Dorothy Allison

Dorothy Allison is the award-winning editor of the early feminist and Lesbian & Gay journals, Quest, Conditions, and Outlook. Dorothy is the author of several novels, including Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)-a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award and winner of the Ferro Grumley prize; Two or Three Things I Know For Sure (1995), and Cavedweller (1998)-which became a national bestseller, a New York Times Notable book of the year, a finalist for the Lillian Smith prize, and an American Literary Association prize winner. Her short story collection, Trash (1988), won two Lambda Literary Awards and the ALA Prize for Lesbian and Gay Writing. Her chapbook of poetry, The Women Who Hate Me, was published in 1983. She lives Northern California with her partner Alix and her teenage son, Wolf Michael, and has a forthcoming novel entitled, She Who.

Daniel Berger

Daniel Berger is a senior member of the Philadelphia law firm Berger & Montague, where he co-chairs the firm's antitrust department and leads the firm's employment discrimination practice area. He has published law review articles in the Yale Law Journal, the Duke University journal of Law and Contemporary Problems, the University of San Francisco Law Review and the New York Law School Law Review and worked with the American Law Institute/American Bar Association program on continuing legal education. He has been affiliated with the Kennedy School of Government through the Shorenstein Center of Media and Public Policy at Harvard University. He is currently a partner of the Democracy Alliance and extensively involved in progressive politics in this country on a national, state, and local level. He was a member of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council and is an author and journalist who has published in the Nation magazine and reviewed books for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Joan Bingham

Joan Bingham, Vice-President and Executive Editor at Grove/Atlantic Press, was instrumental in bringing The Atlantic Monthly Press and Grove Press together in 1993. In the mid-80s, she was a founder and editor of The Washington Weekly. Later, she became involved in human rights work, in Africa and Eastern Europe. A graduate of Connecticut College, she has a MA in history from Georgetown University. She has been a board member of PEN America and is now a member of their Advisory Committee. She is also an Advisory Committee member of the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children.

Duncan Black

Duncan B. Black has held teaching and research positions at the London School of Economics; the Université catholique de Louvain; the University of California, Irvine; and, recently, Bryn Mawr College. Black holds a PhD in economics from Brown University and is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America. He blogs under the name "Atrios" at atrios.blogspot.com.

Arthur I. Blaustein

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Arthur I. Blaustein is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches community development, public policy, and politics. His most recent books are Make a Difference: America's Guide to Volunteering and Community Service, and The American Promise: Justice and Opportunity. He served on the board of the National Endowment for the Humanities under Bill Clinton and was chair of the President's National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity under Jimmy Carter.

David Brock

Former conservative media insider and author of the New York Times best-seller Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, David Brock currently serves as President and CEO of Media Matters for America, a web-based, not-for-profit progressive research and information center dedicated to monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the media, which he founded in 2004. He is the author of four political books, most recently The Republican Noise Machine, Right-Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy, detailing the 30-year effort by the right-wing to establish a conservative media machine.

Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is the bestselling author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.

Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros is the author of seven books, including the short-story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (l991), which won the PEN Center West Award for Best Fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was selected as a noteworthy book of the year by The New York Times and The American Library Journal, and three collections of poetry, Bad Boys (1980), My Wicked Wicked Ways (1987) and Loose Woman (1994). Her two novels are The House on Mango Street (1983), which won the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award in 1985; and Caramelo (2002), which was selected as notable book of the year by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1995, she was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and subsequently organized the Latino MacArthur Fellows - "Los MacArturos" - into a reunion focusing on community outreach. She is also the president and founder of the Macondo Foundation, and the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, a grant-giving institution serving Texas writers. She studied English at Loyola University, and received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa.

Maureen Corrigan

Maureen Corrigan is Book Critic for NPR's Fresh Air. She teaches literature at Georgetown University. Corrigan's literary memoir, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading! was published in 2005. She is a reviewer and columnist for the Washington Post Book World. In addition to serving on the advisory panel of The American Heritage Dictionary, Corrigan has chaired the Mystery & Suspense judges' panel of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Jon Cowan

Jon Cowan is president and co-founder of Third Way, a non-profit strategy center for progressives. He has over 15 years experience at senior levels of progressive politics, including as a founder and president of three national advocacy groups, chief of staff of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, a senior congressional aide, a visiting fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics and co-author of a book on youth politics. He has appeared on Good Morning America, the Today Show, Nightline, 60 Minutes,; all of the national evening news shows and National Public Radio, and has had opinion pieces published in The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Mark Danner

Mark Danner has written about foreign affairs and American politics for more than two decades, covering Latin America, Haiti, the Balkans and the Middle East among other stories. He was for many years a staff writer at The New Yorker and contributes frequently to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and other publications. He teaches at the University of California at Berkeley and at Bard College and speaks and debates widely about America's role in the world.

Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and moved to the United States when she was twelve. She is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones , an American Book Award winner; and The Dew Breaker, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the first Story Prize. She is also the editor of The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States and The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Men and Women of All Colors and Cultures. Danticat earned a degree in French literature from Barnard College, where she won the 1995 Woman of Achievement Award, and later an MFA from Brown University. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.

Laura Dawn

Laura Dawn has been the Cultural Director for MoveOn.org and the MoveOn PAC since March 2004, and currently serves as the Creative Director for MoveOn.org. An innovative artist, activist& producer of progressive media, Laura has created national campaigns and organized artists, musicians, and filmmakers extensively for MoveOn and all MoveOn PAC projects. Most recently, Laura organized MoveOn.org's Video Vets program, culminating with a nationally broadcast TV ad featuring Iraq veteran John Bruhns, directed by Academy Award winning director Oliver Stone, produced by Laura Dawn and Michael Mailer of Mailer Films, and the 20 vets' video vignettes have been featured online. In 2006, Laura compiled and edited the book It Takes a Nation: How Strangers Became Family in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina, the story of MoveOn.org Civic Action's Hurricane Housing program.

Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers is the author of four previous books - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, How We are Hungry, and What is the What. He is the editor of McSweeney's, a quarterly magazine and book-publishing company, and is co-founder of 826 Valencia, a network of nonprofit writing and tutoring centers for young people. As a journalist, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Believer. In 2004 he co-taught a class at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, out of which grew the Voice of Witness series of books, designed to illuminate contemporary human crises through oral history. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and daughter.

Harold Evans

Harold Evans is the author of two critically acclaimed best-selling histories of America: The American Century and, most recently, They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators. He is currently working on an illustrated history of America's first 100 years, to complete his trilogy documenting 200 years of US political and business history. In London, he was the editor of The Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981, and editor of The Times from 1981 to 1982. Evans moved to America in 1984. He was the founding editor of Conde Nast Traveler magazine and President and Publisher of Random House Trade Group (1990-1997). From 1997 to1999 he was Editorial Director and Vice Chairman of U.S. News & World Report, the New York Daily News, The Atlantic Monthly and Fast Company. In 2001, British journalists voted him the greatest all-time British newspaper editor and, in 2004, he was honored with a knighthood in the Queen's 2004 New Year's Honors list. Evans is a Contributing Editor at U.S. News & World Report, and is editor at large of The Week magazine.

Jeff Faux

Jeff Faux founded the Economic Policy Institute in 1986, and made it into the country's leading think-tank on the political and economic issues that face working Americans. In 2003, he stepped down as EPI's president, and is now the Institute's Distinguished Fellow. Faux has studied, taught and published on a wide variety of economic and political issues from the global economy to neighborhood community development, from monetary policy to political strategy. He is the author or co-author of five books, the latest being, The Global Class War (Wiley, 2006). He has now started a new book on America's future.

Faux worked as an economist in the Departments of State, Labor and Commerce, a manager in the finance industry, a blueberry farmer, and a member of a municipal planning board in the State of Maine. He's been an advisor to governments, trade unions, businesses, political campaigns, and community organizations. He's lectured in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, sits on the boards of several of non-profit institutions and magazines, has written articles for numerous newspapers, magazines and journals, testified before Congress, and has appeared many times on television and radio.

Eric Foner

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, is one of the country's most prominent historians and received his doctoral degree at Columbia. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, American Historical Association, and Society of American Historians. He is a winner of the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates (1991), and the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching from Columbia University (2006). His books include Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War; Tom Paine and Revolutionary America; Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy; Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (winner, among other awards, of the Bancroft Prize, Parkman Prize, and Los Angeles Times Book Award); The Reader's Companion to American History (with John A. Garraty); The Story of American Freedom, and Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World.

Todd Gitlin

Todd Gitlin is the author of twelve books, including The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals; The Intellectuals and the Flag; Letters to a Young Activist; Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives (reissued in Fall 2007 with a new afterword); The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars; The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage; Inside Prime Time; The Whole World Is Watching; Uptown: Poor Whites in Chicago (co-author); two novels, the prize-winning Sacrifice and The Murder of Albert Einstein; and a book of poetry, Busy Being Born. These books have been translated into Japanese, Korean, Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. He also edited Watching Television and Campfires of the Resistance.

