George Packer is a US journalist, novelist, and playwright. He is best known for his writings for The New Yorker and The Atlantic about U.S. foreign policy and for his book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. Packer also wrote The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, covering the history of the US from 1978 to 2012. In November 2013, The Unwinding received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His award-winning biography, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, was released in May 2019. His latest book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal was released in June 2021.
New Journalism is a style of news writing and journalism, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, that uses literary techniques unconventional at the time. It is characterized by a subjective perspective, a literary style reminiscent of long-form non-fiction. Using extensive imagery, reporters interpolate subjective language within facts whilst immersing themselves in the stories as they reported and wrote them. In traditional journalism, the journalist is "invisible"; facts are meant to be reported objectively.
John Francisco Rechy is a Mexican-American novelist and essayist. His novels are written extensively about gay culture in Los Angeles and wider America, among other subject matter. City of Night, his debut novel published in 1963, was a best seller. Drawing on his own background, he has contributed to Mexican-American literature, notably with his novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, which has been taught in several Chicano studies courses throughout the United States. But, even after the success of his first novel, he still worked as a prostitute, teaching during the day, and hustling at night. He worked as a prostitute into his forties while also teaching at UCLA. Through the 1970's and 1980's he dealt with personal drug use, as well as the AIDS crisis, which killed many of his friends.
Michael Dana Gioia is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist.
Alexander Stille is an American author and journalist.
Anthony Oliver Scott is an American journalist and cultural critic, known for his film and literary criticism. After starting his career at The New York Review of Books, Variety, and Slate, he began writing film reviews for The New York Times in 2000, and became the paper's chief film critic in 2004, a title he shared with Manohla Dargis. In 2023, he moved to The New York Times Book Review.
William Finnegan is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of works of international journalism. He has specially addressed issues of racism and conflict in Southern Africa and politics in Mexico and South America, as well as poverty among youth in the United States, and is well known for his writing on surfing.
Adam Haslett is an American fiction writer and journalist. His debut short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, and his second novel, Imagine Me Gone, were both finalists for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Berlin. In 2017, he won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Wanda Coleman was an American poet. She was known as "the L.A. Blueswoman" and "the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles".
James Timothy Hunt is an American-Canadian author and journalist. He has also written children's books under the pen name Tim Beiser.
Héctor Tobar is a Los Angeles author, novelist, and journalist, whose work examines the evolving and interdependent relationship between Latin America, Latino immigrants, and the United States. In 2023 he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction.
Andrew Ferguson is an American journalist and author.
Dean P. Baquet is an American journalist. He served as the executive editor of The New York Times from May 2014 to June 2022. Between 2011 and 2014 Baquet was managing editor under the previous executive editor Jill Abramson. He is the first Black person to have been executive editor.
Cathleen "Cathy" Scott is a Los Angeles Times and New York Times bestselling American true crime author and investigative journalist who penned the biographies and true crime books The Killing of Tupac Shakur and The Murder of Biggie Smalls, both bestsellers in the United States and United Kingdom, and was the first to report Shakur's death. She grew up in La Mesa, California and later moved to Mission Beach, California, where she was a single parent to a son, Raymond Somers Jr. Her hip-hop books are based on the drive-by shootings that killed the rappers six months apart in the midst of what has been called the West Coast-East Coast war. Each book is dedicated to the rappers' mothers.
Ted Gioia is an American jazz critic and music historian. He is author of eleven books, including Music: A Subversive History, The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire, The History of Jazz and Delta Blues. He is also a jazz musician and one of the founders of Stanford University's jazz studies program.
Richard Rayner is a British author who now lives in Los Angeles.
Jonah Richard Lehrer is an American author and blogger. Lehrer studied neuroscience at Columbia University and was a Rhodes Scholar. Thereafter, he built a media career that integrated science and humanities content to address broad aspects of human behaviour. Between 2007 and 2012 Lehrer published three non-fiction books that became best-sellers, and also wrote regularly for The New Yorker and Wired.com.
Randall Sullivan is an American author and journalist who has also worked as a screenwriter, film and television producer and on-camera television personality.
Fernanda Melchor is a Mexican writer best known for her novel Hurricane Season for which she won the 2019 Anna Seghers Prize and a place on the shortlist for the 2020 International Booker Prize.
Miles Corwin is a Los Angeles-based author and journalist who specializes in crime and the criminal justice system. Corwin is a recipient of the PEN Center USA Award for Creative Nonfiction for his book And Still We Rise. He is a professor in the Literary Journalism Program in the English Department at the University of California, Irvine.
