André Gregory has been directing theater in New York for more than half a century. His forty-year collaboration with Wallace Shawn began with his critically acclaimed production of Shawn's Our Late Night, and he has collaborated on film versions of his theater productions with Shawn, Louis Malle, and Jonathan Demme. Gregory, Shawn, and Malle created the now-legendary My Dinner with André. As an actor, Gregory has performed in a dozen films, including The Last Temptation of Christ by Martin Scorsese, and Mosquito Coast by Peter Weir. Gregory is also a writer, a teacher, and a painter—an exhibition of his artwork was staged at Monica King Contemporary in New York City this fall.

Wallace Shawn started writing plays in 1967. His first play to be professionally produced, Our Late Night, was written for André Gregory's company the Manhattan Project. It was directed by Gregory and opened at the Public Theater in 1975. Mr. Shawn's other plays—which include The Fever, The Designated Mourner, and Grasses of a Thousand Colors, among others—have been performed in New York and London. Also with André Gregory, Shawn co-wrote and co-starred in the classic film My Dinner with André, and Mr. Shawn's work as a film actor includes appearances in Manhattan, Radio Days, Clueless, and the Toy Story series. Mr. Shawn's most recent book, Night Thoughts, was just released in paperback.

Sarah Bakewell was a bookseller and a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library before publishing her highly acclaimed biographies The Smart, The English Dane, and the best-selling How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. In addition to writing, she now teaches the Masters of Studies in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, University of Oxford. She lives in London.

David L. Ulin is the author or editor of eight previous books, including The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and the Library of America’s Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the former book critic and book editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels, a critical study of John Berger, and a collection of essays titled Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. Hi has authored six highly original nonfiction books, including the recent Zona and But Beautiful, awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize, and Out of Sheer Rage, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.

Howard A. Rodman is a professor of screenwriting at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, Vice President of the Writers Guild of America, West, and has served as Artistic Director of the Sundance Screenwriting Labs. He wrote the screenplays for the films Savage Grace, August, and Joe Gould’s Secret. Rodman is on the executive committee of the Writers Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and is a Fellow of the Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities.

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.

A. Scott Berg is the author of four previous bestselling biographies, including Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, for which he received the National Book Award; Goldwyn: A Biography; Lindbergh, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and the best-selling biographical memoir of Katharine Hepburn, Kate Remembered.

Jim Newton is a veteran journalist who began his career as a clerk to James Reston at the New York Times. Since then, he has worked as a reporter at the Atlanta Constitution and as a reporter, bureau chief, and editor at the Los Angeles Times, where he presently is the editor at large and the author of a weekly column. He is also an educator and author of two biographical books, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made, and most recently, Eisenhower: The White House Years.

Diego Luna is a renowned film, television, and stage actor who has participated in over 30 films, including the award-winning Y Tu Mamá También. Luna has been a professional actor since he was seven years old and recently made his directorial debut with the documentary J.C. Chávez, followed by the fictional film Abel. His latest feature as a director is Chavez, based on the life of legendary farm worker and union leader, Cesar E. Chavez.

NPR correspondent Mandalit del Barco has reported and produced radio stories and photographed everything from street gangs to Hollywood, police and prisons, marijuana, immigration, natural disasters, arts, and urban street culture (including hip hop dance, music, and art). Every year, she covers the Oscars and the Grammy awards for NPR. Her news reports, feature stories, and photos filed from Los Angeles and abroad can be heard on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, alt.latino and npr.org

Jodi Kantor is a Washington correspondent at the New York Times. She was also Arts & Leisure editor of the newspaper, the New York editor at Slate, and one of Crain's "40 Under 40" rising stars. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Adam Nagourney has been the Los Angeles Bureau Chief for the New York Times since August 2010. He served for eight years before that as the paper's chief national political correspondent, based in Washington DC. He is the author, with Dudley Clendinen, of Out For Good, a history of the modern gay political movement.

Terry Teachout is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the chief culture critic of Commentary. He played jazz professionally before becoming a full-time writer. His books include All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, and A Terry Teachout Reader.

Tracy Kidder graduated from Harvard and studied at the University of Iowa. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, and many other literary prizes. The author of Mountains Beyond Mountains, My Detachment, Home Town, Old Friends, Among Schoolchildren, House, and The Soul of a New Machine, Kidder lives in Massachusetts and Maine.

Christos H. Papadimitriou was born and grew up in Greece. He studied electrical engineering at the National Technical University, Athens, and then was awarded a Ph.D. in computer science, from Princeton. After teaching at Harvard, MIT and Stanford, he now holds the Lester C. Hogan Chair at the University of California at Berkeley. Christos's research work is in the theory of algorithms, computational complexity and game theory, fields in which he is one of the leading international experts. He has published over three hundred original articles in leading scientific journals, which have received, to date, over twenty-five thousand citations. His books, Elements of the Theory of Computation, Computational Complexity and Combinatorial Optimization: Algorithms and Complexity, are the standard textbooks in their fields, while his first novel, Turing, was published in 2003 by MIT Press. Christos is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering of the USA, and has been awarded numerous honorary doctorates and other distinctions, among them the prestigious Charles Babbage Prize. He also plays the keyboards in a rock band.