Steven Bach is the author of two previous biographies, Dazzler: The Life and Times of Moss Hart and Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend. Itwas while working on his biography of Marlene Dietrich that he became interested in Riefenstahl. For the two German women, born just months apart, could not have been more different.  One, an ardent anti-Nazi; theother, Hitler’s favorite filmmaker.

Michael Chabon received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at UC Irvine, and has spent most of the past two decades in California. He is the author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Other works include a young adult novel, Summerland, and two collections of short stories, A Model World and Other Stories and Werewolves In Their Youth.

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Liza Mundy was raised in Roanoke,Virginia, and received her AB degree from Princeton University.  She earned an MA in English literature at the University of Virginia, where she also taught writing. At the Washington Post, she is a feature writer for the Sunday magazine, where she has written articles and essays on family life, popular culture, the arts, and politics.  An article she wrote on two deaf women who used a deaf sperm donor to deliberately conceive deaf children was selected by Oliver Sacks for inclusion in The Best American Science Writing 2003.  She has won awards for essays, profiles, and science writing from the Sunday Magazine Editors Association, the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association, the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, The Missouri Lifestyle Journalism Awards, and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.  She was a 2003 Kaiser Foundation Media Fellow, and a 2005 Media Fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.  She has also written for Slate, Lingua Franca, Redbook, Washington City Paper, and The Washington Monthly.  She lives in Arlington, Virginia, with her husband and two children.

Peggy Orenstein is the author, most recently, of the memoir, Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, An Oscar, An Atomic Bomb, A Romantic Night and One Woman's Quest to Become a Mother. An internationally recognized writer, editor and speaker about issues affecting girls and women, her previous books include Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids, Love and Life in a Half-Changed World, and the best-selling School Girls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap. A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Orenstein has also written forsuch publications as Vogue, Elle, Discover, More, Glamour, Mother Jones, Salon, Parenting, "O: The Oprah Magazine," and The New Yorker. Her work has been included in many anthologies, including The Best American Science Writing (2004). She has been a guest lecturer and keynote speaker at numerous college campuses; at state, regional and municipal conferences on gender equity and on juvenile justice; at the National Education Association's National Conference on Women and Minorities and at the conference of the Canadian Teachers Federation. She has published editorials relating to her research in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and USA Today and has appeared on, among other programs, Nightline, Good Morning America, The Today Show, NPR's Fresh Air and Morning Edition and CBC's As It Happens.

Tony Kushner earned a bachelors degree from Columbia University and later did postgraduate work at New York University. In the early 1980s, he founded a theater group and began writing and producing plays. In the early 1990s, he scored a monster hit with the epic, seven-hour, two-part, Broadway blockbuster "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes" which earned Kushner a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, two Drama Desk Awards, the Evening Standard Award, two Olivier Award Nominations, the New York Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award and the LAMBDA Liberty Award for Drama.

Kushner has also written A Bright Room Called Day and Slavs!, as well as several adaptations including Goethe's Stella, Brecht's The Good Person of Setzuan, Corneille's The Illusion, and S. Ansky's The Dybbuk. His work has been produced at the Mark Taper Forum, the New York Shakespeare Festival, New York Theatre Workshop, Hartford Stage Company, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Los Angeles Theatre Center as well as theatres in over 30 countries across the globe. He is the recipient of a 1990 Whiting Foundation Writers Award and playwriting and directing fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Mr. Kushner is currently an adjunct faculty member of New York University's Dramatic Writing program.

Freida Lee Mock is an Academy Award®-winning filmmaker, a director, producer, and writer whose award-winning films include “Sing!” about a Los Angeles community-based children’s chorus; "Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision" (Academy Award Winner, Best Feature Documentary Film, 1995; Directors Guild of America Award nominee 1995); “Never Give Up: The 20th Century Odyssey of Herbert Zipper” (Academy Award® Nominee, Best Documentary Short Film, l996); “Return with Honor”; "Rose Kennedy: A Life To Remember,” and “Bird by Bird with Annie,” a portrait of the best-selling author and humorist Anne Lamott.

Nathan Englander was born in New York in 1970.  His short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories.  Englander’s story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, earned him a PEN/Malamud Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction.  He lives in New York City.

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in LA. Everywhere else he is an author and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. He writes the award-winning "Tommywood" column (www.tommywood.com) that appears in The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. Recently he served as American Film and TV editor of the 2nd Edition of The Encyclopedia Judaica.

Helena María Viramontes is the author of The Moths and Other Stories; Under the Feet of Jesus, a novel; and the co-editor, with Maria Herrera Sobek, of two collections: Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film and Chicana Creativity and Criticism.  Her latest novel, Their Dogs Came With Them, will be published by Atria Books in May2007.  The recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the 2006 Luis Leal Award and the John Dos Passos Award for Literature, her short stories and essays have been widely anthologized and her writings have been adopted for classroom use and university study. A community organizer and former coordinator of the Los Angeles Latino Writers Association, she is a frequent reader and lecturer in the U.S. and internationally.  Born and raised in East L.A., Viramontes now lives in Ithaca, New York, where she is Professor in the Department of English at Cornell University.

Manuel Muñoz is the author of The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, a collection of short stories, to be published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in May 2007.  Zigzagger, his first short-story collection, was published by  Northwestern University Press in 2003. He is the recipient of a Constance Saltonstall Foundation IndividualArtist's Grant in Fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship for 2006.  His work has appeared in many journals, including Rush Hour, Swink, Epoch, Glimmer Train, Edinburgh Review and Boston Review, and has aired on National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts.  A native of Dinuba, California, Manuel graduated from Harvard University and received his MFA in creative writing at Cornell University.  He now lives in New York City, where he is at work on a novel.

Jim Crace is the author of eight previous novels. Being Dead was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2000. In 1997, Quarantine was named the Whitbread Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Crace has also received the Whitbread First Novel Award, the E.M. Foster Award, and the Guardian Award. He lives in Birmingham, England.

David L. Ulin is book editor of the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. He has written for The Atlantic Monthly,The Nation, the New York Times Book Review, LA Weekly, Los Angeles, and National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."

Victoria Lewis is the founder of the Other Voices Project at the Mark Taper Forum (1982-2001), where for over twenty years she developed theatrical training and employment opportunities for the disability community including plays that challenged old notions of disability in drama and the media.