Santi Elijah Holley is an award-winning journalist and the author of An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created. His writing has appeared in numerous national and international outlets, including The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Time, and The Washington Post. He lives in Los Angeles.

Melina Abdullah is a Professor of Pan-African Studies at Cal State LA, Co-Founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, Director of Black Lives Matter Grassroots, a leader in the California Faculty Association (the faculty union), and mama of three children. Dr. Abdullah earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from USC and her B.A. in African-American Studies from Howard University. Abdullah has authored numerous articles and book chapters and is the creator, host, and producer of the radio programs Move the Crowd on KPFK 90.7 FM and This Is Not a Drill! on KBLA Talk 1580 and is a recognized expert on race, gender, class, and social movements.

Sarah Schulman is the author of more than twenty works of fiction (including The Cosmopolitans, Rat Bohemia, and Maggie Terry), nonfiction (including Stagestruck, Conflict is Not Abuse, and The Gentrification of the Mind), and theater (Carson McCullers, Manic Flight Reaction, and more), and the producer and screenwriter of several feature films (The Owls, Mommy Is Coming, and United in Anger, among others). Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, and many other outlets. She is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the College of Staten Island, a Fellow at the New York Institute of Humanities, the recipient of multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was presented in 2018 with Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award. She is also the co-founder of the MIX New York LGBT Experimental Film and Video Festival, and the co-director of the groundbreaking ACT UP Oral History Project. A lifelong New Yorker, she is a longtime activist for queer rights and female empowerment and serves on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. 

Josh Kun is a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he directs the Popular Music Project of the Norman Lear Center. He is the author or editor of several books, including Audiotopia: Music, Race and America, and his writings on music and culture have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, Los Angeles Magazine, and many other publications. As a curator and consultant, he has worked with The Getty Foundation, the GRAMMY Museum, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Autry Museum, the Skirball Cultural Center, and others.

Tyree Boyd-Pates is a dynamic history curator, professor, writer, and speaker who expounds on Black culture from a millennial vantage and mobilizes communities of color through journalism, social media, education, and history. With his work featured in The New York Times, Vogue, The Hollywood Reporter, Fast Company, Fortune Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and other media outlets, Tyree's groundbreaking history exhibitions have inspired thousands to visit museums and engage with history anew. Additionally, he is a regular lecturer at universities to discuss American history, curation, and museums. Tyree is also a TEDx speaker who champions inner-city youth across the country.

Suyapa Portillo Villeda is Associate Professor of Chicana/o Latina/o Transnational Studies at Pitzer College. Her research and teaching priorities include Central American history, migration to the U.S., gender and labor in Central America, LGBTTI Latina/o populations and queer (im)migration in the Americas. Her work focuses on the intersections between labor, gender, ethnicity, race, and other marginalized identities in workers’ lives in Central America and in the U.S.

Natalia Molina is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of two award-winning books, How Race Is Made in America:  Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts and Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940, as well as co-editor of Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method and Practice. Her work examines the interconnectedness of racial and ethnic communities through her concept of "racial scripts" which looks at how practices, customs, policies and laws that are directed at one group and are readily available and hence easily applied to other groups. She continues to explore the themes of race, space, labor, immigration, gender, and urban history in her forthcoming book Place-Making at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant in Los Angeles Nourished its Community (University of California Press, 2022). Professor Molina is working on a new book, The Silent Hands that Shaped the Huntington: A History of Its Mexican Workers. 

Jelani Cobb is a historian, and a professor of journalism at Columbia University. A staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015, he is a recipient of the Sidney Hillman Award for Opinion and Analysis, as well as fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Fulbright Foundation. He lives in New York City.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault is an acclaimed journalist with more than fifty years’ experience working as a correspondent and contributor for NBC, PBS, NPR, CNN, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and other outlets. She is the author of four nonfiction books, as well as the upcoming My People, which will be published in 2022 by HarperCollins. For her contributions to journalism, Hunter-Gault has earned two National News and Documentary Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards, and the Black Enterprise Legacy Award, among other honors.

Daniel James Brown is the author of The Indifferent Stars Above and Under a Flaming Sky, which was a finalist for the B&N Discover Great New Writers Award, as well as The Boys in the Boat, a New York Times bestselling book that was awarded the ALA’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. He has taught writing at San José State University and Stanford University. He lives outside Seattle.

Tom Ikeda is the founding Executive Director of Densho. Tom is a sansei (third-generation Japanese American) who was born and raised in Seattle. Tom’s parents and grandparents were incarcerated during World War II in Minidoka, Idaho. In addition to leading the organization over the last 24 years, Tom has conducted more than 250 video-recorded, oral history interviews with Japanese Americans. Prior to working at Densho, Tom was a General Manager at Microsoft Corporation in the Multimedia Publishing Group. Tom has received numerous awards for his community and historical contributions, including the Humanities Washington Award for outstanding achievement in the public humanities, the National JACL Japanese American of the Biennium Award, the Microsoft Alumni Integral Fellows Award, the Japanese American National Museum Founder’s Award, and the Robert Gray Medal from the Washington State Historical Society.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin is a Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy. She is also faculty in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Department as well as the Program in Public Health. Professor Goodwin’s scholarship is hailed as “exceptional” in the New England Journal of Medicine. She has been featured in Forbes, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times and her scholarship is published or forthcoming in The Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, and Northwestern Law Review, among others.Trained in sociology and anthropology, she has conducted field research in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, focusing on trafficking in the human body for marriage, sex, organs, and other biologics. In addition to her work on reproductive health, rights, and justice, Professor Goodwin is credited with forging new ways of thinking in organ transplant policy and assisted reproductive technologies, resulting in works such as Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts (2006) and Baby Markets: Money and the Politics of Creating Families (2010). She serves on the executive committee and national board of the American Civil Liberties Union. She is a highly sought-after voice on civil liberties, civil rights, reproductive rights and justice, and cultural politics.

