<h4>Tom Zoellner is the author of five nonfiction books, including Train: Riding the Rails that Created the Modern World. He is the co-author of The New York Times bestselling book An Ordinary Man, and his book Uranium won the 2011 Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, Time, Foreign Policy, Departures, The Wall Street Journal, Men’s Health, the Oxford American, and many other places. A professor of English at Chapman University, he lives in Downtown Los Angeles.</h4>

Tom Zoellner

Photo by Aaron Salcido

Lynell George is a Los Angeles based journalist and essayist. Currently an arts and culture columnist for KCET’s Artbound, she has had a long career in LA journalism as staff writer for both the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly — focusing on social issues, human behavior and identity politics as well as visual arts, music and literature. She has taught journalism at Loyola Marymount University and is also a Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities Fellow and a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow (2013). She is also the author of No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels (Verso/Doubleday), a collection of features and essays drawn from her reporting.

Lynell George

Stanton Hall

Richard Thompson

Charles McNulty is a writer and critic in Los Angeles.

Charles McNulty

<h4>Janet Fitch is a Los Angeles native and the author of&nbsp;White Oleander&nbsp;and&nbsp;Paint It Black. Her latest novel is a two-part epic, The Revolution of Marina M. and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral.</h4>

Janet Fitch

<h4>Steve Wasserman, former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, is editor-at-large for Yale University Press.</h4>

Steve Wasserman

<h4>Ted Gioia writes on music, books and popular culture. His latest book is The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire.</h4>

Ted Gioia

Andy Hermann

Joe Donnelly, an award-winning journalist and short-story writer, is currently Assistant Visiting Professor of English and Journalism at Whittier College. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

Joe Donnelly

Bill Holdship

Tony Ortega

Tim Appelo

Dean Kuipers writes on the environment, art and politics and is the author of the new memoir, The Deer Camp. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Playboy, the Los Angeles Times, Outside, and many other publications. He lives in Los Angeles.

Dean Kuipers

Alissa Quart

Robert George

Willis Peter Bilderback earned his PhD from the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, and is the author of The Caveman and the Machine: An Analysis of the American Musical Film, 1929–1935 (2009).

Willis Peter Bilderback

Jeff Turrentine is an&nbsp;environmental journalist based in&nbsp;Brooklyn, NY.

Jeff Turrentine

Dana Gioia is an award-winning poet. Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia is a native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent. He received a B.A. and a M.B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. In 2015 Gioia was appointed the State Poet Laureate of California by Governor Jerry Brown. Gioia has published five full-length collections of poetry, most recently <a href="http://danagioia.com/book/99-poems-new-selected/">99 Poems: New &amp; Selected</a>. His poetry collection, <a href="http://danagioia.com/wp/book/interrogations-at-noon/">Interrogations at Noon</a>, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia’s 1991 volume <a href="http://danagioia.com/wp/book/can-poetry-matter-essays-on-poetry-and-american-culture/">Can Poetry Matter?</a>, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture. In 2014 he won the Aiken-Taylor Award for lifetime achievement in American poetry. Gioia’s many literary anthologies include Twentieth-Century American Poetry, 100 Great Poets of the English Language, The Longman Anthology of Short Fiction, Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, and Literature for Life. His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and The Hudson Review. Gioia has written three opera libretti and is an active translator of poetry from Latin, Italian, and German. In 2011 Gioia became the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California where he teaches each fall semester. In 2015 Gioia was appointed the State Poet Laureate of California by Governor Jerry Brown.

Dana Gioia

Remembering Scott Timberg

"There is only one thing that can kill the Movies, and that is education." — Will Rogers