James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels -- The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz -- were international best-sellers. American Tabloid, was Time Magazine's novel of the year for 1995; his memoir, My Dark Places, was a Time Best Book and a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year for 2001. He lives in Los Angeles.

 

"Ms. Mora's poems are proudly bilingual, an eloquent answer to purists who refuse to see language as something that lives and changes," wrote The New York Times of Agua Santa: Holy Water, Pat's collection now reprinted by The University of Arizona Press. Last year Tucson Weekly Wrote that her sixth collection, Adobe Odes, also published by the University of Arizona Press, "turns its back on hopelessness and finds a way to delight in our everyday world of food, literature, nature, religion and yes, people." Her other poetry collections include Aunt Carmen's Book of Practical Saints, Communion, Borders, and Chants. Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle will be available in paperback in 2008. The Washington Post described Pat's acclaimed memoir, House of Houses, as a "textual feast...a regenerative act...and an eloquent bearer of the old truth that it is through the senses that we apprehend love." It will be republished by The University of Arizona Press in 2009.
Pat received Honorary Doctorates in Letters from North Carolina State University and SUNY Buffalo and is an Honorary Member of the American Library Association. Among her other awards are the 2006 National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award and a 2003 Civitella Ranieri Fellowship to write in Umbria, Italy. She was a Visiting Carruthers Chair at the University of New Mexico, a recipient and judge of the Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a recipient and advisor of the Kellogg National Leadership Fellowships.
The author of many award-winning children's books, Pat is the founder of the family literacy initiative El dia de los nios / El dia de los libros, Children's Day / Book Day ("Dia") , now housed at the American Library Association. The year-long commitment to linking all children to books, languages and cultures, of sharing what Pat calls "bookjoy," culminates in celebrations across the country on April 30th.
Pat is a popular national speaker shaped by the U.S.-Mexico border where she was born and spent most of her life. She is the mother of three grown children and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

 

Gerald Locklin has taught English since 1965 at California State University, Long Beach and is the author of over 125 books and chapbooks or poetry, fiction, and criticism, with over 3000 poems, stories, articles, reviews, and interviews published in periodicals. His full-length books from Water Row Press include Candy Bars: Selected Stories; The Life Force Poems; Go West, Young Toad: Selected Writings; The Pocket Book: A Novella and Nineteen Short Fictions; and Charles Bukowski: A Sure Bet. An Italian edition of his novel Down and Out (Event Horizon Press) has recently been published by Leconte Publishersin Rome as Piu Morto che Vivo, and other titles from EH include The Firebird Poems; Three Mid-Century Tales; Hemingway Colloquium: The Poet Goes to Cuba; and The First Time He Saw Paris (in Two Novellas, with Donna Hilbert). A series of dos-a-dos jazz chapbooks, with Mark Weber, are available from Zerx Press (Albuquerque, NM). His writings are archived and indexed by the Special Collections of the CSULB library. Many early and rare works are available from Water Row Books, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com. He is listed in the usual literary directories. He publishes regularly in 5 AM, Ambit (London), Tears in the Fence (Dorset), Poetry International, New York Quarterly, Nerve Cowboy, Slipstream, Freefall, Coagula Art Journal, and many other periodicals.

 

