Robert (Bob) E. Johnson has lived in Berkeley for over 30 years. For the past twenty years, Bob has led group walking tours for groups such as Greenbelt Alliance (of which he is a board member), Berkeley Path Wanderers Association, the Berkeley Historical Society, and Bay Nature magazine.

Lisa Alvarez is a professor of English at Irvine Valley College. Her poetry and prose has appeared in numerous literary journals. Alvarez coedited Writer’s Workshop in a Book: The Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction with Alan Cheuse and Orange County: A Literary Field Guide with Andrew Tonkovich. She codirects the annual Community of Writers summer conference in Olympic Valley, California, and lives in Modjeska Canyon.

Mick LaSalle is the film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. In the late 1990s he was the on-air film critic for the ABC-TV affiliate in San Francisco, KGO. He is the author of three previous books: Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood, a history and critical study of the actresses who worked during the pre-censorship era of 1929–1934; Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man; and The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn from Contemporary French Actresses. He wrote and coproduced the Complicated Women documentary for Turner Classic Movies, which was narrated by Jane Fonda. He has written introductions to several books, including The Enduring Star, Peter Cowie’s biography of Joan Crawford. 

Ursula Pike is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her work won the 2019 Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest in the memoir category, and her writing has appeared in Yellow Medicine Review, World Literature Today, and Ligeia Magazine. She has an MA in economics, with a focus on community economic development, and was a Peace Corps fellow at Western Illinois University. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia from 1994 to 1996. An enrolled member of the Karuk Tribe, she was born in California and grew up in Daly City, California, and Portland, Oregon. She currently lives in Austin, Texas.