Hendrik Hertzberg

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at the New Yorker, where he frequently writes the opening Comment in the "Talk of the Town." He served as President Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter from 1979 until 1981. From 1981 until 1992 he was associated with he New Republic and served two terms as its editor. During his second stint as editor, between 1988 and 1992, he New Republic won three National Magazine Awards, including back-to-back awards for General Excellence. In 1992, he returned to the New Yorker, where he had first worked from 1969 to 1976. Hertzberg has been a fellow of two institutes at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government: the Institute of Politics and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. He is the author of Politics: Observations & Arguments (2004). In 2006, his Comment essays won a National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary.

Erica Jong

Erica Jong-novelist, poet, and essayist-has published 20 books, including eight novels, six volumes of poetry, and numerous articles in mainline magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times and the Sunday Times of London. In her first novel, Fear of Flying, she introduced the world to Isadora Wing, who also plays a central part in three subsequent novels. She has received the Bess Hokin Prize for Poetry, the United Nations Award for Excellence in Literature, The Victoria Woodhull Award for Ethical Leadership. She also established the Erica Jong Writing Fellows Fund to support a program at Barnard that teaches talented student writers to help other students improve their writing. In recognition of her importance as an author and public intellectual, Columbia University, her graduate Alma Mater, has acquired her literary archive. She serves on the board of the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, The Woodrow Wilson Foundation, The Authors Guild Council. She is a Past President of the Author's Guild. She currently blogs for The Huffington Post.

Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver is the author of twelve books, including The Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer. She has won major literary awards at home and abroad, and in 2000 she received the National Humanities Medal, our nation's highest honor for service through the arts.

George Lakoff

George Lakoff is the co-founder and Senior Fellow of the Rockridge Institute. A Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, he previously taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan. Dr. Lakoff has published a multitude of articles in major scholarly journals and edited volumes. He is the author of the influential book, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, Second Edition, (2002). His most recent books include Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values, Frame the Debate, Whose Freedom?, and Thinking Points.

Lewis Lapham

"Lewis H. Lapham is editor of Lapham's Quarterly. He also serves as editor emeritus and national correspondent for Harper's Magazine. Mr. Lapham is the author of numerous books, including Money and Class in America, Theater of War, Gag Rule, and, most recently, Pretensions to Empire. The New York Times has likened him to H.L. Mencken; Vanity Fair has suggested a strong resemblance to Mark Twain, and Tom Wolfe compared him to Montaigne. Mr. Lapham currently writes ""Notebook,"" a bi-monthly column for Harper's that won a National Magazine Award in 1995 for exhibiting ""an exhilarating point of view in an age of conformity."" He served two terms as editor of Harper's Magazine (1976-1981) and (1983-2006), and during those thirty years, the 157-year-old monthly won fourteen National Magazine Awards.

Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is the author of ten books about the environment and related issues. His first volume, The End of Nature, was also the first book for a general audience about global warming. Appearing in 1989, it has been translated into 24 languages. His most recent work, the national bestseller Deep Economy, appeared in spring of 2007. A scholar in residence at Middlebury College, McKibben led the organization of the largest protest rallies in American history about climate change earlier this year. He is the recipient of many honorary degrees, and a regular contributor to magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harpers, The New York Review of Books, and National Geographic.

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga served in the U.S. Army for three years and later earned two bachelors degrees from Northern Illinois University and a law degree from Boston University. After moving to California to work in the tech industry, Markos started DailyKos.com in May 2002. His blog has had a meteoric rise and now gets more than a million unique visitors each day, making it one of the most popular blogs in the nation. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Orlando Patterson

Orlando Patterson, a historical and cultural sociologist, is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Professor Patterson is the author of numerous academic papers, major academic books, and three novels, and he has published widely in journals of opinion and the national press, including the New York Times, Time magazine, Newsweek, the Public Interest, the New Republic, and the Washington Post. A public intellectual, Professor Patterson was, for eight years, Special Advisor for social policy and development to Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica. He was a founding member of Cultural Survival, one of the leading advocacy groups for the rights of indigenous peoples. He is the recipient of many awards, including the National Book Award for nonfiction, the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Association, and co-winner of the Ralph Bunche Award for the best book on pluralism from the American Political Science Association.

John Podesta

John Podesta is the president and chief executive officer of the Center for American Progress. Podesta served as Chief of Staff to President William J. Clinton from October 1998 until January 2001, where he was responsible for directing, managing, and overseeing all policy development, daily operations, Congressional relations, and staff activities of the White House. A frequent guest of Sunday morning news programs, Podesta is known for his straight talk, acerbic wit, and fierce defense of the Clinton Administration-which he also served from 1997 to 1998 as both an assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff. Earlier, from January 1993 to 1995, he was Assistant to the President, Staff Secretary and a senior policy adviser on government information, privacy, telecommunications security, and regulatory policy.

