The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books began in 1996 with a simple goal: to bring together the people who create books with the people who love to read them. The festival was an immediate success and has become the largest and most prestigious book festival in the country, attracting more than 130,000 book lovers each year.

Meghan Daum is an opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times and the author of the best-selling essay collection My Misspent Youth and the critically acclaimed novel The Quality of Life Report. Her third book, a work of nonfiction about real estate and identity, is due out from Knopf in 2010.

Michael McLeod is a writer, producer and director who has created documentaries for PBS including Frontline, the Discovery Channel and others. McLeod is the author of Anatomy of a Beast: Obsession and Myth on the Trail of Bigfoot.

Geoff Nicholson is the author of 12 novels, including Bleeding London, which was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize and Flesh Guitar. His short stories are widely published, and four of his novels have been optioned for film. Nicholson's latest work is a nonfiction book titled The Lost Art of Walking.

David Wild, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, is a music, film and TV journalist as well as an Emmy-nominated television writer. He is the author of He Is ... I Say: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond.