Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, is the author, most recently, of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. His first book, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, has been translated into thirteen languages and named by Blackwell as one of the hundred most important books of the last decade. He is also the author of How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization and the End of the War on Terror (published in paperback as Beyond Fundamentalism), as well as the editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. Aslan is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at UC Riverside.

Jack Miles is a Senior Fellow for Religious Affairs with the Pacific Council on International Policy and a Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies the University of California, Irvine. A MacArthur Fellow (2003-2007), Miles won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for God: A Biography, which has since been translated into sixteen languages. He is currently the general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions.

George Packer is a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of two novels and three works of nonfiction including The Assassins' Gate, which will be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in November 2005, and Blood of the Liberals (FSG, 2000), which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is also the editor of the anthology The Fight for Democracy. He lives in Brooklyn.

Mike Shuster is a diplomatic correspondent and roving foreign correspondent for NPR. He is based in NPR's Los Angeles bureau. When he is not traveling outside the U.S., he covers issues of nuclear non-proliferation and weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and the Pacific Rim. Shuster took up his current post in 1994, using New York as a base. He moved to Los Angeles in 2000. In the past two years, he has contributed many reports to NPR's extensive coverage of the Middle East, traveling four times to Israel since September 2000. He has also reported from Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq. Shuster's reports have also focused on India and Pakistan, the Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, and the Congo.

Nathan Englander was born in New York in 1970. His short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Englander’s story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, earned him a PEN/Malamud Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. He lives in New York City.

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in LA. Everywhere else he is an author and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. He writes the award-winning Tommywood column (www.tommywood.com) that appears in The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. Recently he served as American Film and TV editor of the 2nd Edition of The Encyclopedia Judaica.

Miriam Pawel is the author of The Union of Their Dreams, widely acclaimed as the most nuanced history of Cesar Chavez’s movement. She is a Pulitzer-winning editor who spent twenty-five years working for Newsday and the Los Angeles Times. She was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and lives in Southern California.

Luis Valdez is a playwright and founding artistic director of El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Workers’ Theater), the internationally renowned theater company founded on the picket lines of the Delano grape strike in 1965 and still in operation in San Juan Bautista, CA, where it is the longest running Chicano Theater in the United States. Valdez’s involvement with Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the early Chicano Movement left an indelible mark that remained embodied in all his work even after he left the UFW. Valdez’s influential Zoot Suit was the first Chicano play on Broadway. His numerous feature film and television credits include, among others, La Bamba, Cisco Kid, and Corridos: Tales of Passion and Revolution. Valdez is the recipient of countless awards, including the prestigious George Peabody Award for excellence in television, the Presidential Medal of the Arts, the Governor’s Award OF the California Arts Council, and Mexico’s prestigious Aguila Azteca Award given to individuals whose work promotes cultural excellence and exchange between US and Mexico.

Laura Pulido is a Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She researches race, political activism, Chicana/o Studies, critical human geography, and Los Angeles. Pulido has done extensive work in the field of environmental justice, social movements, labor studies, and radical tourism.

Dinaw Mengestu is the award-winning author of two novels,The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air.He is a graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University's M.F.A. program in fiction and the recipient of a 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation and a 20 Under 40 award from The New Yorker. His journalism and fiction have appeared in such publications as Harper's Magazine,Granta, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal. He is a recipient of a 2012 MacArthur Foundation genius grant and currently lives in New York City.

Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco. She is the author of the short story collection Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, and the novel Secret Son. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, the Guardian, the New York Times, and in numerous anthologies. Her work has been translated into ten languages. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship and is currently an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. Her new novel, The Moor’s Account, will be published in 2014.

Shane Bauer is an award-winning investigative journalist and photographer. His articles have appeared in Mother Jones, The Nation, Salon.com, the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and many other publications. In 2013, Shane received the John Jay/Henry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting.

Josh Fattal, a graduate of Berkeley's program in environmental economics and policy, is an activist and organizer focused on sustainable development. Along with Shourd and Bauer, he has spoken at universities, human rights conferences, and private events to share the experience of imprisonment in Iran.

