Stephen Greenblatt is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Recipient of the Holberg Prize, he is the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author of The Swerve and Will in the World, and the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare and The Norton Anthology of English Literature.

Jack Miles, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine, has written on religion, politics, and culture for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The WorldPost and many other publications. His book God: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996. The Norton Anthology of World Religions, of which he was the general editor, was published in 2014 in hardcover and in 2015 in a six-volume paperback edition. A MacArthur Fellow during the years 2003-2007, he is currently completing a new work to be entitled God in the Qur’an.

Irene Borger is a journalist and novelist, writer-in-residence at AIDS Project Los Angeles, and the editor of From a Burning House: Stories from the APLA Writers Workshop.

Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, Pulitzer Prize finalist; A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize; and Cleopatra: A Life. Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named a 2011 Library Lion by the New York Public Library, she lives in New York City.

Jon Wiener is a contributing editor to The Nation magazine and a professor of history at the University of California – Irvine, where he specializes in recent American history. His books include: Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower, Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files; Professors, Politics and Pop; and Come Together: John Lennon in His Time. Wiener hosts an afternoon drive-time radio program on KPFK-90.7 FM featuring interviews on politics and culture.

Mary Karr is the author of three award-winning, bestselling memoirs: The Liars’ Club, Cherry, and Lit. A Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, Karr has won Pushcart Prizes for both verse and essays. Other grants include the Whiting Writer’s Award, PEN’s Martha Albrand Award, and Radcliffe’s Bunting Fellowship. The Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University is currently adapting her books for a Showtime series based on her life.

David L. Ulin is the author, most recently of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, which comes out in October from the University of California Press. His other books include The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is a book critic and former book editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Meghan Daum is the author of four books, most recently the collection of original essays The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion. She is also the editor of Selfish, Shallow & Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not To Have Kids, which was published in March of this year. Her other books include the essay collection My Misspent Youth, the novel The Quality of Life Report, and Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House, a memoir. Since 2005, Daum has been an opinion columnist at The Los Angeles Times, covering cultural and political topics. Meghan has written for numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, andVogue.

Leslie Jamison has published work in Harper’s, A Public Space, Oxford American, and The Believer. Her debut novel, The Gin Closet, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize. She lives in Brooklyn and is completing a doctorate at Yale University.

Molly Pulda is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities at USC. She is working on a manuscript about secrecy in contemporary literature and culture.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of six collections of poetry, including After, Given Sugar, Given Salt, The Lives of the Heart, and The October Palace, as well as a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She edited and co-translated The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, and Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems. In 2004, Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor formerly held by such poets as Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop. In 2012, she was elected Chancellor of the Academy. Her newest work, published spring of 2015, is a volume of poetry titled The Beauty and a book of essays titled Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World.

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 will be a spring 2015 writer-in-residence at the Warsaw Bauhaus. Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books and on her Crooked Mirror blog.

Karima Bennoune is a professor of International Law at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. She is a former legal advisor for Amnesty International. Currently, Bennoune sits on the board of the network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML). She has appeared on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 and made frequent appearances on MSNBC, including on All In With Chris Hayes, after the Paris attacks. Her recent book,Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism, which details local struggles against extremism, is based on 300 interviews with people of Muslim heritage from 30 countries. It won the 2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The related TED talk, “When people of Muslim heritage challenge fundamentalism,” has received over 1.2 million views.

Ani Zonneveld is the founder and President of Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV). Since its inception in 2007, Ani has presided over MPV’s expansion to include chapters and affiliates in the United States and around the world, as well as securing consultative status at the United Nations. She is a strong supporter of women and LGBTQ rights, freedom of expression, and for freedom of and from belief. Ani is the brainchild of Literary Zikr—a project that counters radical Islam online, co-editor of an anthology Progressive Muslim Identities—Personal Stories from the U.S. and Canada, and a contributor for Huffington Postand Open Democracy. Ani performs Islamic wedding services for mixed-faith and gay couples.

For more than four decades—from Santana's earliest days as a groundbreaking Afro-Latin-blues-rock fusion outfit in San Francisco— Carlos Santana has been the visionary force behind artistry that transcends musical genres and generational, cultural, and geographical boundaries. To date, Santana has won 10 Grammy® Awards, including a record-tying nine for a single project, 1999’s Supernatural, as well as three Latin Grammys. Santana’s new album, Corazón, was released in May 2014 and is his first Latin music album of his career. The arc of Santana’s performing and recording career is complemented by a lifelong devotion to social activism and humanitarian causes.

Primarily known as an actor, a director, and a performer, Cheech Marin is also an avid art collector. His collection of Chicano art is lent to art institutions worldwide, and he has authored numerous books inspired by his collection. In addition to art books, Marin is also the author of three children’s books. His work on behalf of Latinos has been recognized with the 2000 Creative Achievement Award from the Imagen Foundation and the 1999 ALMA Community Service Award from the National Council of La Raza and Kraft Foods.

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 the general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions.

Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, is an author, most recently, of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. His first book, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, has been translated into thirteen languages and named by Blackwell as one of the hundred most important books of the last decade. He is also the author of How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization and the End of the War on Terror (published in paperback as Beyond Fundamentalism), as well as the editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. Aslan is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at UC Riverside.

Rabbi Sharon Brous is the founding rabbi of IKAR, a spiritual community dedicated to reanimating Jewish life by standing at the intersection of soulful, inventive religious practice and a deep commitment to social justice. Since IKAR’s founding in 2004, Brous has been recognized a number of times as one of the nation’s leading rabbis by Newsweek/ The Daily Beast and as one of the 50 most influential American Jews by the Jewish daily The Forward. In 2013 she blessed the President and Vice President at the Inaugural National Prayer Service. She sits on the faculty of the Hartman Institute-North America, Wexner Heritage, and REBOOT, and serves on the board of Teruah-The Rabbinic Call to Human Rights and rabbinic advisory council to American Jewish World Service and Bend the Arc. Brous lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their three children.

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the novels Home, Gilead (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and Housekeeping, and four books of nonfiction, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Mother Country, The Death of Adam, and Absence of Mind. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Michael Silverblatt is the host of KCRW's half-hour radio show Bookworm, where he introduces listeners to new and emerging authors along with writers of renown. He created Bookworm for KCRW-FM in 1989. The complete Bookworm archive can be heard at kcrw.com/bookworm.