Mike Shuster is a diplomatic correspondent and roving foreign correspondent for NPR. He is based in NPR's Los Angeles bureau. When he is not traveling outside the U.S., he covers issues of nuclear non-proliferation and weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and the Pacific Rim. In the past two years, he has contributed many reports to NPR's extensive coverage of the Middle East, traveling four times to Israel since September 2000. He has also reported from Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq.

Michael B. Oren is a Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem research and educational institute. He is the author the best-selling Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Oxford, 2002), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; a history of the 1956 Sinai Campaign (Cass, 1993); as well as dozens of scholarly and popular articles on history and the politics of the Middle East. His writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Commentary, and The Wall Street Journal.

Elif Shafak was born in 1971 in Strasbourg, France. She is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read woman writer in Turkey. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Shafak has published nine books, seven of which are novels. She writes in both Turkish and English. Shafak's first novel written in English, The Saint of Incipient Insanities, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her second novel written in English is The Bastard of Istanbul (a literal Turkish translation of the title would be "The Father and the Bastard"), which was the bestselling book of 2006 in Turkey. The novel brought Shafak under prosecution by the Turkish government for "insulting Turkishness" under Article 301 of the Turkish Criminal Code. The charges were ultimately dismissed.

Walter Mosley is the author of more than twenty-five critically acclaimed books, including the bestselling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages and includes literary fiction, science fiction, political monographs, and a young adult novel. His short fiction has been widely published, and his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and The Nation, among other publications. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and the PEN American Center's Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City.

John Rechy is the recipient of two coveted Lifetime Achievement Awards: PEN-USA-West's 1997 Lifetime Achievement Award and The Publishing Triangle's William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. In September 2000, a CD-Rom of his life and works--Memories and Desire: The Worlds of John Rechy" (produced through the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California)--debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to an overflow crowd. Last August, Rechy's eagerly awaited novel The Coming of the Night appeared as # 2 on the Los Angeles Times' Bestseller List. His 12th novel marks the author's return to some of the scenes and themes of his now-classic first novel, City of Night.

Greeted with controversy when they first appeared, Rechy's books have in recent years been singled out for major prominence. This year, City of Night was named as one of the 25 all time "best gay novels" by the Publishing Triangle in New York. His The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary was included by the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review as among the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the century.

Rechy's first novel, City of Night, was an international bestseller, and is now taught in contemporary-literature courses throughout the country, along with others of his books. His The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez is required reading in many Chicano literature courses. His second novel, Numbers, was also a national bestseller, as was his nonfiction documentary, The Sexual Outlaw. In addition, he has written, This Day's Death, The Vampires, The Fourth Angel, Rushes, Bodies and Souls, Marilyn's Daughter, and Our Lady of Babylon. He teaches literature and film courses, for writers, in the graduate division of the University of Southern California.

Marsha Kinder began her academic career as a scholar of 18th century English Literature at Occidental College. Since 1980 she has been a Professor of Critical Studies in USC's School of Cinematic Arts where she has been teaching international film, narrative theory and new media. In 1997 she founded and has subsequently directed The Labyrinth Project, a USC research intiative on interactive narrative and database documentary, developing new models of digital scholarship and cultural history. With Labyrinth media artists Rosemary Comella, Kristy Kang and Scott Mahoy, Kinder has been producing database documentaries that have been exhibited at museums and festivals worldwide and have won major awards (the Jury Award for New Narrative Forms at Sundance, best overall design from New Media Invision, and the British Academy Award for best Interactive Design in the Learning Category). 

Rafe Esquith has taught at Hobart Elementary School in Los Angeles for twenty-four years. He is the only teacher to have been awarded the president's National Medal of the Arts. His many other honors and awards include the American Teacher Award, Parents magazine As You Grow Award, Oprah Winfrey's Use Your Life Award TM, and People magazine's Heroes Among Us Award.

Paul M. Barrett, for eighteen years a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, where this book originated, currently directs the investigative reporting team at BusinessWeek. He is the author of The Good Black: A True Story of Race in America and American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion.

Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl is one of the most important intellectuals on Islamic law and Islam in the modern age.   He is Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law where he teaches National Security law, Law and Terrorism, Human Rights law, Islamic law and Immigration law.  Dr. Abou El Fadl holds a B.A. in Political Science from Yale University, a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Islamic law from Princeton University.  Dr. Abou El Fadl is also an Islamic jurist and scholar, having received formal training in Islamic jurisprudence in Egypt and Kuwait. 

