Antonio Skármeta was born in Chile in 1940, the grandson of Dalmatian immigrants. Until 1973 he worked in Santiago as a literary and artistic director and a professor of literature as well as working for the press.  In 1974, after the Pinochet coup, he went into exile in West Berlin.  He had his internationally greatest success with Ardiente Paciencia (English: Burning Patience, 1994). At first a radio play, a stage drama and screenplay, it finally appeared as a novel in 1985.  Michael Radford's film version of the novel, titled Il Postino (Engl: The Postman, 1994) won five Oscar nominations in 1994. In 1989, after the collapse of Pinochet's military dictatorship, the writer returned to Chile in order "to create political space for freedom".  He produced an arts program on television which regularly attracted over a million viewers. Skármeta represented his homeland as Chilean ambassador between 2000 and 2003.  For this work, he received the German Cross of Merit.

Gina B. Nahai is the author of Cry of the Peacock, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith (finalist for the Orange Prize in England and the IMPAC award in Dublin), and Sunday's Silence. Her novels have been translated into sixteen languages, and her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Magazine, and the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. She is a former consultant for the Rand Corporation, and has studied the politics of pre- and post-revolutionary Iran for the United States Department of Defense. She is professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.

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Robert Scheer is the editor-in-chief of the political blog www.truthdig.com and the author of seven books, including Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power; With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War and America After Nixon, and The Age of Multinationals; with his son Christopher and Lakshmi Chaudhry, The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us about Iraq.  Most recently, he wrote Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I and Clinton--and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush. Between 1964 and 1969 he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editorin chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976 to 1993 he served as anational correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Scheer can be heard on the political radio program "Left, Right and Center" on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica, Calif.   

Scheer was raised in the Bronx, where he attended public schools and graduated from City College of New York. He studied as a Maxwell fellow at Syracuse University and was a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley, where he did graduate work in economics. Scheer is acontributing editor for The Nation as well as a Nation Fellow. He has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.

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Josh Swiller has had a wide variety of careers, including forest ranger, raw-food chef, and journalist. In August 2005, he had successful surgery for a cochlear implant and partially recovered his hearing. He often speaks on issues facing mainstream deaf individuals.

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Louise Steinman is a writer and literary curator. Her memoir, The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father's War, was recently published in a new paperback edition by North Atlantic Press/Random House.

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Robin Wright, who covers foreign policy for The Washington Post, has reported from over 140 countries for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CBS News, The New Yorker, The Sunday Times and others. She has covered a dozen wars and revolutions in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia. She was named journalist of the year by the American Academy of Diplomacy and received the U.N. Correspondents Association Gold Medal for coverage of international affairs. Wright also won the National Press Club award for diplomatic reporting, the National Magazine Award for reportage from Iran in The New Yorker, and the Overseas Press Club Award for "best reporting in any medium requiring exceptional courage and initia­tive."   The recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant, Ms. Wright has been a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Yale, Duke, Stanford and others.  A frequent television commentator, Wright is also the acclaimed author of The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran, Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam, Flashpoints: Promise and Peril in a New World, and In the Name of God: The Khomeini Decade.

Warren Olney is the host and executive producer of "Which Way, LA?" and "To the Point." " Which Way, L.A.?" is the signature daily local news program on 89.9 KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com. In fall of 2000, KCRW and Olney took his program to a national audience with To the Point, distributed by Public Radio International.

Olney and both of his programs have been honored with nearly 40 national, regional and local awards for broadcast excellence since its inception.  Most recently, Warren received the Golden Mike Award for "Best Public Affairs Program," and Which Way, L.A.? was honored with the Los Angeles Press Club's Southern California Journalism Award forBest Talk/Public Affairs Show. He is the recipient of Emmy Awards for reporting and anchoring, and Golden Mikes for investigative reporting. Olney served as co-anchor of KCET-TV's "Life & Times Tonight" from June 1999 to September 2000.  His interviews, book reviews, articles, and columns have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Los Angeles Magazine, and California Journal, among other publications.

Sue Miller is the best selling author of the novels Lost in the Forest, The World Below, While I Was Gone, The Distinguished Guest, For Love, Family Pictures, and The Good Mother; the story collection Inventing the Abbots; and the memoir The Story of My Father.  She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Michelle Huneven started writing fiction in 1969, her first year in college.  There, her first creative writing instructor wrote, “Although Ms. Huneven’s writing improved over the course of the semester, she has no talent and should not be encouraged.”  Michelle received and M.F.A. at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and her first published story won a G.E. Younger Writers Award and re-publication in Harper’s magazine.  Her first novel, Round Rock, was a New York Times notable book of the year, one of the LA Times best 100 books of the year, and a Finalist for the LA Times First Fiction Award.  Her second novel, Jamesland was also a New York Times notable book, a Book Sense pick, a finalist for the LA Times Fiction Prize, and a winner of the Southern California Booksellers Award for Fiction. Her short fiction has been published in Harpers, Redbook, and literary magazines.  She received a Whiting Award for Fiction in 2002.  Until recently, she worked as a restaurant critic and food writer for the LA Weekly and The LA Times. Her journalism has also been published in the New York Times, O, Gourmet, Food and Wine and other publications.  Essays have appeared in the following anthologies:  Horse People, Dog is My Co-Pilot, The Knitter’s Gift, Death by Pad Thai, and Mr. Wrong.  Her food writing has earned a James Beard Award and several American Food Journalists awards.  Michelle is presently teaching creative writing at UCLA.  She lives with her husband and multiple pets in the town she grew up in, Altadena, CA, where she is at work on her next novel.

David Hajdu is the music critic for The New Republic and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has written for The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, BookForum, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The New Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, and other publications. Hajdu is the author of three books: Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (1996), Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña, and The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America. His first two books were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and both books won the ASCAP Deems-Taylor Award. His books have also been finalists for the LAMBDA Literary Award and the Firecracker Book Award.

Richard Price is the author of seven novels, including Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He won a 2007 Edgar Award for his writing on the HBO series "The Wire."

Scott Timberg covers books and authors for the Los Angeles Times. He's also the co-editor, with Dana Gioia, of The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles, an anthology of essays and profiles about the city's contemporary intellectual and literary life. Timberg, who worked previously at the late and sometimes lamented New Times Los Angeles, has also written for GQ, Men's Vogue, the Boston Phoenix and Art Review.

Born in San Jose in 1979, Caille Millner was first published at age sixteen, and in 2002 she was named one of Columbia Journalism Review's "Ten Young Writers on the Rise." A graduate of Harvard University, she is the coauthor of Doubleday's The Promise: How One Woman Made Good on Her Extraordinary Pact to Send a Classroom of First Graders to College. She's received the Rona Jaffe Fiction Award as well as prizes from the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts, the National Press Club, and the New York Black Journalists Association. Currently on the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle, she has also written for Newsweek, Essence, The Washington Post, and The Fader.

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Meghan Daum is a weekly columnist on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of the bestselling essay collection My Misspent Youth, the critically acclaimed novel The Quality of Life Report, and has written for many publications, including The New Yorker, Harper's, GQ, Vogue, and The New York Times. She has contributed to public radio's Morning Edition and This American Life and is a regular guest host on KPCC's Zocalo: A Cultural Forum for the New L.A.

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