Reza Aslan, an internationally acclaimed writer and scholar of religions, is a fellow at the University of Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy and Middle East Analyst for CBS News.

Aslan is cofounder and creative director of BoomGen Studios, a hub for creative content from and about the Middle East, as well as the Editorial Executive of Mecca.com, an on-line community for Muslim youth. Born in Iran, he now lives in Los Angeles where he is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at University of California, Riverside.

www.rezaaslan.com

Amy Wilentz is the author of The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier, Martyrs' Crossing, and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger. She is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, and also a 1990 nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Wilentz has written for many publications including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, The New Republic, Mother Jones, Harper's, Vogue and The London Review of Books. She is the former Jerusalem correspondent of The New Yorker and a long-time contributing editor at The Nation. She teaches in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California at Irvine.,

www.amywilentz.com

Anne Waldman, a widely acclaimed poet, editor, performer, teacher, and activist, is the author of more than forty books and small press editions of poetry. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Award and the Shelly Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Waldman is the co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, where she a Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Summer Writing Program. She lives in Boulder, Colorado, and New York City.

Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

Eric Bogosian is the author of the novels Wasted Beauty and Mall. He is the author of several award-winning plays, including Talk Radio, suburbia Griller, and Drinking in America. He is the recipient of three Obie awards and a Drama Desk award and two of his plays have been adapted for film. He lives in New York City.

www.ericbogosian.com

Jerry Stahl's fiction and non-fiction have appeared everywhere from The Village Voice to Hustler, from Esquire and Details to Playboy and The New York Times, among other places. He has also written extensively for television and film, including the highest rated episodes of CSI. His first book, the memoir, Permanent Midnight, was made into a film starring Ben Stiller and Maria Bello. He has also published three novels, Perv: A Love Story, Plainclothes Naked and I, Fatty, a faux-memoir of silent film star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, which has been optioned by Johnny Depp, and a collection of stories Love Without. He is currently completing a movie about Ernest Hemingway for HBO and James Gandolfini.

www.jerrystahl.com

One of America's most admired and respected composers, John Adams Was born and raised in New England and educated at Harvard. He taught for ten years at the San Francisco Conservatory and was composer-in-residence at the San Francisco Symphony.

He is active as a conductor, appearing with the world's greatest orchestras. A regular guest at the BBC Proms, he has appeared in recent seasons with such orchestras as the London Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and New York Philharmonic, and with orchestras in Atlanta, Stockholm, San Francisco, and Detroit. From 2003 to 2007 he was composer-in-residence at Carnegie Hall and conducted the first public concert in Carnegie's new space, Zankel Hall.

His original operatic works include "Nixon in China", "The Death of Klinghoffer", "Doctor Atomic", and "On the Transmigration of Souls," received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Music, and won a rare "triple crown" of Grammy awards: "Best Classical Recording", "Best Orchestral Performance", and "Best Classical Contemporary Composition".

http://www.earbox.com/

As President and Chief Executive Officer of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, Deborah Borda leads one of the largest music organizations in the United States. She is responsible for managing all artistic, administrative, and technical operations of the Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood Bowl, as well as the presentation of close to 300 concerts annually.

Borda came to Los Angeles after close to a decade as Executive Director of the New York Philharmonic, where she served as the first woman in recent history to manage a major American symphony orchestra. She has also chaired the Music Panel of both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Major American Orchestra Managers Group, and has been featured in numerous national publications and television news programs.

www.laphil.com

Christopher Buckley was born in New York City in 1952 and graduated cum laude from Yale University in 1976. He shipped out in the Merchant Marine and at age 24 became managing editor of Esquire magazine. At age 29, he became chief speechwriter to the Vice President of the United States, George H.W. Bush. Since 1989 he has been founder and editor-in-chief of Forbes FYI magazine.

He is the author of twelve books, most of them national bestsellers. They have been translated into sixteen foreign languages, including Russian, Korean and Indonesian. They include: The White House Mess, Wet Work, Thank You For Smoking, God Is My Broker, Little Green Men, No Way To Treat a First Lady and Florence of Arabia. Thank You For Smoking has been made into a major motion picture starring Aaron Eckhart, Robert Duvall, William Macy, Rob Lowe, Adam Brody and Katie Holmes. His novel Little Green Men is being made into a move starring John Malkovich and will be directed by Whit Stillman.

Mr. Buckley has contributed over 60 comic essays to The New Yorker magazine. His journalism, satire and criticism has been widely published in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Republic, Washington Monthly, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Esquire, and other publications. He is the recipient of the 2002 Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence. In 2004 he was awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor.

Colson Whitehead was born in Manhattan in 1969. After graduating from Harvard College, he started working at the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, book, and music. His first novel, The Intuitionist, concerned intrigue in the department of Elevator Inspectors, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and a winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award. He published John Henry Days in 2001, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. The Colossus of New York, a book of essays about the titular city, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He is also the author of Apex Hides the Hurt, and this year's Sag Harbor. His reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the New Yorker, New York magazine, Harper's and Granta.

www.colsonwhitehead.com

Tom Brokaw, one of the most trusted and respected figures in broadcast journalism, is a special correspondent for NBC News. In this role, he reports and produces long-form documentaries and provides expertise during election coverage and breaking news events for NBC News. For 21 years, he was the anchor and managing editor of "NBC Nightly News." He has received numerous honors, including the Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award, the Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement, and he was inducted as a fellow into the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His insight, ability and integrity have earned him a dozen Emmys and two Peabody and duPont awards for his journalistic achievements.

Complementing his distinguished broadcast journalism career, Brokaw has written articles, essays and commentary for several publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time, The New Yorker, Life, and National Geographic.

In 1998, Brokaw became a best selling author with the publication of The Greatest Generation. Inspired by the mountain of mail he received from his first book, Brokaw wrote The Greatest Generation Speaks in 1999. His third book, An Album of Memories, was published in 2001. In November 2002, Brokaw's fourth best selling book A Long Way from Home, a reflective look about growing up in the American Heartland, was released. In his fifth best-selling book, BOOM! Voices of the Sixties, Brokaw shares a series of remembrances and reflections of the time based on his experiences and over 50 interviews with a wide variety of well known artists, politicians, activists, business leaders, and journalists, as well as lesser known figures, including a daughter of a former Mississippi segregationist governor, Vietnam veterans, civil rights activists, health care pioneers, environmentalists, and war protesters.