Jessica Jackley is an entrepreneur focused on financial inclusion, the sharing economy, and social justice. She is best known as a co-founder of Kiva, the world’s first and largest micro-lending website. She is also a co-founder of ProFounder, a pioneering crowdfunding platform for U.S. entrepreneurs, and Kin & Co. consulting group, helping organizations support women and working families. Jessica is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and an active board member for several nonprofit organizations, including Habitat for Humanity. She lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband, Reza Aslan, and their three sons.

Larissa MacFarquhar has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. Her subjects have included John Ashbery, Barack Obama, and Noam Chomsky, among many others. Previously she was a senior editor at Lingua Franca and an advisory editor at The Paris Review. She lives in New York.

Alex Cohen is co-host of KPCC’s Take Two show. Prior to that, she was the host of KPCC’s All Things Considered. She has also hosted and reported for NPR programs, including Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Day to Day 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. Alex is also the author of Down and Derby: The Insider’s Guide to Roller Derby.

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.

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."

Diane Ackerman, poet, essayist, and naturalist, has been the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in addition to many other awards for her work, which includes the best-selling The Zookeeper’s Wife and A Natural History of the Senses. Her memoir One Hundred Words for Love was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has hosted the PBS series Mystery of the Senses and has the rare distinction of having a molecule named after her—dianeackerone— a pheromone in crocodilians.

Dr. Amy Parish is a biological anthropologist, primatologist, and Darwinian feminist, who has conducted ground-breaking research on patterns of female dominance and matriarchal social structure in one of our closest living relatives, the bonobo. Formerly a professor at the University of Southern California, she is now affiliated with faculty at Georgetown University and a research associate at University College London. Parish is currently working on a book about love, marriage, and the experience of being a wife.

Mark Essen, game designer and native Angeleno, holds a MFA from UCLA's Design and Media Arts program. His work has been exhibited at FILE in Sao Paulo, the New Museum in New York, MoCCA in Toronto, FACT, [DAM] Berlin, and Vice/Intel's international Creators Project.

Tracy Fullerton, experimental game designer, is professor and director of the Game Innovation Lab at the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she holds the Electronic Arts Endowed Chair in Interactive Entertainment. The Game Innovation Lab is a design research center that has produced several influential independent games, including Cloud, flOw, Darfur is Dying, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, and The Night Journey -- a collaboration with media artist Bill Viola. Tracy is also the author of Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games.

Sam Roberts has worked as a creative director in the entertainment industry for 10 years. He has directed, designed, written, and produced digital and live entertainment and events. For over five years, he has organized and directed the IndieCade Festival of Independent Games. He now also serves as the Assistant Director of the Interactive Media Division at USC, where he continues to work to promote the medium of games and the next generation of talented gamemakers.

Gail Collins, the best-selling author of When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, is a national columnist for the New York Times. Her latest book is As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda. She lives in New York City.

Anne Taylor Fleming is a nationally recognized commentator, writer, and longtime essayist for the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, and Los Angeles Magazine where she writes a monthly column. Fleming is the associate director of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, and the author of three books: Motherhood Deferred, Marriage: A Duet and As If Love Were Enough. She has also won numerous awards for her TV essays.

Eli Broad is a renowned business leader who built two Fortune 500 companies from the ground up over a five decade career in business. He is the founder of both SunAmerica Inc. and KB Home (formerly Kaufman and Broad Home Corporation). Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe, are devoted to philanthropy as founders of The Broad Foundations, which they established to advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science and the arts. Over the past four decades, the Broads have built two of the most prominent collections of postwar and contemporary art worldwide: The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection and The Broad Art Foundation.

Jim Newton is a veteran journalist who began his career as 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.

Joyce Appleby, professor emerita at University of California, Los Angeles, has long taken an interest in bringing history to a larger public. Past president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society for the History of the Early Republic, she has thought deeply about the complex relationship of the American public with the country's professional historians. As co-director of the History News Service, she now facilitates historians' writing op-ed essays for newspapers which embed contemporary issues in their relevant histories. Before becoming a professional historian, she worked on Mademoiselle magazine and the Pasadena Star-News.

Peter Barnes, entrepreneur and writer, is currently a senior fellow at the Tomales Bay Institute in Point Reyes Station, California. In 1976 he co-founded a worker-owned solar energy company in San Francisco, and in 1983 he co- founded Working Assets Money Fund. He subsequently served as president of Working Assets Long Distance. In 1995 he was named Socially Responsible Entrepreneur of the Year for Northern California. Barnes' previous books include Pawns: The Plight of the Citizen-Soldier, The People's Land and Who Owns the Sky? Our Common Assets and the Future of Capitalism. He is also the founder of the Mesa Refuge, a writers' retreat in northern California.