Evan Handler's acting career began nearly thirty years ago, when he was in his late teens. An actor on stage, screen and television, Handler is also an author, screenwriter, journalist, and outspoken long-term cancer survivor. This May, Handler returns to bookstores with IT'S ONLY TEMPORARY: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive (on-sale May 1; $24.95) and to movie theaters with the highly anticipated big screen version of Sex and the City. Shortly thereafter, Handler will again be starring with David Duchovny in Season 2 of Showtimes hit series Californication.
Handler reprises his role as Harry Goldenblatt, husband to Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) in New Line's highly anticipated Sex and the City: The Movie. Written and Directed by Michael Patrick King, the film is scheduled for a May 29 release.
On television, Handler stars on Californication as Charlie Runkle, the best friend and agent to David Duchovny's Hank Moody. The show (Showtimes highest debuting comedy ever) will return for a second season this summer. Past television credits include starring roles on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Sex and the City, and It's Like, You Know as well as prominent guest starring appearances on Lost, The West Wing, and Six Feet Under. He also starred as Stooge Larry Fine in the 2000 ABC movie The Three Stooges.
A seasoned theater actor, Handler is a veteran of seven Broadway shows six of them performed before his 30th birthday including the world premiere production of Six Degrees of Separation, Neil Simon's Brighton Beach trilogy, and I Hate Hamlet, which he quit mid-performance after being assaulted by a sword-wielding co-star. Handler's self-authored 1993 solo autobiographical show Time On Fire received critical acclaim and ran to sold-out audiences off-Broadway in New York and in Los Angeles.
Handler's big screen successes have spanned co-starring roles as one of the kidnappers in Ron Howard's Ransom, to the seminal early eighties blockbuster Taps. Additional credits include Sweet Lorraine, Dear Mr. Wonderful, and Oliver Stones Natural Born Killers and The Chosen.
Handler has written assignments for national publications such as The New Yorker, Elle, Mirabella, USA Weekend, and O, The Oprah Magazine. He divides his time between New York and Los Angeles.

 

W. Bruce Cameron is a nationally syndicated columnist and the author of 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, which was the basis for the television show 8 Simple Rules on ABC, now syndicated nightly on ABC Family. He is also the author of How to Remodel a Man and is the two-time winner of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists Award for best humor columnist and the winner of the 2006 Robert Benchley Award.

8 SIMPLE RULES FOR MARRYING MY DAUGHTER is soon to be a major motion picture produced by Wendy Finerman Productions and 26 Films.

 

Brian Murray Fagan is an author of popular archaeology books as well as being emeritus professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, U.S..
Professor Brian M. Fagan was born in England. He received his childhood education at Rugby School. He attended Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he studied archaeology and anthropology (BA 1959, MA 1962, PhD 1965). He spent six years as Keeper of Prehistory at the Livingstone Museum in Zambia, Central Africa, and moved to the U.S.A. in 1966. He was Visiting Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, in 1966/67, and was appointed Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1967.
Prof. Fagan is an archaeological generalist, with expertise in the broad issues of human prehistory. He is the author or editor of 46 books, including seven widely used undergraduate college texts. Prof. Fagan has contributed over 100 specialist papers to many national and international journals. He is a Contributing Editor to American Archaeology and Discover Archaeology magazines, and formerly wrote a regular column for Archaeology Magazine. He serves on the Editorial Boards of six academic and general periodicals and has many popular magazine credits, including Scientific American and Gentleman's Quarterly. Prof. Fagan has been an archaeological consultant for many organizations, including National Geographic Society, Time/Life, Encyclopdia Britannica, and Microsoft Encarta. He has lectured extensively about archaeology and other subjects throughout the world at many venues, including the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the National Geographic Society, the San Francisco City Lecture Program, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Getty Conservation Institute. In addition to extensive experience with the development of Public Television programs, Prof. Fagan was the developer/writer of Patterns of the Past, an NPR series in 1984-86. He has worked as a consultant for the BBC, RKO, and many Hollywood production companies on documentaries. In 1995 he was Senior Series Consultant for Time/Life Television's "Lost Civilizations" series. Prof. Fagan was awarded the 1996 Society of Professional Archaeologists' Distinguished Service Award for his "untiring efforts to bring archaeology in front of the public." He also received a Presidential Citation Award from the Society for American Archaeology in 1996 for his work in textbook, general writing and media activities. He received the Society's first Public Education Award in 1997.
Fagan is critical of non-traditional archaeology, and has written scathing reviews of rivals outside academia. His own stance, that archaeology should remain a compendium of material facts, is influential within the field. This view permits Fagan's well-known textbooks to skirt issues that are controversial or political, including issues regarding gender, migration, and pre-Columbian oceanic voyages. His expository style is a departure from the kind of serious theoretical questioning of an earlier generation of archaeologist, particularly the pre-World War II generation of archaeologists, whose work he encompasses, but whose theoretical leanings he ignores. Critics of Fagan, therefore, point to his similarity with later members of the Boasian school of anthropology, who were more interested in tracking objects on a grid than in explaining similarities among objects found in various places, or denoting how notions of similarity were to be constructed.
Fagan appeared on The Daily Show on March 17th, 2008 to discuss 'climate change and its impact on human history.'

 

Mark Juergensmeyer is director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, professor of sociology, and affiliate professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an expert on religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian religion and politics, and has published more than two hundred articles and twenty books, including the recently-released Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State (University of California Press 2008). His widely-read Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press, revised edition 2003), is based on interviews with religious activists around the world--including individuals convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, leaders of Hamas, and abortion clinic bombers in the United States--and was listed by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best nonfiction books of the year. A previous book, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (University of California Press, 1993) covers the rise of religious activism and its confrontation with secular modernity. It was named by the New York Times as one of the notable books of the year. His book on Gandhian conflict resolution has been reprinted as Gandhi's Way (University of California Press, Updated Edition, 2005), and was selected as Community Book of the Year at the University of California, Davis. He has edited the Oxford Handbook of Global Religion (Oxford University Press 2006) and Religion in Global Civil Society (Oxford University Press 2005), and is co-editing The Encyclopedia of Global Religions (Sage Publications 2008) and The Encyclopedia of Global Studies (Sage Publications 2009). His 2006 Stafford Little Lectures at Princeton University, God and War, will be published by Princeton University Press.
Juergensmeyer has received research fellowships from the Wilson Center in Washington D.C., the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the 2003 recipient of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for contributions to the study of religion, and is the 2004 recipient of the Silver Award of the Queen Sofia Center for the Study of Violence in Spain. He received an Honorary Doctorate from Lehigh University in 2004, a Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2006, and the Unitas Distinguished Alumnus Award from Union Theological Seminary, New York, in 2007. He was elected president of the American Academy of Religion, and chairs the working group on Religion and International Affairs for the national Social Science Research Council. Since the events of September 11 he has been a frequent commentator in the news media, including CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR, Fox News, ABC's Politically Incorrect, and CNBC's Dennis Miller Show.

 

Diana M. Raab , MFA is a memoirist, essayist and poet. She teaches memoir, journaling and poetry in the UCLA Writers Program and the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. She also narrates and teaches workshops around the country.
She writes a monthly column called, "My Muse" for Inkbyte.com, an online magazine for writers. She is also an active Friend of Poets and Writers. Diana has been writing from an early age. As an only child of two working parents, she spent a lot of time crafting letters and keeping a daily journal. In university she studied journalism, health administration and nursing, all serving as platforms for her years as a medical and self-help writer. Raab's book, Getting Pregnant and Staying Pregnant: Overcoming Infertility and High-Risk Pregnancy (Hunter House, 1988) won the Benjamin Franklin Book Award for Best Health and Wellness Book in 1992. The book has been translated into French and Spanish and was also published in England. The 20th anniversary edition will be released in 2009.
Raab's memoir, Regina's Closet: Finding My Grandmother's Secret Journal (2007) won the National Indie Excellence Award for Memoir and was the recipient of many other honors.
Raab's work has been published in numerous literary magazines and has been widely anthologized. She has one poetry chapbook, My Muse Undresses Me and one poetry collection, Dear Anais: My Life in Poems for You (Fall, 2008). She's editor of a forthcoming anthology, Writers and Their Notebooks which is a collection of essays written by well-known writers who journal, including Sue Grafton, Kim Stafford, Dorianne Laux, John DuFresne, James Brown and Michael Steinberg, to name a few. The foreword is written by the world-renowned personal essayist, Phillip Lopate.