Isabel Wilkerson, formerly James M. Cox Professor of Journalism at Emory University, is Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University. In 1994, while Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times, she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Wilkerson has also won a George S. Polk Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Journalist of the Year award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson is a senior research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Center at the Urban Institute (UI) in Washington DC and director of UI's Culture, Creativity and Communities Program. Her research focuses on urban policy, neighborhood revitalization and comprehensive community planning, the politics of race, ethnicity and gender in urban settings, and the role of arts and culture in communities. Dr. Jackson's work has appeared in academic and professional journals as well as edited volumes in the fields of urban planning, sociology, community development and the arts. Dr. Jackson has also taught graduate and undergraduate courses in social policy, planning for multiple publics, community economic development and research methods.

Clyde Casey is a visual artist and musician. He makes large movable drum sculptures and uses them to create participatory musical events. In 1988, at the corner of Wall and Boyd Streets, the site of a former gas station and parking lot, Clyde Casey created Another Planet, an outdoor cultural space, where you could find poetry, ping pong, TV, live music and jam sessions by and for people in the community, twenty-four hours a day. The spot also offered storage for belongings and free clothing. Another Planet flourished for a year, before burning down in a fire in 1989.

An LA native and artist, Manuel Compito (aka OG Man) has devoted his creative energy to spreading a self-help philosophy. His OG's N Service Association dedicates itself to uplifting the men and children of Skid Row. In 2007 OG Man launched the highly successful 3-on-3 Basketball League at Gladys Park. Other OG's N Service activities include an annual Fathers Day celebration of responsible parenting and a beautification program that brought painted trash cans to the neighborhood when the City's Sanitation Bureau failed to provide trash cans on Skid Row.

In 1970, Jeff Dietrich and Catherine Morris founded the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, a lay Catholic community of men and women which operates a free soup kitchen, hospitality house for the homeless, AIDS ministry, hospice for the dying, a newspaper, and regularly offers prophetic witness in opposition to war-making and injustice. Jeff has been active in direct service and in the development of humane services and neighborhood amenities for people living in poverty in Skid Row. The Catholic Worker's early involvement in the neighborhood has encouraged the involvement of other initiatives, including the founding of Las Familias del Pueblo and Inner City Law Center.

John Malpede directs, performs and engineers multi-event arts projects that have theatrical, installation, public art and education components. In 1985, Malpede founded the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD). LAPD 's mission is to create performances that connect lived experience to the social forces that shape the lives and communities of people living in poverty. Malpede has produced projects working with communities throughout the US and in the UK, France, The Netherlands, Belgium and Bolivia.

Malpede has received numerous awards, among them: San Francisco Art Institute's Adeline Kent Award, Durfee Sabbatical Grant, LA Theater Alliance Ovation Award, NEA, California Arts Council, City of Los Angeles' COLA Fellowship, California Community Foundation's Visual Artist Fellowship, and was a 2008-2009 fellow at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies.
http://www.lapovertydept.org/

In 1999 Pete White founded LA CAN, to ensure that people living in poverty have voice, power and opinion in the decisions that impact their lives. LA CAN builds indigenous leadership within the Central City East community to address the multitude of problems faced by homeless and very low-income residents of the community, including civil rights and housing on the streets and in the hotels. LA CAN has built a broad base of informed residents that have mounted successful campaigns to defend their tenant, civil and human rights, both on the streets and in residential hotels.

http://www.cangress.org/

A native of California, Stephen G Breyer taught at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and served as assistant special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation before being appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in 1980 and becoming its Chief Judge in 1990. President Clinton nominated him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and he took his seat August 3, 1994. He currently serves as an Honorary Chair for the World Justice Project.

Henry Weinstein teaches law and journalism at the University of California, Irvine. He was a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times from 1978 to 2008, specializing in the coverage of law and labor, and did a considerable amount of investigative reporting. Weinstein has won numerous journalistic awards, including, in 2006, the John Chancellor Award for Excellence, presented annually by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Bill Boyarsky (writer) is a political columnist for Truthdig.com and blogs for LA Observed. He was a lecturer at the USC Annenberg School for Communication for several years and teaches there periodically. In his 30 years with the Los Angeles Times, Boyarsky was a political writer, featured columnist, and city editor. He was a member of reporting teams that won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of two biographies of Ronald Reagan, and authored Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics as well as Los Angeles: City of Dreams. Together with his wife, Nancy, he coauthored Backroom Politics. He lives in Los Angeles.

Peter Jones (Filmmaker) began his career as a broadcast journalist. In 1987, he formed Peter Jones Productions, originally specializing in documentary films related to the history of the motion-picture industry. His special on Judy Garland won a 1997 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational Series. "Stardust: The Bette Davis Story", had its U.S. premiere on Turner Classics Movies in 2006, garnering Jones and his team an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Nonfiction Special and an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming. He lives in the hills overlooking the city the Chandlers invented.

Patt Morrison is a writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of the daily Patt Morrison public affairs program on KPCC. She has won six Emmys and six Golden Mike awards as founding host and commentator on Life & Times Tonight, the nightly news and current affairs program on KCET. Her one-on-one television interview subjects include Salman Rushdie, Henry Kissinger, Frank Gehry, Ray Bradbury, Joan Didion, and many more.

www.pattmorrison.com

James Workman began his award-winning career as a journalist in Washington, D.C., writing for the New Republic, Washington Monthly, Utne Reader, Washington Business Journal, Foreign Service, and Orion, among other publications. In the Clinton Administration he served as a special assistant and natural resources speechwriter to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, with whom he reintroduced wolves, restored fire to its vital and natural role in western forests, and blew up obsolete dams to replenish dying rivers. For seven years in Africa and Asia, he helped prepare and launch the landmark Report of the World Commission on Dams, led investigative research safaris, lectured at universities, and advised on water policy in the developing world. Based on his experience with the Kalahari Bushmen, he is pioneering new platforms for trading the human right to water. He lives in San Francisco.

http://www.heartofdryness.com/

Adán Ortega, Jr. is co-founder of Water Conservation Partners Inc., helping property developers and water planners make water available for projects through state of the art water conservation. He handles strategic communications planning and government affairs for clients at AOA, his public affairs firm. Adán was Vice President for External Affairs of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California ('99-05) where he created the long-running Bewaterwise.com and California Friendly water conservation advertising and branding campaigns. He was Chief Deputy Secretary of State under California Secretary of State Bill Jones during the late 1990s and Assistant General Manager of West and Central Basin Municipal Water Districts from 1994-1997. Adán is a member of the California State Board of Food and Agriculture, the Stewardship Council of Roots of Change, the Board of Directors of Mujeres de La Tierra, and is on the advisory board of Sustainable Conservation.

Sebastian Junger is the New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Storm and A Death in Belmont. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and has been awarded a National Magazine Award and an SAIS Novartis Prize for journalism. He lives in New York City.

John Sacret Young began his television work on the Emmy winning Best Drama series, Police Story, and has since created, written, or Executive Produced six additional series and multiple pilots, mini-series and movies of the week. He co-created with William Broyles, Jr., wrote, and executive produced the ground-breaking series, China Beach. For his work on the show, John received five Emmy and four Writer's Guild Award nominations. The WGA honored him with the Award for an episode he also directed. The West Wing brought him two more Emmy and two more WGA nominations. John won his second WGA Award for the mini-series, A Rumor of War. He's also written and produced feature films and has been honored with two Christopher Awards for the Academy Award nominated Testament starring Jane, and the film Romero with Raul Julia. John's original mini-series about the Gulf War, Thanks of a Grateful Nation, was honored with his second Humanitas Prize as a writer. Young's book, REMAINS: Non-Viewable was a Los Angeles Times best seller.

Kai Bird's most recent book, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978, is a meld of personal memoir and history, fusing his early life in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Egypt with an account of the American experience in the Middle East and intimate insights into the Arab-Israeli tragedy. He is the co-author with Martin J. Sherwin of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and the Duff Cooper Prize for History in London. He wrote The Chairman: John J. McCloy, the Making of the American Establishment and The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy & William Bundy, Brothers in Arms. He is also co-editor with Lawrence Lifschultz of Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy. He is the recipient of many awards, including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and a contributing editor of The Nation.

