Carly Lake is an artist, illustrator, and art educator. Her illustrations have been published in magazines, storyboards, comics, and the chapter book Candice Can Go. She lives and makes art near the San Gabriel Mountains in Los Angeles, CA. She invites you to explore more of her work at carlylake.com.

Cindi Alvitre is a mother and grandmother, and she has been an educator and artist-activist for over three decades. She is a descendant of the original inhabitants of Los Angeles and Orange Counties. In 1985, she and Lorene Sisquoc cofounded Mother Earth Clan, a collective of Indian women who created a model for cultural and environmental education. In the late 1980s she cofounded Ti’at Society, sharing in the renewal of ancient maritime practices of the coastal and island Tongva. She currently teaches American Indian Studies at California State University, Long Beach.

Lawrence DiStasi is an editor, writer, and instructor at UC Berkeley Extension’s Fall Freshman Program and has been the project director of the traveling exhibit Una Storia Segreta: When Italian Americans Were ‘Enemy Aliens’, since 1994. He is author of Mal Occhio: The Underside of Vision (North Point Press, 1981) and Dream Streets: The Big Book of Italian American Culture (Harper & Row, 1989). He is president of the American Italian Historical Association’s Western Regional Chapter.

Marlene Smith-Barazini is the associate editor of California History, the quarterly journal of the California Historical Society. In 1989, she received her MA in writing from the University of San Francisco. She is currently working on a biography of Louise Clappe.

Kirk Lombard lives in Moss Beach, California, with his fishwife Camilla Lombard and their two kids, Django and Penelope. Kirk writes, fishes, sings a skull-cracking baritone, dabbles in papier-mâché sculpture, plays tuba for the SF-based band Rube Waddell, and, with Camilla, runs Sea Forager Seafood, a sustainable, subscription-based seafood delivery service based in San Francisco.

Robert L. Allen is an adjunct professor of African American studies and ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Black Awakening in Capitalist America; Reluctant Reformers: The Impact of Racism on Social Movement in the U.S.; Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America; Strong in the Struggle; and Honoring Sergeant Carter: A Family’s Journey to Uncover the Truth About an American Hero. Allen is also editor (with founder Robert Chrisman) of the journal The Black Scholar. He has been the recipient of many honors and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Book Award (shared with co-editor Herb Boyd for Brotherman).

Erinn Madden graduated with a degree in biology from University of California, Davis, and has spent nearly a decade studying local ecology and animal movements through tropical ecosystems. He is currently a biological technician in Davis, California.

Ken Charters completed a degree in biology from CSU Fresno, and he continued his ecological research as a grad student at Northern Arizona University. Charters is currently a professor of biology at Cochise College where he teaches and studies ecosystem dynamics.

Derek Madden is a professor of biology at Modesto Junior College. He is best known for his discovery of a new species of parasite, and for his work on African ants and giraffes. Madden spent nearly ten years roaming roadsides and habitats of Central California, often illustrating wildlife as cars rushed by, or under intense summer sun or in the rain and fog, to document the life of California’s “Outback” region.

A gifted poet, writer, and storyteller, as well as a cultural and political activist, Darryl Babe Wilson (1939–2014) earned a PhD from the University of Arizona at Tucson. His essays, stories, and poems were published in News from Native California, The Way We Lived: California Indian Stories, Songs, and Reminiscences (Heyday, 1993), and The Sound of Rattles and Clappers: A Collection of New California Indian Writing (University of Arizona Press, 1994), and he coedited Surviving in Two Worlds: Contemporary Native American Voices (University of Texas Press, 1997). Wilson taught Native American Studies at de Anza College and at California State University, Hayward.

Elisa Kleven is the author and/or illustrator of over thirty books, which have received honors from the American Library Association, The New York Times, The Junior Library Guild, School Library Journal, Bank Street College, The American Booksellers Association, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, daughter, son, dog, and cats. Visit her website at elisakleven.com.

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, CA, in 1902. Steinbeck realized that the migration caused by the Dust Bowl was drastically changing the labor forces of California from the foreign “cheap labor” to a higher standard of living for the farm workers. He felt for these migrant workers, and with the help of a friend, Tom Collins, unsuccessfully tried to get federal aid and sympathy, as shown in the articles of The Harvest Gypsies. Steinbeck continued in his crusade, publishing The Grapes of Wrath, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.