Jeanne Theoharis is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She is the author of numerous books and articles on the civil rights and Black Power movements, the politics of race and education, social welfare, and civil rights in post-9/11 America. Her newest book is The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.

Ericka Huggins is a former Black Panther Party member, political prisoner, human rights activist, poet, and teacher. She has lectured throughout the United States on the restoration of human rights, whole-child education, family reunification, restorative justice, and the role of spiritual practice in sustaining activism and promoting social change. She teaches relaxation and resiliency skills for educators and youth in elementary and secondary schools, as well as juvenile and adult prisons and jails, and is currently a professor of sociology at Laney College in Oakland, California.

Robin D. G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. His books include the prize-winning Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America; Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labors Last Century, written collaboratively with Dana Frank and Howard Zinn; and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. His most recent book is Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times.

Evelyn McDonnell is the author and co-editor of five books, including Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids and Rock ‘n’ Roll. She has worked as a pop music critic for the Miami Herald and as senior editor for the Village Voice. She’s won several awards, including an Annenberg Fellowship at USC and first place for enterprise by the South Florida Black Journalists Association. She is currently a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University.

Exene Cervenka is an American singer, songwriter, artist, and activist. Shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 1977, Exene met John Doe at a poetry workshop at Beyond Baroque. Together with guitarist Billy Zoom, they formed the seminal Los Angeles punk band, X. To this day, X continues to play nationally and internationally with all four original members: Cervenka, Doe, Zoom, and drummer D.J. Bonebrake. Over the years, Exene has published poetry, prose, and art books; exhibited her collages in museums and galleries; recorded and toured with her other bands; played solo shows with an acoustic guitar and her songs; and said "yes" to just about every insane, imaginative, worthwhile project other thinking humans have offered her.

Allison Wolfe formed the all-girl punk band Bratmobile with the intention of helping to create and expand a feminist music scene spearheaded by Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill. This feminist, DIY (do-it-yourself) music scene, soon to be coined "riot grrrl," had a goal of making the punk rock scene more feminist while simultaneously making academic feminism more "punk." Later recognized as a strain of third-wave feminism, riot grrrl spread throughout the 1990s, mostly in the US and UK, as a loose network of young, feminist, alternative music scene women who believed in fighting the power with cultural activism. After the demise of Bratmobile and riot grrrl, Allison continued to be active in bands such as Cold Cold Hearts, Deep Lust, Partyline, and Cool Moms. In 1999-2000, she also initiated Ladyfest, a non-profit, DIY feminist music festival. Allison currently resides in Los Angeles, where she is working on an oral history of riot grrrl book/film project.

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist who left her native country at the age of 17 to study art in the United States. She graduated from UC Berkeley in 1982. Upon returning to her country as an adult, Neshat encountered a reality far from the one of her memory. This discord inspired meditations on memory, loss, and contemporary life in Iran that are central to her work. Her video and installation works explore the political and social conditions of Iranian and Muslim life, particularly focusing on women and feminist issues. Neshat's many awards include: the First International Prize, Venice Biennale (1999); Edinburgh International Film Festival (2000); International Center of Photography (2002); and the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005).

Christy MacLear is the Founding Executive Director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, which fosters the legacy of Rauschenberg's life, work, and philosophy that art can change the world. MacLear's career is defined by projects that intersect business strategy and culture. She was the inaugural Executive Director of the Philip Johnson Glass House; directed the Museum Campus in Chicago that created a lakefront park; and managed strategic planning for the Walt Disney Company's new town, Celebration.

Albie Sachs’ career in human rights activism started at the age of seventeen when as a second-year law student at the University of Cape Town, he took part in the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign. He started practice as an advocate at the Cape Bar at age 21. The bulk of his work involved defending people charged under racist statutes and repressive security laws. Many faced the death sentence. He himself was raided by the security police, subjected to banning orders restricting his movement, and eventually placed in solitary confinement without trial for two prolonged spells of detention.

In 1966, he went into exile, first studying and teaching law in England, then working in Mozambique as a law professor and legal researcher. In 1988 his car was blown up by a bomb by South African security agents, and he lost an arm and sight in one eye. After recovering from the bomb, he devoted himself full-time to preparations for a new democratic Constitution for South Africa. In 1990 he returned home and, as a member of the Constitutional Committee and the National Executive of the African National Congress, took an active part in the negotiations, which led to South Africa becoming a constitutional democracy. After the first democratic election in 1994, he was appointed by President Nelson Mandela to serve on the newly established Constitutional Court.

Renee Montagne is co-host of NPR's Morning Edition, the most widely heard radio news program in the U.S. She has hosted the news magazine since 2004, broadcasting from NPR West in Culver City, California. She hosted All Things Considered with Robert Siegel for two years in the late 1980s, and previously worked for NPR's Science, National, and Foreign desks.

Montage has traveled the world widely, covering stories in Afghanistan and the Vatican. In 1990, she traveled to South Africa to cover Nelson Mandela's release from prison and continued to report from South Africa for three years. In 1994, she and a team of NPR reporters won a prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of South Africa's historic presidential and parliamentary elections.

Joe Sacco's acclaimed books include Palestine, which was serialized as a comic book from 1993 to 1995, the first collection of which won an American Book Award in 1996 Safe Area Gorazde, and Footnotes in Gaza, as well as a best-selling collaboration with Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.

Gene Luen Yang began drawing comic books in the fifth grade. He was an established figure in the indie comics scene when he published his first book with graphic novel publisher First Second, American Born Chinese, which is now in print in over ten languages. Yang won the Printz Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His latest book is the graphic novel diptych Boxers & Saints.

Charles Hatfield, Professor of English at California State University, Northridge, teaches comics, children's literature, media, and cultural studies. He is the author of Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby and Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature and co-editor of the newly released The Superhero Reader.

Goli Taraghi is an Iranian-born, U.S.-educated author who returned to Tehran to study and work in international relations and, later, to teach philosophy. Her work is inspired by growing up in the privileged, old-money neighborhood of Shemiran in Tehran and later, as an exile in Paris and various visits to post-revolution Tehran. Taraghi has been honored as a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in France and has won the Bita Prize for Literature and Freedom, given by Stanford University in 2009. She is included in Reza Aslan’s anthology of modern literature from the Middle East, Tablet & Pen; in the anthology Words Without Borders: The World through the Eyes of Writers; and in the PEN anthology of contemporary Iranian Literature edited by Nahid Mozaffari, Strange Times, My Dear. She is a bestselling author in Iran, where her books are often censored.

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.

Louise Steinman is the curator of the award-winning ALOUD series and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC. She is the author of three books: The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War; The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance; and The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation. She was a recent fellow at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, FL. Her work appears, most recently, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, and on her Crooked Mirror blog.

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, at 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.

Alan Weisman is the author of several books, including The World Without Us- an international bestseller translated into 34 languages, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Wenjin Book Prize of the National Library of China. His work has been selected for many anthologies, including Best American Science Writing. An award-winning journalist, his reports have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Discover, Vanity Fair, Wilson Quarterly, Mother Jones, and Orion, and on NPR. A former contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine, he is a senior radio producer for Homelands Productions.

Ursula K. Heise is a Professor in the Department of English at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, and a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. She served as President of ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) in 2011. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature, environmental culture in the Americas, Western Europe, and Japan, literature and science, globalization theory, and media theory. Her books include Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, and Nach der Natur: Das Artensterben und die moderne Kultur (After Nature: Species Extinction and Modern Culture.) She is currently finishing a book called Where the Wild Things Used to Be: Narrative, Database, and Endangered Species.

Randall Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and is a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. The author of six books, he won the Robert F. Kennedy book award for Race, Crime and the Law. A member of the bars of the Supreme Court of the United States and the District of Columbia, a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Kennedy is also a Charter Trustee of Princeton University.

Erwin Chemerinsky is the founding dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law. He has authored seven books and more than 200 law-review articles. He has argued several cases before the Supreme Court and various circuits of the United States Court of Appeals.

Eve Ensler is an internationally bestselling author and an award-winning playwright whose theatrical works include The Vagina Monologues, Necessary Targets, and The Good Body. She is the author of Insecure at Last, a political memoir, and I Am an Emotional Creature. Ensler is the founder of V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised over $90 million for local groups and activists and inspired the global action "One Billion Rising."

Jody Williams, who received the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for her work to ban landmines, is the founding chair of the Nobel Women’s Initiative, launched in January 2006. She is the recipient of fifteen honorary degrees and was named one of the hundred most powerful women in the world in 2004 by Forbes. She is a Campaign Ambassador for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which she helped found in 1992. Williams holds the Sam and Cele Keeper Endowed Professorship in Peace and Social Justice at the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston. In 2012–13, she became the inaugural Jane Addams Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Social Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Pat Mitchell is one of media's most accomplished professionals. From network correspondent to producing award-winning documentaries as an executive in charge of original productions for Ted Turner’s cable networks, she was named Newsweek's 150 Women Who Shake the World and has been recognized with 44 Emmy awards, five Peabody’s, and two Academy Award nominations. Mitchell became the first women President/CEO of PBS and is currently President/CEO of The Paley Center for Media, whose mission is to optimize the power of media to inform, inspire, entertain, and empower. Mitchell is a sought-after speaker and has been honored numerous times for her achievements. She serves on many non-profit and corporate boards