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.

Michael Silverblatt is creator, host and producer of KCRW's literary talk show Bookworm, which began in 1989. The program has attracted such literary heavyweights as E.L. Doctorow, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Gore Vidal, Salman Rushdie and Susan Sontag.

Bernard Cooper has published several memoirs and novels. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is currently the art critic for the Los Angeles Magazine. His most recent book is The Bill From My Father: A Memoir. Katherine Dunn's prize-winning boxing journalism has appeared in many publications, from The Ring and KO Magazine to Vogue and Playboy. She is currently an associate editor of cyberboxingzone.com. Dunn's novel Geek Love was a 1989 National Book Award finalist; her latest book is One-Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing.

Geoff Dyer is the author of several fiction and nonfiction books, including But Beautiful, which was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize, and Out of Sheer Rage, a National Book Critics Circle finalist. His latest novel is Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. He lives in London.

Pico Iyer, a previous finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, is the author of the national best seller The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. He is an author of seven works of nonfiction and two novels.