Among his many honors and distinctions, Dr. Abou El Fadl was recently named a Carnegie Scholar for 2005.  He was also appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as a commissioner on the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom.  He was previously a member of the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch and continues to serve as a member of the Advisory Board of Middle East Watch, part of Human Rights Watch.  He regularly works with numerous human rights organizations including the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, Amnesty International and others.  He is regularly called as an expert in a wide variety of cases involving human rights, terrorism, political asylum, and international and commercial law.

Susan Banyas is a dancer, storyteller, and writer whose artistic roots as an improviser, dancer, and experimental performance artist led to collaborations through SO&SO&SO&SO Inc. Her current performance projects, No Strangers Here Today, and The Hillsboro Story, are centered in Highland County, Ohio one hundred years apart and dance between memory and American history from the Civil War to the early years of the Civil Rights Movement. Everyday Dancing, A Dance Lecture, which she presented at the International Society for the Study of Time conference in Monterey, CA is developing into a dance and text quintet, with everyday photography, titled It's Been a Busy Week.

She co-founded Dreams Well Studio (1991-2003), a low tech performance and teaching laboratory, where she produced and directed poetry shows, Soul Stories evenings, dance/theatre pieces, and gender-inspired shows in collaboration with some of Portland's finest theatre artists, poets, musicians, and dancers.  She has also taught extensively in schools, colleges, and universities and is a creative consultant to organizations and individuals.

She has published essays on art and politics and is currently a member of the Maya Angelou Writers Guild in Portland. Music/spoken word CDs, visual books and image cards from her scripts, short stories, paintings, and photography emerge from the improvisation experiments at the heart of art practice. Her work fuses movement, language, and music into physical images that "speak" about the times we live in, the encounters we experience, and the memory places we inhabit.

David Ornette Cherry, winner of the "2003 ASCAP-Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music," is composer, arranger, and band leader. The ambient music streaming through his childhood was generated by the early collaborations of his dad, Don Cherry, with Ornette Coleman and the musicians who visited his parents' Mariposa Avenue home in Los Angeles. Cherry studied music composition at Bishop College in Dallas and concentrated on world music at California Institute of the Arts. While jazz remains both the root and sustenance of his sound, he often incorporates the sounds of the world in what he calls "multi-kulti" music. His background includes performances with Don Cherry, Ed Blackwell, Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins, Nana Vasconcelos, Olatunji, Hassan Hakmoun, Carlos Ward, Jim Pepper, Collin Walcott, Wadada Leo Smith, and Justo Almario.

Visit David Ornette Cherry's website

Margaret MacMillan was educated at the University of Toronto and at Oxford, where she obtained a B. Phil. in politics and a D. Phil. for a thesis on the British in India between 1880 and 1920. She is the editor of Canada and NATO and the author of Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, which won the 2003 Governor General's Award, the Samuel Johnson Prize, the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize and was a New York Times Editors' Choice for 2002. Currently, MacMillan lives in Toronto, and is provost of Trinity College and professor of history at the University of Toronto. In 2007, she will become the Warden of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University.

Seth Faison spent 12 years living in China, mostly as a journalist. As a 25-year-old looking for adventure, he went to Xi'an, an ancient city known for the tomb of the Terra-cotta warriors, and enrolled in Chinese classes at a university. He spent two years studying the language, loving its concise beauty and hating its maddening complexity. He traveled by train, truck and boat, exploring almost every province in China. He became a reporter at the Hong Kong Standard, and within two years became a correspondent in Beijing, where he covered the Tiananmen student movement and massacre for the South China Morning Post. He joined the New York Times in 1991, covering New York City and specializing in Asian Organized Crime and people smuggling. He was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize for spot news coverage of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. In 1995, he was named Bureau Chief in Shanghai, where he served five years, writing about the deep social and economic change underway, and earning a reputation as a writer skilled at capturing the moods and flavors of China.

Christopher Phillips travels around the world, facilitating hundreds of Socrates Cafés, in which ordinary people gather to ask questions--and questions about questions. He has been a teacher, a journalist, and is the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Society for Philosophical Inquiry (SPI). The distinguished scholar and professor of philosophy Matthew Lipman and Harvard psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Coles serve on the advisory board of SPI.

Phillips has a bachelor's degree in government from the College of William & Mary. He has also earned a Master in Education degree in Early Elementary Education, with a specialization in Teaching Philosophy for Children, a Master of Science degree in Natural Sciences from Delta State University, and a Master of Arts degree in Humanities from California State University-Dominguez Hills. Currently he’s working on his doctoral degree in communications, as well as writing two new books on “dialogue for democracy”. Chris' wife, Cecilia Chapa Phillips, is co-founder of the nonprofit SPI; they're also the ecstatic parents of Caliope Alexis Phillips.