<h4>John Francis Rechy is an American author. He is the recipient of PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award and The Publishing Triangle’s William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. Among the pioneers of modern LGBT literature, Rechy is the author of over a dozen novels, nonfiction books, and plays, and has written essays for The Nation, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, The Saturday Review, New York Times Book Review, San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Dallas Morning News, London Magazine, Evergreen Review, New York Magazine, The Advocate, Mother Jones, Premiere, and many other national publications.</h4>

John Rechy

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

Lisa See is an American novelist and writer. Her books include On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family (1995) and the novels Flower Net (1997), The Interior(1999), Dragon Bones (2003), Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Peony in Love (2007), Shanghai Girls (2009), Dreams of Joy (2011), and China Dolls (2014). She is the daughter of novelist and critic Carolyn See and lives in Los Angeles.

Lisa See

<h4>Susan Straight is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at University of California, Riverside. Her latest novel is Between Heaven and Here.</h4>

Susan Straight

Ron Charles is a book critic at The Washington Post.

Ron Charles

Laurence Goldstein is the author of Poetry Los Angeles: Reading the Essential Poems of the City (University of Michigan Press, 2014), For 32 years (1977-2009) he served as editor of Michigan Quarterly Review.

Laurence Goldstein

<h4>Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of the Jewish Journal. He is the author of, most recently, The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat and a Murder in Paris (Liveright).</h4>

Jonathan Kirsch

In Memoriam: Carolyn See

A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz

An Individual Miracle

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

Radiant Truths

This We Believe

Irvin Yalom, interviewed by Jonathan Kirsch

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of the Jewish Journal. He is the author of, most recently, The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat and a Murder in Paris (Liveright).