Nicholas Goldberg is editor of the Los Angeles Times editorial pages. In the past, he has served as deputy editor of the editorial pages, edited the paper's Sunday Opinion section, and served as Op-Ed page editor. He is a former Middle East bureau chief for Newsday. In that position, he covered many major stories including the peace process in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza; presidential elections inIran; arms monitoring in Iraq; famine in Sudan; and civil war in Algeria. From 1992 to 1995, he was the paper's statehouse bureau chief, covering the administrations of Governors Mario Cuomo and George Pataki. He also covered Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign.

Father Gregory Boyle was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1982. He received his Master of Divinity from the Weston School of Theology; and a Sacred Theology Masters degree from the Jesuit School of Theology. In 1988, Father Boyle began what would become Homeboy Industries, now located in downtown Los Angeles. Fr. Greg received the California Peace Prize, the "Humanitarian of the Year" Award from Bon Appétit; the Caring Institute's 2007 Most Caring People Award; and received the 2008 Civic Medal of Honor from the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. Since 1986, Father Gregory has been the pastor of Dolores Mission in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. The church sits between two large public housing projects, Pico Gardens and Aliso Village, known for decades as the gang capital of the world. Since Father Greg-also known affectionately as G-dog, started Homeboy Industries nearly twenty years ago, it has served members of more than half of the gangs in Los Angeles. In Homeboy Industries' various businesses-baking, silkscreening, landscaping-gang affiliations are left outside as young people work together, side by side, learning the mutual respect that comes from building something together.

Celeste Fremon is an award winning freelance journalist, the author of G-Dog and the Homeboys and the upcoming, An American Family. She is the creator and editor of WitnessLA.com, teaches journalism at the USC Annenberg School and is a Visiting Lecturer at UC Irvine where she teaches literary journalism as it relates to social justice. Fremon is also a Senior Fellow for Social Justice/New Media at the Institute for Justice and Journalism.

Walter Kirn is an essayist, critic, and novelist whose work appears regularly in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Times Book Review. He is the author of five works of fiction, including My Hard Bargain: Stories, She Needed Me, Thumbsucker, Up in the Air, and Mission to America. He recently completed a screenplay based on his 2005 Atlantic article "Lost in the Meritocracy", a memoir of his years at Princeton. Kirn's work is represented in the anthology by his American Everyman, a provocative depiction of Warren Buffett as a great communicator in the tradition of Mark Twain and Will Rogers.

George McGovern was U.S. Senator for South Dakota from 1962 to 1980. He won the nomination as his party's candidate for the presidency against incumbent President Richard Nixon. Following his defeat by Nixon, he served for six years as president of the Middle East Policy Council. He is the author of a dozen books and numerous published articles. He is a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom-the nation's highest civilian award. Senator McGovern is represented in the anthology by his 1967 Atlantic essay, "America's Crisis Addiction," in which he argued that the country's tendency to embark on military interventions of dubious relevance to the national interest had detracted resources and attention from its own social problems -- a thesis that seems every bit as timely today as it was forty years ago.

James Q. Wilson is the author or co-author of fifteen books, the most recent of which is The Marriage Problem. Others include Moral Judgement; The Moral Sense; American Government; Bureaucracy; and Thinking About Crime. He is currently chairman of the Board of Academic Advisers of the American Enterprise Institute. In 2003, President George W. Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award. He is currently the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University.

Robert Vare is the editor at large of The Atlantic Monthly. He is a former editor at The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times Magazine, where he edited the Pulitzer Prize-winning cover story "Grady's Gift," in 1991. In 2004, he was the editor of Things Worth Fighting For, a post-humously published collection of writings by Michael Kelly, the former Atlantic editor-in-chief who was killed while covering the war in Iraq. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, he has taught nonfiction writing at Yale and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Paul Krugman has at least three jobs: professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. Krugman is the author or editor of 20 books and more than 200 professional journal articles, many of them on international trade and finance. In recognition of his work, he received the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association, an award given every two years to the top economist under the age of 40. His previous book, The Great Unraveling, was a New York Times bestseller.

Jon Wiener is a contributing editor to The Nation magazine and aprofessor 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 in Los Angeles, a listener-supported Pacifica network station, where his show features interviews on politics and culture.