Will Self is the acclaimed author of such books as The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Great Apes, How the Dead Live, and The Best of Dave. He won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award. He lives in London.

Julius Shulman was born in Brooklyn on October 10, 1910 and moved to Los Angeles with his family at the age of ten.  Photography went from a hobby to a professional occupation for Shulman in 1936, when he was exposed to modern architecture for the first time on a visit to Richard Neutra’s Kun House in the Hollywood Hills.  Neutra was so impressed with his photos of the home that he immediately hired Shulman to photograph additional projects, thereby launching an unanticipated, prolific career.

Shulman’s images promoted the work of numerous visionary architects including Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, John Lautner, and Pierre Koenig. Decades after the initial prints were created, Shulman’s scenes continue to herald the beauty and functionality of modern architecture.  At age 96, Shulman is still active photographing buildings throughout the country with his business partner, Juergen Nogai.

Wim de Wit is the Head of Special Collections & Visual Resources, and Curator of Architectural Collections at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.  He studied architectural history at the Catholic University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.  He moved to the United States in 1982, where he worked at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum as a guest curator for an exhibition about the Amsterdam School, a group of Dutch architects of the early twentieth century.  From 1983 until 1993, he was the curator for architecture at the Chicago Historical Society, where he organized such exhibitions as “Louis Sullivan, the Function of Ornament” and “Grand Illusions: Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893.”

J. Craig Venter is one of the leading scientists of the twenty-first century. A pioneer in the world of genomic research, he is recognized for his visionary contributions to the field. In February 2001, Venter published the completed sequence of the human genome. He is the founder and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute. He lives near Washington, DC.  

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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Karen Grigsby Bates is the Los Angeles-based correspondent for "Day to Day," NPR's midday news magazine, where she reports on both breaking news (Katrina, the Southeast Asian Tsunami, the execution of Tookie Williams) and features.  She is especially interested in issues that involve the nexus of politics, culture and race.  Bates was a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times Op-Ed page for ten years, and a news correspondent for People magazine.

Born in mainland China, Ha Jin grew up in a small rural town in Liaoning Province.  He served in the People's Liberation Army, staying at the northeastern border between China and the former Soviet Union.  He studied American literature at Shandong University, and did graduate work in the U.S. at Brandeis University, from which he earned a Ph.D. in English. After the Tiananmen massacre, he realized it would be impossible to write honestly in China, so he decided to immigrate.  Ha Jin was awarded the National Book Award for Waiting and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Waiting and War Trash. His other books include The Crazed, The Bridgegroom and Oceans of Words. He is a professor of English at Boston University.

Over a career in poetry that spans five decades and twelve collections, Galway Kinnell has received the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, the Frost Medal, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is renowned as an especially sensuous poet and moving reader. His varied career has taken him to Iran as a teacher and journalist and to Louisiana as a fieldworker for the Congress of Racial Equality.  Galway Kinnell has served as the State Poet of Vermont, and was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University for 25 years. He is currently a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He lives in Vermont.

Chris Abani's prose includes the novels The Virgin of Flames, Graceland, Masters of the Board, and the novellas Becoming Abigail and Song For Night. His poetry collections include Hands Washing Water and Kalakuta Republic. He is a professor at the University of California, Riverside and the recipient of many awards, including the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship and PEN Hemingway Book Prize.

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Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Saadoun Al-Bayati was exposed to the meditative states produced through percussion and vocalizing as a child while attending Sufi rituals and ceremonies. His voice training took place through Qur'anic recitation, and as a young man, Saadoun often substituted for the muezzin at his neighborhood mosque, calling Muslims to prayer. Saadoun has performed the music of Iraq and other parts of the Arab Middle East since childhood.

In the United States Saadoun pursued studies in acting and graduated from the Goodman Theatre at the Art Institute of Chicago. His accomplishments as an actor include playing Dr. Aziz to Lillian Gish's Mrs. Moore in "A Passage to India" and working with such theatrical talents as Morris Carnovsky in "Mother Courage" and "King Lear" and Sam Wanamaker in "MacBeth".

Beau Beausoleil is a bookseller and the author of nine books of poetry, the latest titled Concealed In Language. He lives in San Francisco, California.

Laila Lalami, a native of Morocco, is a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New York Times and elsewhere. Her debut book offiction, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was published in the fall of 2005 and translated into five languages. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.

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Suzanne Lummis' reviews and poetry have appeared in The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Poetry International and other magazines. Her collection In Danger was part Heyday Books' California Poetry Series. She is director of The Los Angeles Poetry Festival and editor of the literary web magazine, www.speechlessthemagazine.org. She teaches poetry writing through the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.

Majid Naficy fled his homeland in 1983 one year and a half after his wife Ezzat was executed in Iran. He has published two collections of poetry, Muddy Shoes and Father and Son as well as his doctoraldissertation "Modernism and Ideology in Persian Literature."  Majid isthe author of more than twenty books in Persian as well as theco-editor of the literary organ of Iranian Writers' Association inExile.

Sholeh Wolpé, a native of Iran, is a poet, literary translator and writer. She is the author of Sin—Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, The Scar Saloon, and the forthcoming Rooftops of Tehran. She is the associate editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Modern Literature from the Muslim World and editor of the forthcoming Iconoclasts and Visionaries.

www.sholeh.info

Mark Salzman is an award-winning novelist and nonfiction author. His first memoir, Iron & Silk, inspired by his years in China, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction and received the Christopher Award.  His book True Notebooks is a fascinating look at his experiences as a writing teacher at Los Angeles Central Juvenile Hall. Salzman is also the author of the memoir Lost in Place: Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia, and the novels The Laughing Sutra, The Soloist, and Lying Awake.  Salzman is also a cellist and his playing appears on the soundtrack to several films, including the Academy Award-winning documentary Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien. He has also played with Yo-Yo Ma and pianist Emanuel Ax at Lincoln Center.  

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Nora Gallagher is the author of two memoirs Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith and Practicing Resurrection. Her first novel, Changing Light, was published in early 2007.  Her essays, book reviews and journalism have appeared in many publications including The New York Times Magazine, DoubleTake, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Utne Reader, The Village Voice, Mother Jones, and The Los Angeles Times.   

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Roz Chast, a native of Brooklyn, began selling her cartoons to The New Yorker in 1978 and since then, over 800 of her drawings have appeared in the magazine. Her notably witty humor is regularly seen in such publications as Bon Appetit, The Harvard Business Review and Scientific America. In addition, she has published several collections of cartoons, illustrated children's books, and designed book jackets, CD covers and theater posters. A cartoonist who sees humor in all human interaction, Chast is known for casting a new and distinctly different twist on the everyday foibles of the human race. Chast originally studied painting at The Rhode Island School of Design, but her quirky sense of humor lead her instead to frequent the pages of The New Yorker.

Louise Steinman is curator of ALOUD at Central Library and co-director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities USC. She is the author of two books: The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father's War and The Knowing Body: The Artist as Storyteller in Contemporary Performance. Her writing has appeared in Los Angeles, West Magazine, New York Times Syndicate; L.A. Weekly, Salon.com and other publications.

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Judith Thurman is widely regarded as one of the great literary journalists of our time. She is renowned for her style, depth, and penetration of her subjects. Her first major work, the biography of Isak Dinesen, won the National Book Award, was short listed for the Pulitzer Prize, and served as the basis for the Sydney Pollack film Out of Africa. Her biography of Colette was short listed for every major U.S. literary prize, including the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Nationa lBook Critic's Circle Award. It won the LA Times Book Award for biography and the Salon Book Award for biography. She is a staff writer for The New Yorker and lives in New York.