Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University. She is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, editor of Race On Trial: Law and Justice in American History, and coauthor with Vernon Jordan of Vernon Can Read: A Memoir. Gordon-Reed is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School.

Barbara Tversky is Professor of Psychology at Columbia Teachers College and Professor Emerita of Psychology at Stanford University. A fascination with the human mind brought her to the study human cognition. The conviction that the mind is embedded in a body and the body in the world has infused her research and thinking. Her work has explored the mind in action in space and in time. She finds inspiration in technology, science, and the arts, and is indebted to collaborators in computer science, linguistics, philosophy, physical and life science, neuroscience, art, poetry, comics, architecture, and design.

Naomi Wolf made a sensation with her landmark international bestseller The Beauty Myth in 1991. The author of six other books, including the New York Times bestselling The End of America, Wolf is the cofounder and president of the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership and cofounder of the American Freedom Campaign, an American movement for democracy and the rule of law.

www.americanfreedomcampaign.org

Martin Kaplan, director of The Norman Lear Center, is associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and a USC Annenberg Research Professor. He has been a White House speechwriter; a Washington journalist; a deputy presidential campaign manager; a Disney studio executive; a motion picture and television producer and screenwriter; a radio host; and a blogger.

www.learcenter.org

Peter W. Galbraith, author of the critically acclaimed The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End, is the leading authority on Iraq and a widely respected commentator on foreign affairs. He is the architect of the partition plan that is considered the main alternative to Bush's Iraq strategy, and which has been endorsed by both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, and many members of Congress. Galbraith served as the first US Ambassador to Croatia where he mediated the 1995 Erdut Agreement that ended the Croatia War. He has held senior positions in the United Nations and, as a cabinet Minister in East Timor's UN-sponsored transitional government, played a key role in that country's emergence as an independent state. He has worked on Iraq for more than 25 years, having uncovered and documented the start of Saddam Hussein's genocide against the Kurds in 1987 and his use of chemical weapons in 1988. He was the author of the Senate-passed Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988 that would have imposed comprehensive sanctions on Iraq and was with Kurdish rebels during their doomed 1991 uprising. Galbraith has made more than twenty trips to Iraq since Saddam Hussein's overthrow in 2003, and was a news consultant in Baghdad for ABC news in the chaotic weeks immediately following the regime's collapse.

Paul Theroux began his travels after graduating from the University of Massachusetts in 1963. He taught briefly in Urbino, Italy, before joining the Peace Corps in Malawi, Africa, and eventually ended up teaching English at the Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. In 1971, he gave up teaching to write full time and England became his 17-year, on-again, off-again home.

Theroux received the Whitbread Prize for his novel Picture Palace (1978), and the James Tait Black Award for The Mosquito Coast (1982). His novels Saint Jack (1973), The Mosquito Coast, Doctor Slaughter (1984) and Half Moon Street (1984) have all been made into films. With the publication of The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train through Asia (1975), and continuing with The Old Patagonian Express, Theroux established himself as America's foremost travel writer. Other travel books by Theroux include The Kingdom by the Sea (1983), Sailing Through China (1984), Riding the Iron Rooster (1988) and more recently, Dark Star Safari, Overland from Cairo to Cape Town (2003), a revisit of Africa and his Peace-Corps past 40 years earlier. His most recent work of fiction is the novel Blinding Light ( 2005).

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Tom Curwen is staff writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times. He was editor of the Outdoors section, a writer for the features section and deputy editor of the Book Review. He has been honored by the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors for three pieces he did for Outdoors on caving with nature writer, Barbara Hurd, on Alaskan bush pilots and the annual migration of sand hill cranes to the Bosque del Apache. He has a master's degree in Creative Writing from USC and was a recipient of a 1991 Academy of American Poets prize. In 2002, he received a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for mental health journalism.

After receiving a bachelor's degree in architecture from RISD, David Macaulay vowed never to practice. Instead, he worked as an interior designer, a junior high school teacher, a teacher at RISD, and experimented with creating books. He published his first book, Cathedral, in 1973. City, Castle, Pyramid, Mill, Underground, Unbuilding, and Mosque followed, all of which have provided the explanations of the how and the why in a way that is both accessible and entertaining. Macaulay is perhaps best known for the award-winning international bestseller The Way Things Work, updated in 1998 and renamed The New Way Things Work. Using a humorous woolly mammoth to illustrate principles, Macaulay offers readers of all ages explanations for complexities of today's technology. He uses this same humorous approach to explain complicated systems in The Way We Work, which tackles the most intricate machine of all: the human body. His many awards include the Caldecott Medal and Honor Awards, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, the Christopher Award, and the Washington Post–Children's Book Guild Nonfiction Award. In 2006 he was awarded a MacArthur "genius" award.

