Joel Benenson, founder and CEO of Benenson Strategy Group, is the only Democratic pollster in history to have played a leading role in three winning presidential campaigns. He has been the chief pollster and a senior strategist for President Barack Obama since the beginning of his 2008 campaign, and worked on President Bill Clinton’s polling team during the 1996 race. Since founding Benenson Strategy Group in 2000, Joel has served as a strategist and consultant to heads of state, domestic political leaders at all levels, Fortune 100 CEOs, and leaders of major advocacy and nonprofit institutions.
Erwin Chemerinsky is the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at University of California, Irvine School of Law, with a joint appointment in Political Science. Prior to assuming this position in 2008, he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University from 2004-2008, and before that was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School. He is the author of ten books, including The Case Against the Supreme Court, published by Viking in 2014, and two books to be published by Yale University Press in 2017, Closing the Courthouse Doors: How Your Constitutional Rights Became Unenforceable and Free Speech on Campus (with Howard Gillman).
Elizabeth Loftus is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Social Behaviour and Professor of Law at UC Irvine. A cognitive psychologist who has worked extensively on human memory and its malleability, her research on the misinformation effect and eyewitness testimony has had a significant impact on both laboratory and law court. Loftus has provided expert witness testimony for many high-profile cases, including the McMartin preschool molestation case, the trial of Oliver North, and the trial of the officers accused in the Rodney King beating.
Jennifer Keller is one of California’s foremost trial lawyers. A fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, she has tried over 150 cases to jury verdict, ranging from complex civil matters — including business and intellectual property cases — to white collar to murder. She has received innumerable awards for excellence as a trial lawyer and excels at “bet the company” litigation.
Mike Murphy is a Republican political consultant who has advised Republicans including John McCain, Rick Lazio, John Engler, Tommy Thompson, Spencer Abraham, Christie Whitman, Lamar Alexander, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Until January 2006, he was an adviser to Mitt Romney. From 2015 to 2016, he also ran Jeb Bush’s political action committee, Right to Rise.
Adam Nagourney is the Los Angeles bureau chief for The New York Times. Before that, he served eight years as the chief national political correspondent. He is the author, with Dudley Clendinen, of “Out for Good,” a history of the modern gay rights movement.
Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times bestseller The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011; a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), and Bluets (Wave Books, 2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years). In 2016 she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. She has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught literature, writing, criticism and theory at the New School, Pratt Institute, and Wesleyan University. She has been on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts since 2005, and currently lives in Los Angeles.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s first book, Random Family, was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the winner of The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Ridenhour Book Prize. LeBlanc’s work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Esquire, Elle, Spin, The Source, The Village Voice, and other magazines. She lives in Manhattan.
Tom Lutz is the founder and editor of Los Angeles Review of Books. His books — Doing Nothing (American Book Award), Crying (New York Times Notable Book), Cosmopolitan Vistas (Choice Outstanding Academic Title), and American Nervousness, 1903 (New York Times Notable Book) — have been translated into 12 languages and have appeared on NYT and LAT bestseller lists. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New Republic, Chicago Tribune, Die Zeit, ZYZZYVA, Exquisite Corpse, Salon.com, Black Clock, and other newspapers and literary venues, as well as in dozens of books and academic journals. He has taught at Stanford University, University of Iowa, CalArts, University of Copenhagen, and now at UC Riverside.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s first novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Literary Excellence from the American Library Association, a California Book Award, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Fiction from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association. He is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford University Press, 2002) and the co-editor of Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (University of Hawaii Press, 2014). His current book is Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War from Harvard University Press (2016), a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. His next book is the short story collection The Refugees, forthcoming in February 2017 from Grove Press. Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, as well as a member of the steering committee for the Center for Transpacific Studies.
Nicholas Lemann joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1999, and has written the Letter from Washington and the Wayward Press columns for the magazine. He came to The New Yorker from The Atlantic Monthly, where, beginning in 1983, he was a national correspondent, writing about politics, education, business, social policy, and other topics. Previously, he was a writer and editor at the Washington Monthly, at Texas Monthly, and at the Washington Post. From 2003 to 2013, he served as the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he is now a faculty member. He is the author of the books “The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America,” “The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy,” and “Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War.”
Jed S. Rakoff is a federal judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. An Adjunct Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, Rakoff is a leading authority on the securities laws and the law of white collar crime, and has authored many articles on the topic, as well as leading treatises on RICO and corporate sentencing.
Bobby Grace is currently a Deputy District Attorney for the County of Los Angeles, working in the Major Crimes Unit. He is a frequent lecturer to law enforcement and community groups on both gang and domestic violence prosecutions, and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the UCLA Black Alumni Association.
Barbara Demick is a journalist who worked as the correspondent for Eastern Europe for the Philadelphia Inquirer before becoming the Beijing bureau chief for the LA Times. She is the author of two books, Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood and Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, the latter being nominated for a National Book Award.
Margaret Roberts is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC San Diego. Her work uses modern computer-assisted text analytic methods, and has been path-breaking in terms of providing a rigorous understanding of when and why the Chinese government censors online dialogue.
Olufunmilayo Arewa is a Professor of Law and Anthropology at UC Irvine, and Director of the Center on Africa and the Law. Her research focuses on intellectual property and business, with a primary focus on copyright and music. She has worked in legal and business capacities at law firms, startup companies and a venture capital firm, was an Economic Officer in the U.S. Foreign Service, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.
Pardis Mahdavi is an American Journalist and an associate professor of anthropology at Pomona College. Mahdavi’s research covers labor, migration, gender, sexuality, human rights, youth culture, transnational feminism and public health, specializing in the context of shifting political and global structures. Her global area of expertise is the Middle East, and she is also a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post.
Danzy Senna is the author of the national bestselling novel Caucasia, winner of the Book of the Month Award for First Fiction and the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Caucasia was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, was named a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and has been translated into eight languages. A recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, Ms. Senna is also the author of the novel Symptomatic, and the memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History, which she researched and wrote as a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Her latest work, a story collection, You Are Free, was recently published by Riverhead Books.
Barry Siegel, a Pulitzer Prize winning former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, directs the Literary Journalism Program at UC Irvine, where he is a professor of English. He is the author of seven books, including four volumes of narrative nonfiction and three novels set in imaginary Chumash County on the central coast of California. Most currently, he contributed a chapter, “Judging State Secrets: Who Decides–and How?” to the book After Snowden: Privacy, Secrecy, and Security in the Information Age, published by Thomas Dunne Books in May 2015.
Hector Tobar is a best-selling author and a New York Times contributing op-ed writer who has had a long career in journalism, including working for The New Yorker, LA Weekly, and many positions at the Los Angeles Times. He was a Metro columnist, a book critic, and the national Latino affairs correspondent for The Times as well as its bureau chief in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Tobar contributed to the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage of the Los Angeles riots of 1992. He is the author of four books, including the critically acclaimed, New York Times bestseller Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle That Set Them Free, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Ruth Franklin is a book critic and former editor at The New Republic. She has written for many publications, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and Salmagundi, to which she contributes a regular film column. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in biography, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a Leon Levy Fellowship in biography, and the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2011), was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Her new book is Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life.
David L. Ulin is the former book critic of the Los Angeles Times. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author or editor of nine books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, the novella Labyrinth, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, and the Library of America’s Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine, where he is also a Professor of Law, by courtesy, and Historical Writing Mentor for the Literary Journalism Program. His most recent books are, as author, China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (2013) and, as editor, The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China (forthcoming 2016). He has written for many magazines (such as Index on Censorship, Slate, and New Left Review) and a wide variety of newspapers, blogs, and journals of opinion. He regularly travels to Asia, is on the editorial board of Dissent magazine, and is the advising editor for China for the Los Angeles Review of Books.