Achievement Award, PEN USA, Western Center. In June 2006 he was given the Centennial Medal of the Graduate School of Arts and Science, Harvard University.

Chip Jacobs is a Los Angeles-area author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles with William J. Kelly, and Wheeling the Deal, the Outrageous Legend of Gordon Zahler, Hollywood's Flashiest Quadriplegic. On the journalism side, Jacobs' reporting has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, the Daily News of Los Angeles, L.A. Weekly, CNN, The Chicago Tribune, The Orlando Sentinel, The Pasadena Star News and Southland Publishing, among other outlets. For his efforts, he's been honored by the Los Angeles Press Club, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and The Los Angeles Times.

chipjacobs.com

William J. Kelly has written for L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Alternet, and California Journal. He was chief spokesman for more than thirteen years of South Coast Air Quality Management District, the smog control agency for greater Los Angeles. He is the author of Home Safe Home, and senior correspondent for California Energy Circuit.

After forty years of activism, politics and writing, Tom Hayden is still a leading voice for ending the war in Iraq, erasing sweatshops, saving the environment, and reforming politics through greater citizen participation. He has written eyewitness accounts for The Nation, where he serves on the editorial board, about the global justice movements in Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Chiapas, and India. He is currently writing and advocating for US Congressional hearings on exiting Iraq. This year he drafted and lobbied successfully for Los Angeles and San Francisco ordinances to end all taxpayer subsidies for sweatshops. He is the author or editor of thirteen books, including most recently, Reunion (re-issued as Rebel), The Lost Gospel of the Earth, Irish on the Inside, Street Wars, and The Port Huron Statement. He recently has taught at Pitzer College, Occidental College, and Harvard's Institute of Politics.