Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, is Middle East Commentator for NPR's "Marketplace" and Muslim Affairs Analyst for CBS News.

He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Religion from Santa Clara University, a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard University, a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from the University of Iowa, and is currently a Doctoral Candidate in Sociology of Religions at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Honor Moore is the author of three collections of poems: Red Shoes, Darling, and Memoir. She is the editor of Amy Lowell: Selected Poems for the Library of America and co-editor of At the Stray Dog Cabaret, A Book of Russian Poems translated by Paul Schmidt. Her biography, The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, was a New York Times Notable Book in 1996, and she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 for The Bishop's Daughter. Her play Mourning Pictures, was produced on Broadway and published in The New Women's Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, which she edited. Moore is also a theatre critic for The New York Times. She teaches in the graduate writing program at the New School and Columbia.

Pico Iyer is the author of six works of nonfiction and two novels, including The Open Road: The Global Journey of the XIVth Dalai Lama. He has covered the Tibetan question for Time, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications for more than twenty years. He lives in suburban Japan.