Cynthia Hawkins is the owner of Hawkins House of Burgers in Watts, where her commitment to serving "only the best" fresh ingredients for decades has led her restaurant to be celebrated as one of the best burger joints in the U.S. Cynthia is the youngest in a family of successful entrepreneurs and grew up helping her parents manage their "50s style" malt shop, later converted to Slater Market- a neighborhood grocery store- before taking over the space and reinventing it as Hawkins House of Burgers. Cynthia’s restaurant has been featured on the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods and has received rave reviews from Los Angeles Magazine, LA Weekly 99 Essential Restaurants, Zagat, LAist, and Ask Men, among others.

Ricardo Jordan Diaz is the Chef and Founder of Colonia Restaurant Group. Diaz grew up in the restaurant business, and at the age of nine, he was already washing dishes every weekend at his family’s Mexican seafood chain “El 7 Mares”. After opening a number of family locations, he set out on his own to recreate the Latin dining experience. Starting with a few Dorados restaurants in the late nineties, Diaz went on to found Cook’s Tortas in 2007, Guisados in 2010, Bizarra Capital in 2012, Colonia Taco Lounge in 2013, Colonia Publica in 2014 and become Executive Chef of Santa Monica’s Tacoteca that same year. His goal is to expose patrons to the wonderful variety and extensive ingredients that Latin cuisine offers in its home countries.

Josh Kun is a professor in the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. He is the author of the new book To Live and Dine in L.A.: Menus and the Making of the Modern City(Angel City Press) based on the special collections of the Los Angeles Public Library. His first collaboration with the Library was Songs in the Key of Los Angeles, an examination of the early sheet music of the city that resulted in an award-winning book, as well as new recordings, public concerts, and an online web series with KCET Artbound. He is also the author of the American Book Award-winning Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America, co-author of And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Our Vinyl, and co-editor of Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border, among other volumes.

Winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, Joseph E. Stiglitz is the best-selling author of Making Globalization Work, Globalization and Its Discontents, and The Three Trillion Dollar War, co-authored with Linda Bilmes. He was chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and served as senior vice president and chief economist at the World Bank. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Jim Newton is a veteran journalist, author, and educator. He began his career as a clerk to James Reston at The New York Times and spent 25 years as a reporter, bureau chief, columnist, and editor at the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of two critically acclaimed biographies, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made and Eisenhower: The White House Years. Last year, he collaborated with former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on Panetta's autobiography, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace. He is presently creating a new magazine at UCLA scheduled to debut this spring.

Jennifer Clement has studied literature in New York and Paris. Among many honors for her work, the internationally acclaimed novel Prayers for the Stolen was awarded the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) Fellowship for Literature as well as the Sara Curry Humanitarian Award. She is also the author of the memoir Widow Basquiat and the novels A True Story Based on Lies, a finalist for the Orange Prize, and The Poison That Fascinates, as well as several books of poetry. Clement’s work has been translated into twenty languages. She lives in Mexico City and was President of PEN Mexico from 2009 to 2012.

Magdalena Edwards is a writer based in Los Angeles and born in Santiago, Chile. Her essays and lyrical experiments have appeared recently in The Millions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review Daily. Her work as a staff writer for Chile's leading newspaper El Mercurio led to graduate studies at UCLA in Comparative Literature, with an emphasis on twentieth-century poet-translators from the Americas, including Elizabeth Bishop, Octavio Paz, and Manuel Bandeira. Edwards occasionally translates poetry and prose from Spanish and Portuguese, and she is an editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is working on a book about love.

Winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, Joseph E. Stiglitz is the best-selling author of Making Globalization Work, Globalization and Its Discontents, and The Three Trillion Dollar War, co-authored with Linda Bilmes. He was chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and served as senior vice president and chief economist at the World Bank. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Jim Newtonis a veteran journalist, author, and educator. He began his career as a clerk to James Reston at The New York Times and spent 25 years as a reporter, bureau chief, columnist, and editor at the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of two critically acclaimed biographies, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made and Eisenhower: The White House Years. Last year, he collaborated with former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on Panetta's autobiography, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace. He is presently creating a new magazine at UCLA scheduled to debut this spring.

Sandy Tolan is the author of Me & Hank and The Lemon Tree. As co-founder of Homelands Productions, Tolan has produced dozens of radio documentaries for NPR and PRI. He has also written for more than forty magazines and newspapers. His work has won numerous awards, and he was a 1993 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and an I. F. Stone Fellow at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He is an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Kelly McEvers is a national correspondent based at NPR West. She previously ran NPR's Beirut bureau, where she earned many awards, including a George Foster Peabody award, for her 2012 coverage of the Syrian conflict. She recently made a radio documentary about being a war correspondent with renowned radio producer Jay Allison of Transom.org. In 2008 and 2009, McEvers was part of a team that produced the award-winning Working series for American Public Media's business and finance show Marketplace.

Karima Bennoune is a professor of International Law at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. She is a former legal advisor for Amnesty International. Currently, Bennoune sits on the board of the network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML). She has appeared on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 and made frequent appearances on MSNBC, including on All In With Chris Hayes, after the Paris attacks. Her recent book,Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism, which details local struggles against extremism, is based on 300 interviews with people of Muslim heritage from 30 countries. It won the 2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The related TED talk, “When people of Muslim heritage challenge fundamentalism,” has received over 1.2 million views.

Ani Zonneveld is the founder and President of Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV). Since its inception in 2007, Ani has presided over MPV’s expansion to include chapters and affiliates in the United States and around the world, as well as securing consultative status at the United Nations. She is a strong supporter of women and LGBTQ rights, freedom of expression, and for freedom of and from belief. Ani is the brainchild of Literary Zikr—a project that counters radical Islam online, co-editor of an anthology Progressive Muslim Identities—Personal Stories from the U.S. and Canada, and a contributor for Huffington Postand Open Democracy. Ani performs Islamic wedding services for mixed-faith and gay couples.

Adam Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University, where he founded the Stanford Graphic Novel Project. He is the author of the novel The Orphan Master’s Son, set in North Korea, which was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. His work has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Tin House, Granta, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories. His other works include Emporium, a short-story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us. He lives in San Francisco.

Blaine Harden is the author of Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia and Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West. Africa won a PEN American Center citation for the first book of nonfiction. Escape from Camp 14 was both a New York Times and an international bestseller published in twenty-seven languages. Harden formerly served as The Washington Post’s bureau chief in East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. He lives in Seattle.