Musician, poet, painter, and preformance artist, Oliver Lake has created chamber pieces for the Arditti and Flux String Quartets; arranged music for Bjork, Lou Reed, and A Tribe Called Quest; and collaborated with poets Amiri Baraka and Ntozake Shange, choreogrphers Ron Brown and Marlies Yearby, and actress/author Anna Deavere Smith. He had done jazz-poetry collaborations with Huang Xiang since 2004.

Huang Xiang was imprisoned six times over 12 years in China and tortured for hiw work, which was completely banned. He has lived in exile in the United States since 1997. A bilingual edition of his selected poetry was published in 2003. In 2004 he became the writer-in-residence for City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, and he continues to live in Pittsburgh.

Guillermo Arriaga is a nobelist and screenwriter best known for his collaborations with director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, such as Amores Perros and, most recently, Babel, which earned Golden Globe and Oscar nominations. His novels include The Night Buffalo, A Sweet Scent of Death, and The Guillotine Squad.

Saul Williams is the author of four collections of poetry: The Dead Emcee Scrolls, said the shotgun to the head, She, and The Seventh Octave. He has also made appearances on the shows Girlfriends and HRB's Def Poetry Jam.

Sam Shepard has written 45 plays, 12 of which have won Obie Awards. In 1979, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Buried Child. He is also an Oscar-nominated actor and winner of the Golden Palm Award at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival for his screenplay for Paris, Texas.

Patti Smith's album Horses was folowed by Radio Ethiopia, Easter, Dream of Life, Gone Again, and Trampin'. She is also an acclaimed poet and her publications include Witt, Babel, Wool-Gathering, The Coreal Sea, and Patti Smith Complete: Lyrics, Notes, and Reflections.

Discussion of the new face of interntional high-tensile fiction with acclained mystery writer S.J. Rozan.

S.J. Rozan is the author of 10 crime nobels. Her novels and short stories have won crime-writing awards such as the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, and Macavity. Her most recent work, In This Rain, takes the reader from the streets of Harlem to the hals of City Hall.

Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett (Spain) was awarded the Feminino Lumen prize for best female writer in Spain. Her book Dog Day is the first installment of her Inspector Petra Delicado mystery series to be published in English.

Henry Chang's debut novel, Chinatown Beat, features Detective Jack Yu. Through Yu, Chang presents us with the darker side of New York's Chinatown.

Kenji Jasper began his writing career as a journalist, publishing his first article while working at an intern for the Washington Informer at the tender age of 13. Snow, the second novel in his Dark trilogy, has just been released. In it, Jasper explores the mean streets of Wasington DC.

As a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, Harper's, and many other publications, Mark Danner has covered Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq, and the Middle East. His books on politics and foreign policy include The Road to Illegitimacy, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Graid, and the War on Terror, and The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History. As a staff writer for the foreign news desk of Der Spiegel, Carolin Emcke has written about war crimes and human rights violations in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Colombia. She is the author of Echoes of Violence: Letters from a War Reporter. These award-winning journalists discuss the violent world we live in and the dangers one faces in reporting on it.