David Rieff is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of seven previous books, including At the Point of a Gun, the acclaimed A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, which was named one of the 10 best nonfiction books of the year by the Los Angeles Times Book Review and a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Award, and Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. He has written regularly for many other magazines, including the New Yorker and The New Republic. He has been a visiting professor at Bard College and a teaching fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in New York City.

John Burnham Schwartz is the author of the novels Claire Marvel, Bicycle Days and Reservation Road, which is being made into a motion picture based on his screenplay, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, and Jennifer Connelly. His books have been translated into more than fifteen languages and his writing has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and Vogue. He lives with his wife and son in Brooklyn, New York.

Michael Pollan is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and the author of four books, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, Second Nature, A Place of My Own, and The Omnivore's Dilemma. The recipient of numerous journalistic awards, including the Reuters-I.U.C.N. Global Award in Environmental Journalism, Pollan served for many years as executive editor of Harper's. His articles have been anthologized in Best American Science Writing, Best American Essays and the Norton Book of Nature Writing. At Berkeley, he serves as Director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism. He earned his college degree at Bennington College, studied at Oxford University (Mansfield College), and received a master's in English from Columbia University 1981.

Dagoberto Gilb was born in the city of Los Angeles, his mother a Mexican who crossed the border illegally, and his father a Spanish-speaking Anglo raised in East Los Angeles.  He studied philosophy and religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and graduated with both bachelor's and master's degrees.  After that, he began his life as a construction worker, eventually joining the union in Los Angeles; a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. As a class-A journeyman carpenter, his employment for the next twelve years was on high-rise buildings, including MOCA.  His books include The Magic of Blood (1993), which won  the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Award, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1994), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Woodcuts of Women (2001), and Gritos (2003). Gilb recently published, as its editor, Hecho en Tejas:  An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature (2006).  He is now a tenured professor in the Creative Writing Program at Texas State University, in San Marcos, Texas.  

Katha Pollitt, the author of Virginity or Death!, is a poet, essayist, and columnist for The Nation.  She won the National Book Critic Circle Award for her first collection of poetry, Antarctic Traveller, as well as two National Magazine Awards for her essays and criticism.

Visit Katha Pollitt's website

Jon Wiener is a contributing editor to The Nation magazine and a professor of history at the University of California - Irvine, where he specializes in recent American history. His books include: Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower, Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files; Professors, Politics and Pop; and Come Together: John Lennon in His Time. Wiener hosts an afternoondrive-time radio program on KPFK-90.7 FM in Los Angeles, a listener-supported Pacifica network station, where his show features interviews on politics and culture.

Willie Brown has been at the center of California politics, government, and civic life for an astonishing four decades. His career spans the American presidency from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush.  Today, he heads the Willie L. Brown, Jr., Institute on Politics and Public Service, where this acknowledged master of the art of politics shares his knowledge and skills with a new generation of California leaders.

Susan Jacoby's last book, Freethinkers, was championed by Philip Roth, Sam Harris, and the late Arthur Schlesinger.  She is a regular commentator on NPR, and a contributor to the New York Times, among many others. She is the author of seven books, including Wild Justice, a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Jack Miles: MacArthur Fellow, Senior Advisor to the President at the J. Paul Getty Trust, and visiting scholar at Occidental College, is a writer whose work has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and many other publications. His book GOD: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 and has been translated into sixteen languages. A sequel to tha tbook entitled CHRIST: A Crisis in the Life of God was published simultaneously in 2001 in the United States, Britain, Germany, and France. He is Senior Fellow with the Pacific Council on International Policy, serves on the final selection committee of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and is general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions.

Visit Jack Miles's website

Samantha Power is the Anna Lindh Professor of Global Leadership and Public Policy Practice at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a foreign policy columnist at Time magazine. In 2003, her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Council on Foreign Relations’ Arthur Ross Prize for the best book in U.S. foreign policy.