Ruth Colker is one of the leading scholars in the country in the areas of Constitutional Law and Disability Discrimination. She is the author of 16 books, two of which have won book prizes. She has also published more than 50 articles in law journals such as the Boston University Law Review, Columbia Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Journal, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the University of Virginia Law Review, and Yale Law Journal.

Jasmine E. Harris is a Professor of Law and Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall Research Scholar at the University of California—Davis School of Law. Professor Harris is an expert in disability law, antidiscrimination law, and evidence. She is a law and equality scholar with a particular focus on disability. Professor Harris combines approaches in law and the humanities to understand better the role that perception, aesthetics, and emotions play in group subordination. By accounting for aesthetic preferences, she argues, we can better design antidiscrimination laws to address structural biases and develop novel remedial pathways. Professor Harris’s recent articles have or will appear in such publications as the Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review (print and online), Yale Law Journal Forum, Cornell Law Review Online, American Journal of Law and Medicine, and the Journal of Legal Education.

D. J. Waldie is the author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out. His narratives about life in Los Angeles have appeared in Buzz magazine, Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, the Georgetown Review, Salon and Dwell magazine. His book reviews and opinion pieces appear in the Los Angeles Times. He is a contributing writer for Los Angeles magazine. D.J. Waldie lives a not-quite-middle-class life in Lakewood, in the house his parents bought in 1946.

Carolina A. Miranda is a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times where she reports on art and culture. She has also been a reporter for Time magazine and worked as an independent journalist, contributing to outlets such as NPR, ARTnews and Architect. She is a regular contributor for KCRW’s “Press Play” and was the founding co-chair of the Los Angeles Times Guild employee union.

David Kipen was born and raised in Los Angeles. He founded the nonprofit Boyle Heights lending library Libros Schmibros in 2010. Former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts, book editor/critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, and contributor to multiple volumes of California cultural history, Kipen teaches full-time in the UCLA writing program. A familiar voice on public radio, he also serves as book critic for Los Angeles magazine and is critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times.

Andrea Bernstein, who won a Peabody award for her work uncovering abuses of power in the Bridgegate scandal, is the author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power and the co-host of the Trump, Inc. podcast from WNYC and ProPublica.

Kristen Muller, as Southern California Public Radio’s Chief Content Officer, oversees the station’s programming, podcasting, and excellent local journalism. She leads an award-winning team of hosts, reporters, producers, and editors who are dedicated to informing, entertaining, and connecting the diverse communities of LA.

Kwame Anthony Appiah pens the Ethicist column for the New York Times, and is the author of the prize-winning Cosmopolitanism, among many other works. A professor of philosophy and law at New York University, Appiah lives in New York.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby draws on art historical, political, and personal references to create densely layered figurative compositions that, precise in style, nonetheless conjure the complexity of contemporary experience. Akunyili Crosby was born in Nigeria, where she lived until the age of sixteen. In 1999 she moved to the United States, where she currently lives. Her cultural identity combines strong attachments to the country of her birth and to her adopted home, a hybrid identity that is reflected in her work. Crosby is the recipient of a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship and was awarded Financial Times‘ Women of the Year, 2016. Recent solo exhibitions include Front Room: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, The Baltimore Museum of Art, alongside Prospect.4, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, New Orleans. Among her current projects is an outdoor mural for LA MOCA Grand Avenue, which will be on view until December 31, 2018. She lives in Los Angeles.

Erin Christovale is the Assistant Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She is also the curator of Black Radical Imagination with Amir George, which has screened both nationally and internationally in spaces such as MoMA PS1, MOCA Los Angeles, and the Museo Taller José Clemente Orozco. Exhibitions include a/wake in the water: Meditations on Disaster(2014) at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Memoirs of A Watermelon Woman (2016) and A Subtle Likeness (2016) at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, and S/Election: Democracy, Citizenship, Freedom (2016) at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and baby boy(2017) at Transmission Glasgow. She recently organized the 28th anniversary of "Alternative Endings, Radical Beginnings" with Vivian Crockett as part of Visual AIDS project, A Day With(Out) Art and Made in L.A. 2018, the Hammer Museum’s biennial showcasing artists from the greater Los Angeles area with Anne Ellegood.

Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the author of seven books, including Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation. She lives with her family and her animals in upstate New York.

Attica Locke’s latest novel Bluebird, Bluebird won the Edgar Award for best novel and was named a Best of 2017 book by the New York Times. Her other works include the novels Pleasantville, winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction; Black Water Rising, which was nominated for an Edgar Award; and The Cutting Season, a national bestseller and the winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. A former fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmaker’s Lab, Locke has worked as a screenwriter as well. Most recently, she was a writer and producer on the Fox drama Empire and worked with Ava Duvernay on the Netflix project em>Central Park Five. She is currently developing Bluebird, Bluebird into a TV series with FX. She serves on the board of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles.