• Paul Farrell
• Catherine Ryan Hyde
• Robert Scheer
• Leigh Rubin
• Carolyn Marsden & Virginia Loh
• Mark London Williams
• Cecil Castellucci
• Todd Mack

Earlier, he was Executive Vice President of the Financial News Network; Executive Vice President of Mercury Entertainment Corp; Associate Editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner; developed the Mutual Fund Center for CBS MarketWatch.com; an investment banker with Morgan Stanley; head of the Crisis Management Group; and former USMC Staff Sgt. He has a Juris Doctor and a Doctorate in Psychology.

Dr. Farrell’s latest book is “The Millionaire Meditation” of which his website, www.PaulBFarrell.com, says: Do what you love. Anything. Anywhere. Forget sitting. Research says it doesn’t work for most. You tried, you know. And no gurus, you decide. This is a totally new approach to meditating: manage stress, get healthier, focus and increase productivity, sharpen your competitive edge, improve your game and your earning power, build wealth, enjoy some peace of mind. It’s easy, four simple rules. You can do it anywhere, any time, your way, doing whatever makes you happy, at work, at home, in sports, with friends, enjoying creative activities, helping people, serving your community. Yes, it works!

Pay It Forward, the movie (Warner Brothers), is currently in release. The book has been translated into 20 languages for publication in more than 30 countries, and was chosen among the Best Books for Young Adults 2001 by the American Library Association. The mass market paperback was released in October 2000 and quickly became a national bestseller. "Electric God" and "Walter’s Purple Heart" are optioned for film and currently in development, with Hyde retained to adapt "Walter’s Purple Heart". On April 21, 2005, Variety announced that Nicolas Cage has signed on to play Hayden Reese in the film adaptation of "Electric God", which will be produced by Mission Pictures and Cage’s Saturn Films, and directed by Mark Pellington.

More than 45 of her short stories have been published in Hayden's Ferry Review, Pearl, South Dakota Review, Vignette, The Amherst Review, Descant, The Crescent Review, The Laurel Review, Literal Latte, River Styx, High Plains Literary Review, Bellingham Review, Red Cedar Review, The Antioch Review, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Manoa, New Letters, Ploughshares and many other journals, and in the anthologies "Santa Barbara Stories" (John Daniel & Co., 1998) and "California Shorts" (Heyday Books, 1999). Her story “Bloodlines” was reprinted in the anthology "Dog is my Co-Pilot" (Crown, 2003). New short story publications include “Disappearances” in Glimmer Train and "Dancing With Elinor" forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review.

Two of her stories have been honored in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, “Love is Always Running Away” in 1994 and “Dante” in 1996. Her story “Red Texas Sky” was nominated for Best American Short Stories, the O'Henry Award, and a Pushcart Prize, and her story “Wednesday Man” was also nominated for Pushcart Prize XXII. She had six stories in consideration for Pushcart Prize XXIV: “The Last Younger Man,” nominated by Eureka Literary Magazine; “Five Singing Gardeners and One Dead Stranger,” nominated by Literal Latte; and four stories from "Earthquake Weather", nominated by Russian Hill Press. She received second place in the 1997 Bellingham Review Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction for “Breakage.” Her story “Castra"tion Humor” was cited as one of the 100 Other Distinguished Stories of 1998 in "Best American Short Stories 1999. Her story “Requiem for a Flamer” was nominated for Pushcart Prize XXVI by Quarterly West. Her stories “Bloodlines” and “The Man Who Found You in the Woods” were cited as two of the 100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2001 in "Best American Short Stories 2002".

She has served on the 1998 fiction fellowship panel of the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and on the editorial staff of the Santa Barbara Review. She has participated in the Central Coast Book & Author Festival since its inception in 2000. Each fall she teaches fiction workshops at the Cuesta College Writers' Conference, and has recently joined the Santa Barbara Writers Conference teaching staff. She is fiction editor of Central Coast Magazine, and currently writes full-time.

Robert Scheer, a journalist with over 30 years experience, has built his reputation on the strength of his social and political writing. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines.

As Scheer creates his weekly national and local columns, he draws upon a wealth of experience and knowledge. Between 1964 and 1969, he was Vietnam correspondent, managing editor and editor in chief of Ramparts magazine. From 1976 to 1993, he served as a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, where he wrote articles on such diverse topics as the Soviet Union, arms control, national politics and the military.

Scheer has interviewed every president from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush, and his profiles of them have shaped journalism history. Scheer developed close journalistic relationships with Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush I. His reporting on them had a tangible impact on national debate -- such as the eminent 1976 Playboy interview in which Jimmy Carter, the then-presidential candidate, admitted to lusting in his heart; and the 1980 interview with the L.A. Times, during which Bush I confessed to Scheer his dream of a "winnable nuclear war."

An accomplished author, Scheer has written six books including "Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death: Essays on the Pornography of Power"; "With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War" and "America After Nixon: The Age of Multinationals".

In his most recent book, "Playing President", Scheer offers an unparalleled insight into the presidential mind. Through both new writing and reprinted material, he analyzes each administration since Nixon, and including George W. Bush, offering insights that may surprise the reader -- particularly those with rigid preconceptions about the decision-making processes of our leaders. The volume also includes Scheer's famous presidential interviews, along with previously unpublished interview transcripts and select previous writings.

Scheer covered presidential politics for the Los Angeles Times for thirty years. On Tuesday afternoons, he can be heard on the political radio program "Left, Right and Center" on KCRW, the National Public Radio affiliate in Santa Monica. He has also taught courses at Antioch College in San Francisco, New York City College, UC Irvine, UCLA and UC Berkeley. He is now a Senior Lecturer at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, where he teaches a course on media and society.

Over the years, Scheer has been honored for his work, including his coverage of the underprivileged and the welfare system. Recently, he was the 1998 honoree of the Shelter Partnership, an organization of Los Angeles downtown businesses, and the USC School of Social Work's Los Amigos award recipient. He has also received awards and citations from Stanford University, the Moscow Academy of Sciences, UC San Diego and Yale University.

Scheer was raised in the Bronx where he attended public schools and graduated from City College of New York. He 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 has also been a Poynter fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.

Maybe you could call Leigh Rubin a sit-down comedian. But whatever you call him, he’s just gratified to have the opportunity to make other people laugh. With his cartoon panel, Rubes, in hundreds of newspapers across the country and gracing millions of greeting cards, mugs and T-shirts, Rubin has plenty of opportunities.

Walk into almost any gift shop, and you'll probably see a bevy of Rubes cards. And, ironically, the inspiration to create a new cartoon panel hit Rubin while he was surrounded by just such a collection of greeting cards. “It was 1978, and I was walking through the card section of a pharmacy,” Rubin said. “I just stopped in my tracks, looked at the cards and thought, 'Wait a minute. I can do that.’”

And so he did. Rubin took his first steps on the path to cartoon success in 1979, establishing Rubes Publications, his own publishing company, and distributing his own greeting cards. He began publishing the popular Notable Quotes in 1981.

Rubes, in the form that cartoon aficionados now know it, began appearing in newspapers in 1984 and the first paperback collection of Rubes was published in late 1988 by G.P. Putnam & Sons. His most recent series of books include The Wild Life of…Love, Cats, Dogs, Pets, Cows and Farm Animals.

Originally self-syndicated, Rubes is now distributed by Creators Syndicate to more than 400 newspapers worldwide. As one of the most popular single-panel cartoons, Rubes is a regular feature in SkyWest’s United Express and Delta Connections magazines. Rubes appears in major daily metropolitan papers such as the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the Winnipeg Free Press, the Washington Times, the Sacramento Bee, the Houston Chronicle, the Orange County Register, and the Los Angeles Daily News.

In “The Jade Dragon,” Ginny is sure the new girl in her second-grade class will be her best friend. After all, Stephanie is Chinese, just like Ginny. But Ginny soon discovers some puzzling things about Stephanie: she doesn't like Chinese food, she hates her straight black hair, and even more surprisingly, her parents are not Chinese. At Ginny's house, MaMá cooks delicious Chinese dishes as the family prepares for their big holiday party and Stephanie spies Ginny's most prized possession -- a hand-carved jade dragon -- and asks to take it home. Much as Ginny yearns for a best friend, is it worth the risk of losing her special keepsake and angering MaMá? Drawing on Virginia Loh's real life story, the authors poignantly capture Ginny's dilemma as she navigates with difficulty between her culture and her friendship

The Danger Boy books aren't just about history," says Mark London Williams about his middle-grade time-travel novels, an action-filled series dubbed "pulse quickening" by FAMILYFUN magazine. "Hopefully, the way the books are told speaks to a history of storytelling, too. With the reader's blessing, the stories also get unstuck from those histories, roam back and forth in time, make a little trouble."

Danger Boy: The year is 2019, and a secret government agency is forcing Eli Sands's dad to continue with his time-travel experiments, even though Eli's mom has just disappeared in one. Now Eli has a ridiculous code name - and a gravely important mission. In the newest adventure, “Danger Boy: Trail of Bones” he and his sidekicks pop up at the start of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804. Will the alarming discoveries they make signal a change in the course of history?

Cecil Castellucci is the author of “Boy Proof” and “The Queen of Cool.” She is also a film-maker who just completed her first independent feature film and is co-founder of the short-filmmaking club Alpha 60, which is dedicated to creative endeavors in film. She can be seen acting in her own and others' performance pieces and plays. She is also known as the singer/songwriter Cecil Seaskull, and was the lead Nerd in the band, Nerdy Girl.

“The Queen of Cool”: On the outside, Libby Brin is the most popular girl in school. She has the coolest friends, the hottest boyfriend, the trendiest clothes, and the hippest parents. But on the inside, Libby is dying - of boredom. In a moment of desperation, Libby signs up for an internship at the L.A. Zoo, much to the dismay of her friends, who’d prefer she spend her time with them, shopping, partying, and making fun of everyone else. To Libby, the zoo gig seems like something, anything, different to do, even if it means she has to work with two nerds - Tina (aka "Tiny"), a little person and aspiring actress, and Sheldon, an introverted boy with a brilliant, inquiring mind. But what happens when Libby realizes she actually enjoys working at the zoo and may even like Tina and Sheldon? Will the Queen of Cool be forced to give up her crown?