Ken Light has worked as a documentary photographer and filmmaker for over fifty years, focusing on social issues facing America. His books include Course of the Empire , What's Going On? 1969-1974 , Valley of Shadows and Dreams , Witness in Our Time , and Picturing Resistance . His work has been presented in over 250 exhibitions worldwide, and he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts photographers' fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts survey grant, and the Dorothea Lange Fellowship. Light is the Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Visit his website at kenlight.com. Ishmael Reed is an acclaimed multifaceted writer and author of ten novels, including Flight to Canada and Mumbo Jumbo , as well as plays and collections of essays and poetry. He was nominated for a National Book Award in both poetry and prose in 1972.

Conjure , a volume of poetry, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and his New and Collected Poems: 1964-2006 received a Gold Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California. Reed has also received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Blues Song Writer of the Year award from the West Coast Blues Hall of Fame, a Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the National Institute for Arts and Letters, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Reed taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for thirty-five years and currently lives in Oakland, California.