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 was a recent fellow at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, FL. Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and on her Crooked Mirror blog.

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

Jim Holt is the author of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This, and Why Does The World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story. Holt is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and The New Yorker , where he has written on string theory, time, infinity, numbers, truth, and bullshit, among other subjects.

Sean Carroll is a physicist and author of The Particle at the End of the Universe and From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. He is on the faculty at the California Institute of Technology, where his research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology, especially issues of dark matter, dark energy, and the origin of the universe. His writing has appeared in Scientific American, New Scientist, The Wall Street Journal.

Eve Ensler is an internationally bestselling author and an award-winning playwright whose theatrical works include The Vagina Monologues, Necessary Targets, and The Good Body. She is the author of Insecure at Last, a political memoir, and I Am an Emotional Creature. Ensler is the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised over $90 million for local groups and activists and inspired the global action "One Billion Rising."

Jody Williams, who received the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for her work to ban landmines, is the founding chair of the Nobel Women’s Initiative, launched in January 2006. She is the recipient of fifteen honorary degrees and was named one of the hundred most powerful women in the world in 2004 by Forbes. She is a Campaign Ambassador for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which she helped found in 1992. Williams holds the Sam and Cele Keeper Endowed Professorship in Peace and Social Justice at the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston. In 2012–13, she became the inaugural Jane Addams Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Social Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Pat Mitchell is one of media's most accomplished professionals. From network correspondent to producing award-winning documentaries as an executive in charge of original productions for Ted Turner’s cable networks, she was named Newsweek's 150 Women Who Shake the World and has been recognized with 44 Emmy awards, five Peabody’s, and two Academy Award nominations. Mitchell became the first women President/CEO of PBS and is currently President/CEO of The Paley Center for Media, whose mission is to optimize the power of media to inform, inspire, entertain, and empower. Mitchell is a sought-after speaker and has been honored numerous times for her achievements. She serves on many non-profit and corporate boards

Frans de Waal is the author of Our Inner Ape, Chimpanzee Politics, The Age of Empathy, and most recently, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates. He has been named among Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and is the C. H. Candler Professor in Emory University’s Psychology Department.

Dr. Amy Parish is a biological anthropologist, primatologist, and Darwinian feminist, who has conducted ground-breaking research on patterns of female dominance and matriarchal social structure in one of our closest living relatives, the bonobo. Formerly a professor at the University of Southern California for 13 years, she has now affiliated with faculty at Georgetown University and is a research associate at University College London.  Parish is currently working on a book about love, marriage, and the experience of being a wife.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Torch and Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, a collection of writings from her "Dear Sugar" column in The Rumpus. Her memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as the inaugural title for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. Her stories and essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Allure, The Rumpus, The Missouri Review, The Sun, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere.

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor at High Country News, where she writes about politics, the environment, and natural resources. Her work has also appeared in Mother Jones, The Atlantic, Sierra, Audubon, the LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times.

Anne Lamott is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Some Assembly Required; Grace (Eventually); Plan B, Traveling Mercies; and Operating Instructions, as well two other works of nonfiction and seven novels, including the trilogy composed of Imperfect Birds, Rosie, and Crooked Little Heart. Lamott is the past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an inductee to the California Hall of Fame, and a former columnist for Salon. Her new book is, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers.

Father Gregory Boyle is an ordained Jesuit priest, and has been the pastor of the Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights for over 25 years. In 1988, Father Gregory founded Homeboy Industries, which has served members of more than half of the gangs in Los Angeles. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the California Peace Prize, the Irvine Leadership Award, and an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Occidental College. His bestselling memoir, Tattoos on the Heart, has been honored by PEN USA as the 2011 Best Creative Nonfiction Book of the Year.

British-born Colin Thubron has spent his working life writing and traveling in the vast land mass of Asia. His earliest books were on Damascus, Lebanon, Jerusalem and Cyprus. In the eighties he traveled by car through the Soviet Union for Where Nights Are Longest and through China for Behind the Wall. His later travel books include The Lost Heart of Asia, on the republics of Central Asia; In Siberia; and Shadow of the Silk Road, the account of a journey from eastern China to the Mediterranean. He has published seven novels including A Cruel Madness and Turning Back the Sun. His many awards include the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs.

Born in England, to Indian parents, Pico Iyer grew up in Southern California. He is the author of seven works of non-fiction, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul. He has also written the novels Cuba and the Night and Abandon. Iyer has been an essayist for Time magazine, while also writing for The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The New York Times and National Geographic. His most recent book, The Open Road, describing more than 30 years of talking and traveling with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama was a best-seller across the U.S. Iyer has been based for the past 20 years near Nara, in rural Japan, though he is always on the road.