Danielle Fernandes Dominique Schuelein-Steel is an American writer, best known for her romance novels. She is the bestselling author alive and the fourth bestselling fiction author of all time, with over 800 million copies sold. She has written 179 books, including over 146 novels.
Mario Gianluigi Puzo was an American author, screenwriter, and journalist. He is known for his crime novels about the Italian-American Mafia and Sicilian Mafia, most notably The Godfather (1969), which he later co-adapted into a trilogy directed by Francis Ford Coppola. He received the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the first film in 1972 and Part II in 1974. Puzo also wrote the original screenplay for the 1978 Superman film. His final novel, The Family, was released posthumously in 2001.
Willie Lewis Brown Jr. is an American politician of the Democratic Party. Brown served over 30 years in the California State Assembly, spending 15 years as its speaker. He later became mayor of San Francisco, and was the first African American to hold that office. The San Francisco Chronicle called Brown "one of San Francisco's most notable mayors", adding that he had "celebrity beyond the city's boundaries."
Randy Shilts was an American journalist and author. After studying journalism at the University of Oregon, he began working as a reporter for both The Advocate and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as for San Francisco Bay Area television stations. In the early 1980s, he was noted for being the first openly-gay reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. His first book The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk was a biography of LGBT activist Harvey Milk.
David Talbot is an American journalist, author and media executive. He is the founder, former CEO and editor-in-chief of an early web magazine, Salon. Talbot founded Salon in 1995. The magazine gained a large following and broke several major national stories. It was described by Entertainment Weekly as one of the Net's "few genuine must-reads".
DMZ is an American comic book series written by Brian Wood, with artwork by Wood and Riccardo Burchielli. The series is set in the near future, where a Second American Civil War has turned the island of Manhattan into a demilitarized zone (DMZ), caught between forces of the United States of America and secessionist Free States of America.
Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports is a bestselling non-fiction book published on March 23, 2006 and written by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle. When Sports Illustrated released excerpts from the book on March 7, it generated considerable publicity because the book chronicles alleged extensive use of performance-enhancing drugs, including several different types of steroids and growth hormones, by San Francisco Giants outfielder Barry Bonds.
Julie Orringer, is an American writer and lecturer. She attended Cornell University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She was born in Miami, Florida and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, fellow writer Ryan Harty. She is a recipient of the Plimpton Prize, among others.
David K. Shipler is an American author. He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction in 1987 for Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. He also wrote the book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America. Formerly, he was a foreign correspondent of The New York Times. He has taught at many colleges and universities. Since 2010, he has published the electronic journal, The Shipler Report.
The Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in the Ventana Wilderness area of the Los Padres National Forest, southeast of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, is the oldest Japanese Buddhist Sōtō Zen monastery in the United States. The Center is very isolated, more than 16 miles (26 km) from the nearest paved road, and only accessible via a narrow, steep, one-lane dirt road. During the winter months, practitioners live alone on site. During the summer months, the Center is opened to day and overnight guests. The hot springs have been developed into Japanese-style baths. It is the first Zen monastery established outside Asia.
Jon Evans is a Canadian novelist, journalist, adventure traveler, and software engineer.
Phil Bronstein is an American journalist and editor. He serves as executive chair of the board for the Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley, California. He is best known for his work as a war correspondent and investigative journalist. In 1986, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the fall of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Later, he held leadership positions with The San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Chronicle, and Hearst Newspapers Corporation.
Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh is an American sociologist and urban ethnographer. He is a professor of sociology and African-American studies at Columbia University. In September 2016, he took a position at Facebook. He was a board member at Philadelphia-based nonprofit Public/Private Ventures until it disbanded on 31 July 2012. In his work, Venkatesh has documented criminal gangs and the drug trade, and has written about the dynamics of the underground economy including street prostitution, contributing his findings to the research of economics professor Steven Levitt.
Julia Scheeres is a journalist and nonfiction author. Born in Lafayette, Indiana, Scheeres received a bachelor's degree in Spanish from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a master's in journalism from the University of Southern California. Now living and working in San Francisco, California, she has been a contributor to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Wired News, and LA Weekly. She is a 2006 recipient of the Alex Awards.
Craig Barron is an American visual effects artist, currently Creative Director at Magnopus, a Los Angeles media company that produces augmented and virtual-reality experiences.
Barnaby Conrad III is an American author, artist, and editor.
A ridesharing company is a company that, via websites and mobile apps, matches passengers with drivers of vehicles for hire that, unlike taxicabs, cannot legally be hailed from the street.
Robin Sloan is an American author. His debut novel, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, is about a laid-off Silicon Valley tech worker who begins working at a dusty bookstore with very few customers, only to start discovering one secret after another. The mysterious old books, along with the store's owner, lead to a 500‑year‑old secret society.
Robert Saleh is an American football coach who is the defensive coordinator for the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League (NFL). He previously has served as an assistant coach for the Jacksonville Jaguars, Seattle Seahawks and Houston Texans.
Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth is a 2018 non-fiction book by American journalist Sarah Smarsh. The book contains events from her life and the lives of her relatives, and it focuses on cycles of poverty and social class in the U.S. state of Kansas. Heartland was a finalist for the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2018.
