Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, is a fellow at the University of Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy and Middle East Analyst for CBS News.

Andrei Codrescu is an award-winning writer and National Public Radio commentator. His latest books are Jealous Wit­ness: New Poems and New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing from the City (Algonquin). The author of many essay collections, including The Disappearance of the Outside, he is the MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University.

Mark Murphy, Executive Director of REDCAT, is an influential leader in the national and international field of contemporary performing arts, with 20 years of experience producing, presenting and developing new audiences for interdisciplinary performances. Murphy has served as Chairman of the Choreographer's Fellowship Panel for the National Endowment for the Arts, was a founding board member of the National Performance Network, an advisor to the National Dance Project, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Japan Foundation's Performing Arts Program. He is the winner of first place awards from the Society of Professional Journalists for Feature Writing and radio documentary production.

www.redcat.org

One of America's most admired and respected composers, John Adams was born and raised in New England and educated at Harvard. He taught for ten years at the San Francisco Conservatory and was composer-in-residence at the San Francisco Symphony.

Award-winning author and journalist Mark Arax is a co-author of The King of California-a Los Angeles Times bestseller-and author of In My Father's Name. He is a contributing writer at Los Angeles magazine and a former senior writer at the Los Angeles Times. He teaches nonfiction writing at Claremont McKenna College and lives in Fresno.

Ken Bernstein is Manager of the Office of Historic Resources for the City of Los Angeles' Department of City Planning, where he directs Los Angeles' historic preservation policies. In this capacity, he serves as lead staff member for the City's Cultural Heritage Commission, is launching a multi-year citywide survey of historic resources, and is working to create a comprehensive historic preservation program for Los Angeles. He previously served for eight years as Director of Preservation Issues for the Los Angeles Conservancy, where he directed the Conservancy's public policy and advocacy activities.

Adriene Biondo is the Commercial Chair Emeritus, and Residential Chair Emeritus of the Los Angeles Conservancy Modern Committee (Modcom). Adriene is working to establish a Historic Preservation Overlay Zone (historic district) for the Granada Hills Eichler tract where she resides, and participated in writing National Register nominations that were unanimously approved for two Bay Area Eichler tracts. She helped pave the way for the Modcom program to nominate the remaining Case Study Houses for listing in the National Register of Historic Places and she a wide range of preservation efforts, including the preservation to date of the 1958 Johnie's Broiler in Downey, which has officially been declared eligible for the California Register.

William Deverell is an American historian with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth century American West. He has written works on political, social, ethnic, and environmental history. He is currently working on a book exploring the history of the post-Civil War American West. With David Igler of UC Irvine, he is co-editing The Blackwell Companion to California and with Greg Hise of USC, The Blackwell Companion to Los Angeles. William Deverell is the director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West.

Michael Diaz serves as the current chairperson of the Lincoln Heights HPOZ Board and is the founder of the Lincoln Heights Neighborhood and Preservation Association. His civic involvement is extensive and varied including serving as a board member of the Los Angeles Conservancy, as a commissioner of the Los Angeles Historical Records & Landmarks Commission, a member of the Northeast Community Plan Advisory Committee and the Lincoln Heights Neighborhood Council Steering Committee, as well as the founding president of the Latin-American Cinemateca of Los Angeles.

Larry Mantle is the host of KPCC's AirTalk, the longest continuously airing daily radio talk program in Southern California. A fourth-generation Angeleno, he has interviewed thousands of prominent guests on an extraordinary array of topics and is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards.

Gayle Greene is a professor of English at Scripps College, in Claremont, California, where she teaches Shakespeare, contemporary women writers, women's studies, creative nonfiction, and lately, courses on sleep. After writing several books on contemporary women's fiction and feminist theory, her interests shifted to health and the environment, and she published The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation, a biography of the pioneer radiation epidemiologist whose research turned up the links between fetal x-ray and childhood cancer. She then turned her research to insomnia, which has been the bane of her existence since she can remember, and began attending American and European sleep conferences. Greene is a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, a professional medical society for researchers and clinicians, and a board member and the patient representative of the American Insomnia Association.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is the Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education at Harvard and the chair of the board of the MacArthur Foundation. As a sociologist, she examines the culture of schools, the patterns and structures of classroom life, socialization within families and communities, and the relationships between culture and learning styles. She is the author of eight books, including Worlds Apart: Relationships Between Families and Schools; Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer and The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other.

Page Stegner was born in Salt Lake City in 1937. He attended Stanford University, where he received his B.A. in history and his Ph.D. in American literature. From 1967 to 1995 he was a professor of American literature and director of the creative writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A prolific author and editor, he recently published The Collected Letters of Wallace Stegner.

Tom Curwen is staff writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times. He was editor of the Outdoors section, a writer for the features section and deputy editor of the Book Review. He has been honored by the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors for three pieces he did for Outdoors on caving with nature writer Barbara Hurd, on Alaskan bush pilots and the annual migration of sand hill cranes to the Bosque del Apache. He has a master's degree in Creative Writing from USC and was a recipient of a 1991 Academy of American Poets prize. In 2002, he received a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for mental health journalism.

David L. Ulin is book editor of the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of 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 California Book Award. He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, LA Weekly, Los Angeles, and National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."

Jenny Price is a writer whose work focuses on L.A. environment. Author of Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America, she has published in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Weekly, Audubon, Believer, and GOOD, and is a regular contributor to the "Native Intelligence" column on LA Observed. She has written often about the Los Angeles River and gives frequent tours. She has a Ph.D. in history from Yale University, and has been a Research Scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women since 1999. She is currently working on a new book, Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A.

David Ornette Cherry, winner of the "2003 ASCAP-Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music," is composer, arranger, and band leader. The ambient music streaming through his childhood was generated by the early collaborations of his dad, Don Cherry, with Ornette Coleman and the musicians who visited his parents' Mariposa Avenue home in Los Angeles. Cherry studied music composition at Bishop College in Dallas and concentrated on world music at California Institute of the Arts. While jazz remains both the root and sustenance of his sound, he often incorporates the sounds of the world in what he calls "multi-kulti" music. His background includes performances with Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins, Nana Vasconcelos, Olatunji, Hassan Hakmoun, Carlos Ward, Jim Pepper, Collin Walcott, Wadada Leo Smith, and Justo Almario.

www.davidornettecherry.com