Warren J. Hinckle III was born October 12, 1938, in San Francisco. He was executive editor of Ramparts magazine from 1964 to 1969, and he cofounded Scanlan’s magazine in 1970. He later served as editor for City of San Francisco, Frisco, and The Argonaut. He wrote regularly for the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and the San Francisco Independent, and was the author of numerous books, including If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade: An Essential Memoir of a Lunatic Decade. He died in San Francisco on August 25, 2016.

Tom Dalzell has lived in Berkeley since 1984. He has worked as a lawyer for the labor movement for his entire adult life. He has written extensively about slang. He has been methodically walking the streets of Berkeley since late 2012 in search of quirky stuff, blogging about it since 2013. The New York Times described him as looking “too strait-laced to be the arbiter of the eccentric.” He accepts this verdict.

Daniel A. Sjursen is a retired US Army Major and contributing editor at antiwar.com. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Salon, the Nation, TomDispatch, the Huffington Post, and the Hill, among other publications. He served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. He cohosts the progressive veterans’ podcast Fortress on a Hill. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet. Sjursen lives in Lawrence, Kansas.  

Bernard Taper (1918–2016) is the author of several books, including the acclaimed Balanchine: A Biography and Cellist in Exile: A Portrait of Pablo Casals. Following a stint as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, he worked for many years as a staff writer for the New Yorker. He was also a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Benjamin Griffin is an editor at the Mark Twain Project. A native of Berkeley, he was educated at the University of California and at Cambridge University. He specializes in Mark Twain and in the theory and practice of scholarly editing.

Fred White is an associate professor of composition and he directed the writing program at Santa Clara University from 2003 to 2005. His books include The Well-Crafted Argument (with Simone Billings), Lifewriting, Communicating Technology, Science and the Human Spirit, and The Writer’s Art.

Rick Laubscher is a fourth-generation San Franciscan who fell in love with streetcars as a child, when his mother took him downtown on an “iron monster” through the Twin Peaks to see the circus. He worked as a broadcast reporter in San Francisco, then as a corporate executive, where he began his advocacy for vintage streetcar service. He now operates his own strategic communications consultancy, Messagesmith, and serves as president of the nonprofit Market Street Railway.

Lyn Risling is an artist whose work reflects the revival and continuation of cultural traditions and the natural world of her tribal peoples, the Karuk, Yurok, and Hupa. Involved in many aspects of her cultures, she was a recipient of the Community Spirit Award from First Peoples Fund for her artwork and commitment to her Native culture and community. Lyn has shown her work throughout California, and her art can be found in tribal cultural curriculum, language materials, brochures, T-shirts, and posters.

John Muir (1838–1914) was a naturalist, author, and advocate for wilderness preservation. A prolific writer, his many books, essays, and letters abound with wit, humor, and an exuberant love of the natural world.

A fourth-generation Californian and legendary antiwar activist, David Harris is a former contributing editor at Rolling Stone and the New York Times Magazine and the author of eleven books, including The Last Stand, published in paperback by Heyday. Visit his website at davidharriswriter.com.

Hank Umemoto was born in 1928 to immigrant grape farmers in Florin, a rural community near Sacramento, California. After his release from camp, he moved to Los Angeles, where he spent the first three and a half years living on skid row. After finishing high school, he worked to support himself and his mother while attending Los Angeles City College. During the Korean War, he served overseas in the army with the 38th Military Intelligence Service. After his discharge, he attended Cal State Los Angeles using funds from the GI Bill, then married, raised a family, and worked in a variety of trades and businesses. His jobs included gardener, owner of a jewelry store, owner of a mail-order business, and insurance agent with Cal Western Life. He eventually started a print shop and remained in the printing business for thirty-two years, until his retirement in his mid-seventies. He passed away in 2019.

Brian Komei Dempster is a Sansei (third-generation Japanese American). He received BAs in American ethnic studies and English from the University of Washington and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. His poems have been published in various journals and anthologies. Dempster is the editor of From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America’s Concentration Camps, which received a 2007 Nisei Voices Award from the National Japanese American Historical Society. His debut book of poems, Topaz, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in fall 2013.  He is a professor of rhetoric and language and a faculty member of Asian Pacific American studies at the University of San Francisco.  Currently, he divides his time between teaching and serving as Director of Administration for the master of arts program in Asia Pacific studies. Read more on his website, briankomeidempster.com.