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Diane Ackerman is the author of several works of nonfiction including, most recently, An Alchemy of Mind, a poetics of the brain based on the latest neuroscience; Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden; Deep Play, which considers play, creativity, and our need for transcendence; A Slender Thread, about her work as a crisis line counselor; The Rarest of the Rare and The Moon by Whale Light, in which she explores the plight and fascination of endangered animals; A Natural History of Love; On Extended Wings, her memoir of flying; and the bestseller A Natural History of the Senses. Her poetry has been published in leading literary journals and various anthologies. She also writes nature books for children: Animal Sense; Monk Seal Hideaway; and Bats: Shadows in the Night. She is co-editor of a Norton anthology, The Book of Love. Ms. Ackerman has received many prizes and awards and she also has the rare distinction of having a molecule named after her --dianeackerone.

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Louise Steinman is a writer and literary curator. She is the author of The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance and the award-winning memoir The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father's War, recently published in a new paperback edition. She is Co-Director of The Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC.

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Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. His previous books include God’s Dust, Behind the Mask, The Missionary and the Libertine, Playing the Game, The Wages of Guilt, Anglomania, Bad Elements and Murder in Amsterdam, which won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the Best Current Interest Book. He was awarded the 2008 Shorenstein Journalism Award, which honored him for his distinguished body of work and the 2008 Erasmus Prize.

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John Nathan is an author, translator, Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, and cultural critic who has devoted a long and rich lifetime to removing the cloak of enigma that surrounds the Japanese. Born in New York City, he spent part of his childhood in Tucson, Arizona, and now lives with his family in Santa Barbara, California, where he is the Takashima Professor of Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California - Santa Barbara.

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the novels Gilead, (FSG, 2004)—winner of the Pulitzer Prize—and Housekeeping (FSG, 1980), and two books of nonfiction, Mother Country (FSG, 1989) and The Death of Adam. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Trevor Paglen is an artist and geographer whose work deliberately blurs the lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us. His work has been exhibited at many venues, including University of California Berkeley Art Museum; Transmediale.08 Festival, Berlin; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, among other venues. Among his publiciations are I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me: Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Renditon Flights and the forthcoming Blank Spots on a Map . Paglen lives and works in Berkeley.

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Lize Mogel is an interdisciplinary artist who works with the interstices between art and cultural geography. Her cartographic projects include Public Green, which was seen in Los Angeles bus shelters throughout 2001/2002. With Lex Bhagat, she is co-editor of the book/map collection An Atlas of Radical Cartography and co-curator of the traveling exhibition "An Atlas." She also co-curated Genius Loci, an exhibition of conceptual mappings of Los Angeles (Sci-Arc, Los Angeles; California Museum of Photography, Riverside). Exhibitions include the Gwangju Bienniale, South Korea; Gallery 400, Chicago; Overgaden, Copenhagen; Common Room, New York City, and the upcoming Experimental Geography (ICI, touring).

Public Green

James M. McPherson is the George Henry Davis '86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University. He is the bestselling author of numerous books on the Civil War, including Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era which won the Pulitzer Prize, For Cause and Comrades, which won the prestigious Lincoln Prize, and Crossroads of Freedom.

William Deverell is a professor of history at USC, where he specializes in the history of California and the American West and directs a scholarly institute that collaborates with the Huntington Library in Pasadena. He is the author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910. With Greg Hise, he is co-author of Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region.

Etgar Keret is internationally acclaimed for his short stories. Born in Tel Aviv in 1967 to an extremely diverse family, his brother heads an Israeli group that lobbies for the legalization of marijuana, and his sister is an orthodox Jew and the mother of ten children. Keret regards his family as a microcosm of Israel. His book, The Nimrod Flip-Out ( 2006), is a collection of 32 short stories that captures the craziness of life in Israel today. His other books include Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God (2004,), Missing Kissinger (2007,), and Gaza Blues (2004) Over 40 short movies have been based on his stories. Keret is the writer of several feature screenplays, including Skin Deep (1996), which won First Prize at several international film festivals and was awarded the Israeli Oscar. Wrist Cutters, featuring Tom Waits, was released in August 2007. Jellyfish, his first movie as a director along with his wife Shira Geffen, won the coveted Camera d'Or prize for best first feature at the Cannes Film Festival 2007. Keret is at present a lecturer in the film department at Tel Aviv University.

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Ben Ehrenreich was born and raised in Long Island, New York. He studied religion at Brown University, and eventually emigrated to Los Angeles, where he still lives, writing fiction and journalism. His reporting has taken him from Afghanistan to South America and all over the United States (most recently to Haiti). His articles and essays have been published in L.A. Weekly, the Village Voice, The Believer, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and many other publications. His fiction has appeared in Bomb, McSweeney's, Black Clock, Swink, and elsewhere. His work has been reprinted in anthologies including The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2004, Notes from Underground: The Most Outrageous Stories from the Alternative Press, and The World's Best Sex Writing 2005. His first novel, The Suitors, was published in 2006.