Kevin Bales is President of Free the Slaves, the US Sister organization of Anti-Slavery International (the world’s oldest human rights organization), and Professor of Sociology at Roehampton University in London. His book Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy published in 1999, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Archbishop Desmond Tutu called it “a well researched, scholarly and deeply disturbing expose of modern slavery”. The documentary based on his work, which he co-wrote, Slavery: A Global Investigation, won the Peabody Award for 2000 and two Emmy Awards in 2002. He is a Trustee of Anti-Slavery International and was a consultant to the United Nations Global Program on Trafficking of Human Beings. He recently completed a two-year study of human trafficking into the US for the National Institute of Justice. His book Understanding Global Slavery was published in September 2005. He is the author of New Slavery: A Reference Handbook (revised 2nd ed. 2005). His book Ending Slavery, a roadmap for the global eradication of slavery, was published in Sept. 2007.

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Judith Freeman is a novelist, essayist, critic and short story writer, author of four novels and a collection of short stories. Her novels include The Chinchilla Farm, Set for Life (winner of the Western Heritage Award in 1991), A Desert of Pure Feeling, and most recently, Red Water, named one of the 100 best books of 2002 by the Los Angeles Times. In 1997 Judith received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction. Her essays, reviews, and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. She teaches in The Masters of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California and has been a writer-in-residence at various workshops around the country. She lives in Los Angeles and Idaho.

Muhammad Yunus was born in Chittagong, a seaport in Bangladesh. The third of fourteen children, he was educated at Dhaka University and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study economics at Vanderbilt University. He then served as chairman of the economics department at Chittagong University before devoting his life to providing financial and social services to the poorest of the poor. He is the founder and managing director of Grameen Bank and the author of the bestselling Banker to the Poor. Yunus and Grameen Bank are winners of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

David Frum is the author of five books, including two New York Times bestsellers: The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush (2003), and co-author with Richard Pearle of an End to Evil: What's Next in the War on Terror.  He is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and writes a daily column for National Review Online.  He contributes frequently to the editorial pages of The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, as well as to Great Britain's Daily Telegraph and Canada's National Post. In 2001-2002, Frum served as a speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush.  His first book Dead Right, was described by Frank Rich of the New York Times as "the smartest book written from the inside about the American conservative movement."

Randall Kennedy is one of the most sought after media experts on the topic of race in America.  A professor at Harvard Law School, the National Law Journal said he "is doing the smartest work in the area of race."  He is the author of Interracial Intimacies, Nigger, and Race, Crime, and the Law. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton and his law degree from Yale. A Rhodes Scholar, he served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Los Angeles-based Gregory Rodriguez is a journalist, a former MSNBC political analyst and a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. His work has appeared in such leading publications as The New York Times, The Economist, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek. He is the Director of the California Fellows Program and a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan public policy institute.

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Michael Henry Heim has taught in the Departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at UCLA for thirty-five years and translates from a number of languages, including Russian, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, German, and French. In addition to the new novel by Bernhard Schlink, Homecoming, his translations include the Modern Library edition of Chekhov's plays and a collection of Chekhov's letters, contemporary Russian, Hungarian, and Croatian novelists, three novels and a play by Milan Kundera, two novels and a collection of stories by Bohmil Hrabal, two novels by Danilo Kis, a children's novel by Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Günter's Grass's My Century and Peeling the Onion: A Memoir.

Not a Cornfield artist, Lauren Bon resides in Los Angeles and holds a Masters of Architecture degree from MIT and a BA from Princeton. Ms. Bon is a trustee of the Annenberg Foundation and President of Not Cornfield, LLC. Her recent urban, public and land art projects in the U.S., Hong Kong, Belfast and Northern Ireland, as well as her role as a trustee, make her uniquely poised to build the capacity of the Foundation in the area of site based philanthropy, serving communities through education, civic, health, artistic initiatives and programs. Not a Cornfield art project is being developed through a grant by Annenberg Foundation.

Brian Girard is a Senior Associate Principal with Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, an international practice of 400 people with studios in NewYork and London. His projects include the Park Fifth residential highrise in Los Angeles, a residential district in Incheon, Korea, and the proposed redevelopment of the 26 acre West Side Rail Yards in New York.

Christopher Hawthorne is architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, Slate, and Metropolis. With Alanna Stang, he is the author of The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005). A graduate of Yale University, he has taught at Columbia University and UC Berkeley.

Dan Rosenfeld is a Principal, with Paul Keller, Matt Burton, John Horvat and the late IraYellin, in Urban Partners, LLC, an entrepreneurial real estate firm focusing on development opportunities of unusual social, economic, or aesthetic value in urban and high-growth areas of the Western United States. Among the firm’s projects are Del Mar Station in Pasadena, Wilshire Vermont Station and the Caltrans District 7 Headquarters in Los Angeles.  Dan worked previously with The Cadillac Fairview Corporation, Tishman/Speyer Properties and Jones Lang La Salle. He served as an appointee of Governor Pete Wilson and Mayor Richard Riordan, directing the real estate operations of the State of California and City of Los Angeles. Dan holds BA and BS degrees in architecture and engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Martha Welborne is the Managing Director of the Grand Avenue Committee, a public/private partnership focused on revitalizing downtown Los Angeles through the creation of a $2.0 billion project that includes sixhigh-rise buildings and a 16-acre civic park.  Recently, she was also the Project Director of an initiative that led to the creation of Los Angeles County's Metro Rapidbus, one of the most successful new transit systems in the County.  She holds two Masters degrees from MIT, was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University, and is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. She is also currently the President of the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Fritjof Capra, Ph.D., physicist and systems theorist, is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, which promotes ecology and systems thinking in primary and secondary education. He is on the faculty of Schumacher College, an international center for ecological studies in England, and frequently gives management seminars for top executives. Dr. Capra is the author of five international bestsellers, The Tao of Physics (1975), The Turning Point (1982), Uncommon Wisdom (1988), The Web of Life (1996), and The Hidden Connections (2002). He coauthored Green Politics (1984), Belonging to the Universe (1991), and EcoManagement (1993), and coedited Steering Business Toward Sustainability (1995). His most recent book is The Science of Leonardo.

Richard Reeves, Senior Lecturer at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, has written numerous works on American and world politics, and has won dozens of awards for his work in print, television, and film. His books include a trilogy on the modern American Presidency: President Kennedy: Profile of Power (1993), President Nixon: Alone in the White House (2001), and President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination (2006). Reeves is a syndicated columnist and former Chief Political Correspondent of The New York Times, as well as a former National Editor and Columnist for Esquire and New York Magazine. He graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. with a degree in mechanical engineering and worked as an engineer before becoming a journalist.

Jennifer Ouellette is the author of two popular science books for the general public: The Physics of the Buffyverse (2007) and Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics (2006). She is a contributing editor of Physics Today, and of APS News, the monthly membership publication of The American Physical Society. She also works with the American Institute of Physics' Discoveries and Brea throughs in Science TV project, and has covered science policy issues for the Materials Research Society. Her freelance work has appeared in Discover, Salon, Nature, Symmetry, and New Scientist, among other venues, and she maintains a general science-and-culture blog called Cocktail Party Physics, featuring her avatar altar-ego/evil twin, Jen-Luc Piquant.  She holds a black belt in jujitsu, and has been known to draw upon that expertise from time to time to demonstrate the fundamentals of Newtonian mechanics to the general public. From February through April 2008, she was a Journalist in Residence at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.