Sarah Shourd is a writer and human rights activist with the organization United4Iran. She is a regular contributor to Huffington Post and has written for the New York Times, CNN.com, Newsweek/Daily Beast, and other publications.

Arun Rath is the new weekend host of All Things Considered. Previously, Rath was a reporter, producer, and editor, most recently as a senior reporter for the PBS series Frontline and The World® on WGBH Boston, where he specialized in national security and military justice. He has produced three films forFrontline, the latest being an investigation of alleged war crimes committed by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq. Rath also reports on culture and music for the PBS series Sound Tracks.

George Packer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, which received several prizes and was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by The New York Times Book Review. He is also the author of two novels, The Half Man and Central Square, and two other works of nonfiction, Blood of the Liberals, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and The Village of Waiting. His play,Betrayed, ran off-Broadway for five months in 2008 and won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play. His most recent book is Interesting Times: Writings from a Turbulent Decade. He lives in Brooklyn.

Héctor Tobar is a novelist who has also worked as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times for nearly twenty years. He shared a Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of the 1992 riots and then served as the national Latino Affairs correspondent, the Buenos Aires bureau chief, and the Mexico City bureau chief. He is currently a book critic for the Los Angeles Times and is the author of three books: Translation Nation, The Tattooed Soldier, and the award-winning The Barbarian Nurseries. His non-fiction book on the story of the Chilean miners, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle that Set Them Free, is forthcoming in the fall of 2014. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, Tobar is a native of the city of Los Angeles.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein received her doctorate in philosophy from Princeton University. Her award-winning books include the novels The Mind-Body Problem, Properties of Light, and Mazel, and nonfiction studies of Kurt Gödel and Baruch Spinoza. She has received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships, and she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. She lives in Massachusetts.

Alex Cohen is co-host of KPCC's Take Two show. Prior to that, she was a host of KPCC's All Things Considered. Before joining Southern California Public Radio, Cohen was a host and reporter for NPR's Day to Day. She's also served as a host and reporter for NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered as well as American Public Media's Marketplace and Weekend America. Prior to that, she was the L.A. Bureau Chief for KQED FM in San Francisco. She has won various journalistic awards, including the LA Press Club’s Best Radio Anchor prize.

Hisham Aidi is a lecturer at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He was a George Soros OSI Fellow, a Carnegie Scholar, and co-editor of Black Routes to Islam with Manning Marable. He has been a columnist for Al Jazeera and also wrote for Africana.com based at Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute. He lives in New York.

Safa Samiezade'-Yazd currently edits the Arts and Culture and Music sections for Aslan Media, an online media source on the Middle East and its global diaspora communities. She has blogged for Care2's Causes and News Network, where she was recognized for her cultural reporting on the Egyptian protests in Tahrir Square. Her writings on resistance art within Middle East conflict and periphery cultures can be found online at Art21 and Reorient Magazine, as well as Deutsche Welle's upcoming anthology Sitting on the Fence: The Role of Media and Conflict. She lives in Denver, Colorado.

Masha Gessen is the author of seven books, including the national bestseller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. Born in Moscow, she emigrated to the United States in her teens, then returned to Russia a decade later. Writing in both Russian and English, she has covered every major development in Russian politics and culture of the past two decades, receiving numerous awards and fellowships in the process. She blogs weekly for The New York Times and has written for The New York Review of Books, International Herald Tribune, The Guardian, andU.S. News & World Report (where she served as Moscow Bureau Chief), and has also edited several Russian magazines. She has recently relocated to New York City.

Suzi Weissmanis a Professor of Politics at Saint Mary’s College of California. She broadcasts the weekly Beneath the Surface with Suzi Weissman program on KPFK Los Angeles. She serves on the editorial boards of Critique and Against the Current, and is the author of Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope, and the editor of Victor Serge: Russia Twenty Years After and The Ideas of Victor Serge.