Rebecca Solnit is an essayist, historian, and activist whose work focuses on issues of environment, landscape, and place. Her books include Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West, A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and the Mark Lynton History Prize, and Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.

David L. Ulin is a book critic for 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." His most recent book, The Lost Art of Reading, is due out this fall.