Margaret Moran Cho is an American stand-up comedian, actress, musician and activist. She is known for her stand-up routines, through which she critiques social and political problems, especially regarding race and sexuality. She rose to prominence after starring in the ABC sitcom All-American Girl (1994–95), and became an established stand-up comic in the subsequent years.
Vivian Vance was an American actress best known for playing Ethel Mertz on the sitcom I Love Lucy (1951–1957), for which she won the 1953 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress, among other accolades. She also starred alongside Lucille Ball in The Lucy Show from 1962 until she left the series at the end of its third season in 1965. In 1991, she posthumously received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She is most commonly identified as Lucille Ball’s longtime comedic foil from 1951 until her death in 1979.
Michelle Gilliam Phillips is an American singer, songwriter and actress. She rose to fame as a vocalist in the musical quartet the Mamas & the Papas in the mid-1960s. Her voice was described by Time magazine as the "purest soprano in pop music". She later established a successful career as an actress in film and television beginning in the 1970s.
Julia Anne Sweeney is an American actress and comedian. She gained fame as a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 1990 to 1994. She played Mrs. Keeper in the film Stuart Little and voiced Brittany in Father of the Pride. She recently appeared in the Hulu series Shrill, the Showtime series Work in Progress, and the Starz series American Gods.
Ayelet Waldman is an Israeli-American novelist and essayist. She has written seven mystery novels in the series The Mommy-Track Mysteries and four other novels. She has also written autobiographical essays about motherhood. Waldman spent three years working as a federal public defender and her fiction draws on her experience as a lawyer.
Doug Stanhope is an American stand-up comedian, author, actor, political activist and podcast host. His stand-up material favors caustic and often obscene observations of life in the style of Bill Hicks, which he delivers while consuming alcohol. Politically, he has favored libertarianism and once endorsed the Free State Project, a proposed political migration of at least 20,000 libertarians to a single low-population state to foster libertarian ideas.
Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American scholar of sociality, writer, and television host. A convert to evangelical Christianity from Shia Islam as a youth, Aslan eventually reverted to Islam but continued to write about Christianity. He has written four books on religion: No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, God: A Human History and in 2022 An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville.
Christopher Ryan Hardwick is an American comedian, actor, television and podcast host, writer, and producer. He hosts Talking Dead, an hourlong aftershow on AMC affiliated with the network's zombie drama series The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead, as well as Talking with Chris Hardwick, a show in which Hardwick interviews prominent pop culture figures, and The Wall, a plinko-inspired gameshow on NBC, Hardwick created Nerdist Industries, operator of the Nerdist Podcast Network and home of his podcast The Nerdist Podcast, which later left the network and was renamed to ID10T with Chris Hardwick. His podcast has broadcast 1,000 episodes as of December 2019.
The Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design is housed in the former home of Doris Duke near Diamond Head just outside Honolulu, Hawaii. It is now owned and operated as a public museum of the arts and cultures of the Islamic world by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art (DDFIA). Guided tours depart from the Honolulu Museum of Art, which operates the tours in co-operation with DDFIA.
Laleh Mehree Bakhtiar was an Iranian-American Islamic and Sufi scholar, author, translator, and psychologist. She produced a gender-neutral translation of the Quran, The Sublime Quran, and challenged the status quo on the Arabic word daraba, traditionally translated as "beat" — a word that she said has been used as justification for abuse of Muslim women. Her translation was the first translation of the Quran by an American woman.
Janeane Garofalo is an American comedian, actress, and former co-host on Air America Radio's The Majority Report.
Mark Moshe Kasher is an American stand-up comedian, writer and actor based in the Los Angeles area. He is the author of the 2012 memoir Kasher in the Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16. In 2009, iTunes named Kasher "Best New Comic" and his comedy album Everyone You Know Is Going to Die, and Then You Are! was ranked one of the top 20 comedy albums on iTunes that same year. He was also named "Comic to Watch in 2010" by Punchline Magazine.
Sikivu Hutchinson is an American author, playwright, director, and musician. Her multi-genre work explores feminism, gender justice, racial justice, LGBTQIA+ rights, humanism and atheism. She is the author of Humanists in the Hood: Unapologetically Black, Feminist, and Heretical (2020); White Nights, Black Paradise (2015); Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels (2013); Moral Combat: Black Atheists; Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (2011); and Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles (2003). Her plays include "White Nights, Black Paradise", "Rock 'n' Roll Heretic" and "Narcolepsy, Inc.". "Rock 'n' Roll Heretic" was among the 2023 Lambda Literary award LGBTQ Drama finalists. Moral Combat is the first book on atheism to be published by an African-American woman. In 2013 she was named Secular Woman of the year and was awarded Foundation Beyond Belief's 2015 Humanist Innovator award. She was also a recipient of Harvard's 2020 Humanist of the Year award.
Jane Postlethwaite is an queer English comedian, writer and actor. She is originally from Cumbria, England.
Alice Wong is an American disability rights activist based in San Francisco, California.
Marcella Arguello is an American comedian based in Los Angeles, California.
Karinda Dobbins is an American comedian. She co-produces the monthly comedy show The Resistance! alongside Dhaya Lakshminarayanan, has regularly opened for W. Kamau Bell, and additionally opened for Trevor Noah, Gina Yashere, Michelle Wolf, and Dave Chappelle. She has performed at festivals such as the Desi Comedy Fest, the Portland Queer Comedy Festival, Bridgetown Comedy Festival, and Comedy Central's Colossal Clusterfest. In 2019, SFist named her one of their 13 San Francisco Standup Comedians to Go See Now.
Ellen Sussman is a New York Times bestselling author of four novels. She was born in Trenton, New Jersey and resides in Sebastopol, California with her husband. Sussman's work features settings and characters from France to Bali to the United States. She lived in Paris from 1988 to 1993 with her first husband and two daughters.
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim is a comedy podcast hosted by two Muslim women about being a Muslim woman in America.
Demi Lardner is an Australian comedian based in Sydney. In 2013, she won Raw Comedy in Melbourne and went on to win So You Think You're Funny? in Edinburgh for her comedy set. She regularly streams on Twitch, and co-hosts the podcast bigsofttitty.png with her husband Tom Walker.
