Adam Mansbach's novels include The End of the Jews, winner of the California Book Award and the best selling Angry Black White Boy, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005. His fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Believer, Granta, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. He was the 2010-2011 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University. His daughter, Vivien, is three.

Jenna Elfman is currently filming episodes of the award-winning television drama, Damages, with Glenn Close as well as a guest appearance on Showtime's Shameless. Her most recent film was 2011's Friends with Benefits. Elfman's past movies include Keeping the Faith, and Ron Howard's Edtv, among many others. She is best known for her role as Dharma in the hit series Dharma and Greg for which she garnered a Golden Globe Award, three Emmy Award nominations and two TV Guide Awards.

Attica Locke's widely acclaimed debut novel, Black Water Rising, was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, an Edgar Award, an NAACP Image Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in the UK. As a screenwriter, Locke wrote scripts for Paramount, Warner Bros, Disney, Twentieth Century Fox, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, and HBO. She was a fellow at the Sundance Institute's Feature Filmmakers Lab, and has served on the board of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. Her new novel, The Cutting Season, will be published in October of this year.

Ricardo Cortés has illustrated books about grass, jury duty, electricity, and the Jamaican bobsled team. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, New York magazine, the Village Voice, the San Francisco Chronicle, and on the O'Reilly Factor and CNN. He lives in Brooklyn, NY, where he is working on a book about a shark.

Photo: LAPL Photo collection