REYNA GRANDE
is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, Across A Hundred Mountains, for which she has received an American Book Award and El Premio Aztlan Literary Award. She was born in Mexico and raised by her grandparents after her parents left her behind while they worked in the U.S. Reyna came to the U.S. at the age of ten as an undocumented immigrant. She is a sought-after speaker and lecturer at middle/high schools, colleges and universities across the nation. Her second novel, Dancing with Butterflies, will be published in the spring of 2009.

www.reynagrande.com

WENDY JOHNSON
For more than thirty years, Wendy Johnson, one of the founders of the organic Farm and Garden Program at Green Gulch Zen Center in northern California, has been meditating and gardening at Green Gulch where the fields curve like an enormous green dragon between the hills and the ocean. Her long-awaited book, Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate, is part memoir of a passionate gardener, part master class in organic gardening and sustainable agriculture, and part meditation on the natural world. It was published as a Bantam Trade Paperback Original in March 2008.

www.gardeningatthedragonsgate.com

LAILA LALAMI
was born and raised in Morocco. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. She is the recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts grant and a Fulbright Fellowship. Laila was short-listed for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2006. Her debut collection of short stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, is about four Moroccans who cross the Straits of Gibraltar on a lifeboat in order to immigrate to Spain. Her new novel, Secret Son, will be published in April 2009.

www.lailalalami.com

JENNIFER 8. LEE
The daughter of Chinese immigrants and a fluent speaker of Mandarin Chinese, Jennifer graduated from Harvard in 1999. At the age of twenty-four, she was hired by The New York Times, where she is a metro reporter and has written a variety of stories on culture, poverty, and technology. In The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, Jennifer takes readers on a remarkable journey that is both foreign and familiar, penetrating this subculture by traveling the world (and almost every American state) in her quest to understand Chinese food and the people who make it.

www.fortunecookiechronicles.com

SANDRA TSING LOH
Sandra Tsing Loh, a writer and a performer, is the author most recently of Mother on Fire, a comic memoir of her struggle to find a school in Los Angeles for her child to attend. Her original off-Broadway solo stage version of Mother on Fire ran for seven months in Los Angeles. Sandra has been a regular commentator on NPR's Morning Edition and Ira Glass’s This American Life. American Public Media's Marketplace broadcasts her monthly segment, The Loh Down. She is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic Monthly.

www.sandratsingloh.com

ADINA NACK, PhD
Adina Nack’s first book, Damaged Goods? Women Living with Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases, has received rave reviews from experts in the field and is recognized as the first to explain how the stigma surrounding STDs can socially and psychologically harm those who are infected. Sharing her own human papillomavirus (HPV) story, as well as discussing her research, Nack has been featured in newspaper, radio and TV interviews. A respected medical sociologist and popular lecturer, she seeks to give voice to the millions of women living with genital herpes and HPV infections.

www.adinanack.com

ANN WRIGHT
spent thirteen years in the U.S. Army and sixteen additional years in the Army Reserves, retiring as a Colonel. On March 19, 2003, the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Ann Wright cabled a letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin Powell, stating that without the authorization of the UN Security Council, the invasion and occupation of a Muslim, Arab, oil-rich country would be a disaster. Since then, she has been writing and speaking out for peace. In Dissent: Voices of Conscience, Ann Wright and co-author Susan Dixon tell the stories of men and women who risked careers, reputations, and even freedom out of loyalty to the Constitution and the rule of law.

www.voicesofconscience.com