Maynard L. Parker (1900-1976) built a career making residential spaces look their alluring best. Based in Los Angeles, Parker was one of postwar America’s most prolific commercial photographers, his sun-kissed style of photography offering a seductive domestic vision to a new consumer age. Parker’s work appeared in House Beautiful, Architectural Digest, Better Homes and Gardens, Sunset, and other popular home and design magazines of the 1930s through the 1960s. His lens revealed the homes and lifestyles of socialites and movie stars, the masterworks of internationally acclaimed architects and designers, and the modest ranch houses, tidy gardens, and new interiors which embodied the American dream.

Jennifer A. Watts is curator of photographs at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where her exhibitions, research, and writing has primarily focused on the photography of California and the American West. She has coauthored several books, including This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in Los Angeles Photographs; Edward Weston: A Legacy; and The Great Wide Open: Panoramic Photographs of the American West. Watts is the curator of the recent exhibition, “A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning, and Memory in the American Civil War.”

Christopher Hawthorne is architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. Before coming to the Times he was architecture critic for Slate and a frequent contributor to the New York Times. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Washington Post, Metropolis, Architect, Domus, I.D., Print, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and Architectural Record, among many other publications. He is the author, with Alanna Stang, of The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture, published by Princeton Architectural Press.

D. J. Waldie is the author of books, essays and blogs about Los Angeles and Southern California. He is a contributing writer at Los Angeles Magazine and a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times. His commentary and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. He is widely known for his award-winning memoir, Holy Land. His most recent book is House, in collaboration with Diane Keaton. He blogs at KCET.org.

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.

Annie Murphy Paul is a magazine journalist and book author whose writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and The Best American Science Writing, among many other publications. A former senior editor at Psychology Today magazine, she was awarded the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. She is the author of The Cult of Personality, a cultural history and scientific critique of personality testing, and Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives. Origins was chosen as one of the Notable Books of 2010 by The New York Times Book Review.

Michael C. Lu, MD, MPH is an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology and public health at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and at the UCLA School of Public Health. He is a member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Select Panel on Preconception Care, and a lead investigator for the National Children's Study in Los Angeles. He has received numerous awards for his teaching, including Excellence in Teaching Awards from the Association of Professors of Gynecology and Obstetrics.

Rebecca Skloot is a science writer whose articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine; The Oprah Magazine; and others. She is guest editor of The Best American Science Writing 2011. Her debut book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks an instant New York Times bestseller and was named Best Book for 2010 by Amazon.com. It is currently being being adapted into a young adult book and an HBO film produced by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball.

Carolyn Kellogg is an LA-based book critic and the lead blogger for the LA Times book blog, Jacket Copy. She was a judge of the 2010 Story Prize and is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.