David France is the author of Our Fathers, a book about the Catholic sexual abuse scandal, which Showtime adapted into a film. He coauthored The Confession with former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey. He is a contributing editor for New York and has written as well for The New York Times. His documentary film How to Survive a Plague was an Oscar finalist, won a Directors Guild Award and a Peabody Award and was nominated for two Emmys, among other accolades.

Dr. Mark H. Katz has delivered care to persons with HIV for 30 years. Since 1985, he has been affiliated with Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles. From 1992-2006, he was the Regional HIV Physician Coordinator for the Southern California Kaiser region. In addition to his HIV outpatient work, he is currently a hospitalist at the West LA Medical Center and the Physician Lead at West LA for Clinician-Patient Communication, inspiring providers to be more empathic communicators. He has long been an educator as well as a physician activist–through work with organizations such as LA Shanti and Being Alive (for which he conducted a monthly medical update from 1988 through 1997). He is the recipient of many honors, but his greatest professional reward, he says, is "continually having the opportunity to be involved in the care of people who face the challenge of HIV with such grace and determination." Dr. Katz is at work on a series of essays and recollections about the HIV epidemic.

A graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program of the California Institute of the Arts, Tony Valenzuela is the Executive Director of Lambda Literary, the nation’s leading nonprofit organization advancing LGBTQ literature. He is a longtime community activist and writer whose work has focused on LGBT civil rights, HIV/AIDS, and gay men’s health. He is credited with having ruptured the conventional wisdom in HIV/AIDS prevention among gay men by launching an international debate regarding sexual health beyond condom use. Out Magazine has listed him among the "Out 100." He wrote, produced, and performed his acclaimed one-man show, The (Bad) Boy Next Door, a second-generation AIDS narrative that toured in a dozen cities in the U.S. He has continued to publish essays, fiction, and journalism and is currently working on a memoir.

Tim Wu is an author, policy advocate and professor at Columbia University, currently serving as Senior Advisor to the United States Federal Trade Commission.  In 2006, he was recognized as one of fifty leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine, and in the following year, 01238 magazine listed him as one of Harvard’s one hundred most influential graduates. He writes for Slate, where he won the Lowell Thomas gold medal for travel journalism, and he has contributed to The New Yorker, Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Forbes.

Madeleine Brand is the host of KCRW’s award-winning Press Play, a show she created to bring a distinct, Southern California lens to news and culture. Madeleine has been a journalist for 25 years, primarily in public radio. She worked at NPR for 13 years in Los Angeles, New York and Washington. She’s won numerous awards for her hosting and reporting. Madeleine has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree with honors in English from UC Berkeley.

Ericka Huggins is an educator, Black Panther Party member, former political prisoner, ally, and poet. For 35 years, Ericka Huggins has lectured in the United States and internationally, Restorative Justice practices and the role of spiritual practice in creating social change. In 2016, in recognition of the 50th Anniversary of the Black Panther Party, Ericka speaks about the importance of inclusive grassroots movements. Ericka was a professor of Sociology and African American Studies from 2011 through 2015 in the Peralta Community College District. At Merritt College, home of the Black Panther Party, she co-created and taught a course, “The Black Panther Party-Strategies for Organizing The People”.

In the summer of 1969, Phyllis J. Jackson dropped out of college and joined the Black Panther Party at the National Headquarters in Berkeley, California. Today, she is an associate professor of art history at Pomona College, specializing in the arts and cinema of Africa and the African diaspora. Dr. Jackson continues the BPP legacy of “Each One, Teach One” by offering mind-decolonizing courses, such as Black Aesthetics and the Politics of Representation, Whiteness: Race, Sex, and Representation, Black Women, Feminism(s) and Social Change, or Cinema Against War, Imperialism and Corporate Power. She co-directed the 1996 documentary Comrade Sister: Voices of Women in the Black Panther Party and is working on a book entitled AutoBiography of an Image: A Black Woman’s Journey Through the Visual Landscape.

Norma (Armour) Mtume, M.H.S, M.A. M.F.T., served as Minister of Health and later as the Minister of Finance in the Black Panther Party. She is a native Angeleno, recently retired Co-founder, and Chief Financial and Operations Officer for SHIELDS for Families, a 24-year-old social-service nonprofit serving families in South Los Angeles. Mtume co-founded two other social service agencies and three free community clinics during her career. She is currently a part-time Instructor in the College of Medicine at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles.

Melina Abdullah is Professor and Chair of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and immediate past campus president and current Council for Affirmative Action Chair for the California Faculty Association (the faculty union). Dr. Abdullah earned her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in Political Science and her B.A. from Howard University in African-American Studies. She was appointed to the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission in 2014 and is a recognized expert on race relations. She is an organizer at the Los Angeles branch of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Bryan Shih is a photojournalist and former contributor to the Financial Times and National Public Radio in Japan. His work on the Panthers led to his selection for the New York Times inaugural portfolio review in 2013 and garnered him one of the highest rankings among entries in the LensCulture 2015 Portrait Awards competition. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Japan and is a graduate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he completed an audio-visual thesis on “Islamic Converts in Prison.”

Ben Ehrenreich is the author of one book of journalism, The Way to the Spring; two novels, Ether and The Suitors; and many articles, stories, and essays. He lives in Los Angeles.

Amy Wilentz is the author of Farewell Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti, The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier, Martyrs’ Crossing, and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger. She is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, and also was a 1990 nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2014, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Farewell, Fred Voodoo. She has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, Thompson-Reuters magazine, The New Republic, The Village Voice, and many other publications. She teaches in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California at Irvine, and lives in Los Angeles.

Maxine Hong Kingston is Senior Lecturer for Creative Writing at the University of California, Berkeley. For her memoirs and fiction, The Fifth Book of Peace, The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, and Hawai’i One Summer, she has earned numerous awards, among them the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the title of “Living Treasure of Hawai’i.” In July 2014, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama.

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. His stories have appeared in Best New American Voices, TriQuarterly, Narrative, and the Chicago Tribune and he is the author of the academic book Race and Resistance. His first novel, The Sympathizer won the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. His nonfiction book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War will be published in April 2016. He teaches English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

William Finnegan is the author of Cold New World, A Complicated War, Dateline Soweto, and Crossing the Line. He has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist and has won numerous journalism awards, including two Overseas Press Club awards since 2009. A staff writer at the New Yorker since 1987, he lives in Manhattan.

David Rensin has written or co-written 17 books, seven of them NY Times bestsellers. They include All for a Few Perfect Waves, an oral/narrative biography of rebel surfing icon Miki Dora; The Mailroom, an oral history of what it’s like to start at the bottom dreaming of the top in Hollywood; and Devil at My Heels, the autobiography of WWII/Olympian Louis Zamperini. He lives and surfs in Ventura, California.

Adam Hochschild is the author of seven books. King Leopold’s Ghost was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as was his recent To End All Wars. Bury the Chains was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN Center USA Literary Award.

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.

Dr. Baz Dreisinger is: professor, journalist, justice worker, film and radio producer, cultural critic and prison-rights activist. As a journalist and critic, Dr. Dreisinger writes about Caribbean culture, race-related issues, travel, music and pop culture for such outlets as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and ForbesLife, and produces on-air segments about music and global culture for National Public Radio. Together with filmmaker Peter Spirer, Professor Dreisinger produced and wrote the documentaries Black & Blue: Legends of the Hip-Hop Cop which investigates the New York Police Department’s monitoring of the hip-hop industry, and Rhyme & Punishment about hip-hop and the prison industrial complex. She is the author of Near Black: White to Black Passing in American Culture (2008) and, in 2016, Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World.

Scott Budnick is the Founder and President of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition. He grew up in Atlanta, GA, and graduated from Emory University in 1999 with degrees in Business and Film. Formerly the Executive Vice President of Todd Phillips’ production company, Green Hat Films, Scott executive produced many successful comedies including the highest grossing rated-R comedies in history, The Hangover series. Outside of film, Scott is a fierce champion for children in need. Scott is a teacher and serves on the Board for InsideOUT Writers, an organization that aims to reduce juvenile recidivism through the use of creative writing and by providing a range of services to meet the needs of currently and formerly incarcerated young adults. Scott also serves on the Board of the Los Angeles Conservation Corps and on the Advisory Board for the Loyola Law School Center for Juvenile Law and Policy. For his work with youth in the criminal justice system, Governor Jerry Brown named Scott California’s Volunteer of the Year for 2012. Scott currently sits on the Board of State and Community Corrections (BSCC) and the Governor-appointed Community Colleges Board of Governors. Most recently, Scott was selected to be a Board Member of President Obama’s newly created foundation, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance.

Ellen R. Malcolm is the founder of EMILY’s List and has helped level the political playing field for women candidates, given women donors unprecedented influence in electoral politics, brought millions of women voters to the polls; and created a powerful movement dedicated to restoring progressive values to the American government.

Ann Friedman is a freelance journalist who writes about gender, politics, technology, and culture. She is a columnist for New York magazine’s website, and her work appears regularly in The Guardian, The New York Times, ELLE, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Republic. She also co-hosts the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, makes hand-drawn pie charts, and sends a popular weekly email newsletter.

Roberta Kaplan is a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and is litigating the case against Mississippi’s gay marriage ban. She lives in New York with her wife and son.

Lillian Faderman is an internationally known scholar of lesbian history and literature, as well as ethnic history and literature. Among her many honors are six Lambda Literary Awards, two American Library Association Awards, and several lifetime achievement awards for scholarship. She is the author of The Gay Revolution and the New York Times Notable Books, Surpassing the Love of Men and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers.