Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and novelist. He is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller Deep Down Dark, as well as The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation, and The Tattooed Soldier. His new book is Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”. Héctor is also a contributing writer for the New York Times opinion pages and an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine. He’s written for The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times and other publications. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, L.A. Noir, Zyzzyva, and Slate. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his family.

Carribean Fragoza is a fiction and nonfiction writer from South El Monte, CA. Her collection of stories Eat the Mouth That Feeds You was published in 2021 by City Lights and was a finalist for a 2022 PEN Award. Her co-edited compilation of essays, East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, was published by Rutgers University Press, and her collection of essays Writing Home: New Terrains of California is forthcoming with Angel City Press. She has published in Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times, Zyzzyva, Alta, BOMB, Huizache, KCET, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtNews, and Aperture Magazine. She is the Prose Editor at Huizache Magazine and Creative Nonfiction and Poetry Editor at Boom California, a journal of UC Press. Fragoza is the founder and co-director of South El Monte Arts Posse, an interdisciplinary arts collective. She is a 2023 Whiting Literary Award recipient.

Salman Rushdie is the author of twelve novels— including Midnight’s Children (Booker Prize, Best of the Booker), The Satanic Verses, and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights—and one collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published nonfiction: Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line, and co-edited the anthologies Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of American PEN, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a novelist. He is the author of The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation, The Tattooed Soldier, and most recently, his book on the Chilean Miners, Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a novelist. He is the author of The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation, and The Tattooed Soldier. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Jesse Katz is the author of The Opposite Field, a memoir set in the immigrant suburb of Monterey Park. As a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, Jesse shared in two Pulitzer Prizes—for coverage of the 1994 Northridge earthquake and the 1992 L.A. riots. As a senior editor at Los Angeles magazine, he received the PEN Center USA’s award for literary journalism and the James Beard Foundation’s M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. RatPac Entertainment is producing a movie based on Jesse’s most recent story, "Escape from Cuba: Yasiel Puig’s Untold Journey to the Dodgers."

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.

Ben Ehrenreich is the author of two novels, Ether and The Suitors and many articles, stories, and essays. He notes Bolaño as having influenced him as a writer.

Barbara Kennedy Epler is editor-in-chief, president and publisher of New Directions, an independent publisher founded in 1936. Among her many responsibilities are acquiring new authors, such as W.G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño, as well as other great writers like Laszlo Krasnahorkhai, Victor Pelevin, Inger Christensen, Yoel Hoffmann, Yoko Tawada,  and Javier Marías. New Directions publishes about 40 new books a year and maintains more than 1,000 titles on their backlist, publishing a great deal of fiction and poetry in translation as well as American experimental poets.

Mónica Maristain is an editor, journalist, and writer. She was born in Argentina and has lived in Mexico for the past 13 years. She has written for numerous national and international publications, including the Argentine magazines Clarín, Página 12 and La Nación, as well as Playboy. In 2010 she contributed to the anthology I’ll Write It Tomorrow: Authors of the 60s and published Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. The interview is included in New Direction’s posthumous publication (Roberto Bolaño) Between Parenthesis. Maristain is the author of the Bolaño biography El Hijo de Mister Playa: Uma semblanza de Roberto Bolaño.

David Shook studied endangered languages in Oklahoma and poetry at Oxford. His debut poetry collection, Our Obsidian Tongues, explores the multiplicity of voices that inhabit Mexico City. His many translations include Roberto Bolaño’s Infrarealist manifesto, Mario Bellatin’s novellas, and Víctor Terán’s poetry from the Isthmus Zapotec. He served as Translator in Residence for the Poetry Parnassus, where he premiered his poetry documentary Kilómetro Cero, covertly filmed in Equatorial Guinea. Shook grew up in Mexico City but now lives in Los Angeles, where he edits Molossus and Phoneme Books.

Héctor Tobar has 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 novel about the story of the Chilean miners is forthcoming.  The son of Guatemalan immigrants, Tobar is a native of the city of Los Angeles.

L.A. native Richard Montoya is an actor, director, and member of the Latino/Chicano comedy troupe, Culture Clash. Culture Clash was founded in Los Angeles in 1984 and is still an active troupe. Montoya‘s work is often a reflection on issues of race and cultural identity; he is interested in the “multicultural experiment.”

Myriam Gurba is the author of the Edmund White Award-winning novella and short story collection Dahlia Season and the chapbook Wish You Were Me. Gurba's writing appears in anthologies published by City Lights, Seal, and other fine presses. In 2011, Gurba toured with the lezzendary (legendarily lesbian) literary roadshow Sister Spit. She is not above striking Faustian deals as long as they firmly place her in the same tax bracket as Warren Buffett. She teaches remedial high school classes in Long Beach and is the kind of teacher kids trust enough to ask for a tampon.

Erin Aubry Kaplan is a journalist and essayist who was born and raised in Los Angeles. She has been a staff writer at the LA Weekly and a weekly opinion columnist for the L.A. Times, the first African American opinion columnist in the paper's history. She has contributed to many publications, including Salon.com, Essence, Oxford American and Ms. Magazine. A collection of her journalism and essays, Black Talk, Blue Thoughts and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches from a Black Journalista, was published in 2011. She teaches nonfiction in the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles.

Philip Littell has written a lot of words that have been set to music, collaborating with a veritable roll-call of classical composers: Previn, Susa, Kernis, Tork, and many more. Meanwhile he has been producing work for the less legitimate musical theater with collaborator Eliot Douglass (No Miracle: A Consolation, The Night Market, The Wandering Whore), and Libby Larsen (Billy The Kid And What He Did), has translated Moliere and Feydeau, and clowned in cabaret and sung in clubs, while continuing to work as an actor. He has two epic/historical travesty plays in hand and ready to go.

Héctor Tobar has 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 currently writes a weekly column for the paper and is the author of three books, Translation Nation, The Tattooed Soldier, and most recently, The Barbarian Nurseries. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of the city of Los Angeles.

Besides teaching writing and theatre, Brenda Varda is the founder of Wordspace in Los Angeles, a cultural hub for writers in all genres. Wordspace creates workshops and development opportunities that allow writers to experiment and connect with new audiences. In creating her own works for the theatre (Unknown, The Met, Sacred Fools, UCIRA), Varda looks to create narratives that reframe contemporary identities while still providing reference to common cultural experiences. Her MFA thesis work, Fables du Theatre, a fantasy of three theatrical fables produced in collaboration with a fictional theatre company (Immanence Theatre Ensemble), was produced at Unknown Theatre in 2008 and nominated for an LA Weekly Award.

Alie Ward is a former writer for the LA Times and columnist for the LA Weekly, and now covers cocktails for KCET and CookingChanneltv.com. She's the co-creator and co-host for Cooking Channel's Classy Ladies with Alie & Georgia as well as an on-camera contributor to Cooking Channel's Unique Sweets. She tells stories around town at Upright Citizens Brigade, The Meltdown and Public School and after 13 years in Los Angeles she knows to wear SPF 70 -- and take Fountain.

Héctor Tobar has 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 currently writes a weekly column for the paper and is the author of three books, Translation Nation, The Tattooed Soldier, and, most recently, The Barbarian Nurseries. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of the city of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Jesse Katz is the author of The Opposite Field, a memoir set in the immigrant suburb of Monterey Park. As a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, Jesse shared in two Pulitzer Prizes­-for coverage of the 1994 Northridge earthquake and the 1992 L.A. riots-and was named a Pulitzer finalist for his stories about street gangs. As a senior editor at Los Angeles magazine, he received the PEN Center USA's award for literary journalism. Jesse teaches literary journalism at the University of California, Irvine, and has mentored incarcerated teenagers as a volunteer with InsideOut Writers.