Robert Scheer

Robert Scheer has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. He has served as a national correspondent and contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times, writing on diverse topics such as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics, and the military and launched a nationally syndicated column. He has written several books, most recently, Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I and Clinton-and How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush. Scheer studied as a Maxwell fellow at Syracuse University and was a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley, where he did graduate work in economics. Scheer is a contributing editor for the Nation as well as a Nation Fellow. He has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.

Gail Sheehy

Gail Sheehy is the bestselling author of 15 books, including her original landmark work, Passages, named by a Library of Congress survey as one of the ten most influential books of our time. Her most recent book is Sex and the Seasoned Woman: Pursuing the Passionate Life. As a literary journalist, Sheehy was one of the original contributors to New York magazine. A contributing editor to Vanity Fair since 1984, she won the Washington Journalism Review Award for Best Magazine Writer in America for her in-depth character portraits of national and world leaders, including both Presidents Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Margaret Thatcher, Saddam Hussein, and Mikhail Gorbachev. Other honors include the National Magazine Award, the Penny-Missouri Journalism Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in race relations for her book, Spirit of Survival. She is one of the founders of the Women's Commission for Refugee Women.

Andy Stern

Andy Stern is the president of the 1.9 million member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the fastest-growing union in North America. As both a labor leader and an activist, Stern is a leading voice and aggressive advocate for practical solutions to achieve economic opportunity and justice for workers; to ensure affordable, quality health care for all; to promote quality public services; and to guarantee that globalization benefits not just big corporations but also working people. To that end, Stern has spearheaded bold new partnerships with community allies, employers, and other worker organizations, and he has helped elect officials of both major parties. Stern is the author of the book, A Country That Works (Free Press), which offers a fresh prescription for the vital political and economic reforms America needs to get back on track.

Katrina vanden Heuvel

Katrina vanden Heuvel is Editor and Publisher of The Nation. She is the co-editor of Taking Back America--And Taking Down The Radical Right (Nation Books, 2004). She is also co-editor (with Stephen F. Cohen) of Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev's Reformers (Norton, 1989) and editor of The Nation: 1865-1990, and the collection A Just Response: The Nation on Terrorism, Democracy and September 11, 2001. Her book, A Dictionary of Republicanisms, , was published in November 2005. She is a frequent commentator on American and international politics on ABC, MSNBC, CNN and PBS. Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Boston Globe. Her weblog for thenation.com is "Editor's Cut."

Jim Wallis

Jim Wallis is a bestselling author, public theologian, speaker, preacher, and international commentator on religion and public life, faith, and politics. His latest book is The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America (2008). His previous book, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It (2005), was on the New York Times bestseller list for 4 months. He is President and Chief Executive Officer of Sojourners, where he is editor-in-chief of Sojourners magazine. His columns appear in major newspapers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and he is a regular guest on such television shows as Meet the Press, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the O'Reilly Factor. He has written eight books, including Faith Works, The Soul of Politics, Who Speaks for God?, and The Call to Conversion. He lives in inner-city Washington, D.C. with his wife, Joy Carroll and their sons, Luke and Jack.

Amy Wilentz

Amy Wilentz is the author of The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier, Martyrs' Crossing, and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger. She is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, and also a 1990 nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Wilentz has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, the New Republic, Mother Jones, Harper's, Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel & Leisure, the San Francisco Chronicle, More, the Village Voice, the London Review of Books, and many other publications. She is the former Jerusalem correspondent of the New Yorker and a long-time contributing editor at the Nation. She teaches in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California at Irvine, and lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three sons.

Susan Ford Wiltshire

Susan Ford Wiltshire is author of Greece, Rome, and the Bill of Rights and of Seasons of Grief: A Sister's Story of AIDS, as well as other books in classics and poetry. Wiltshire contributed to Where We Stand: Voices of Southern Dissent in 2004. She was appointed for a six-year term by President Bill Clinton to the National Council on the Humanities and has been active since 1998 as a straight ally of Soulforce, Inc. She is a board member of the Tennessee Equality Project and a retired classics professor at Vanderbilt University.

Laura Miller

Laura Miller helped to co-found Salon.com in 1995 and is currently a staff writer at that publication. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the Last Word column for two years. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and many other publications. She is the editor of The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors (Penguin, 2000) and the author of The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia (Little, Brown, 2008). She lives in New York.