Susan LaTempa identifies as an editor in Los Angeles, not as a Los Angeles editor. At L.A. Style, West Coast Plays, Padua Hills Theater Festival, Westways, The Los Angeles Times, and Liberty Hill Foundation, she's worked with journalists, playwrights, novelists, recipe developers, landscapers, photographers, and videographers. She's concentrated on addressing L.A.'s vast, cosmopolitan audiences, in the process helping shape dozens of memorable articles, reviews, memoirs, parodies, essays, theater pieces, and videos that have illuminated so many aspects of L.A.
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of seven books (including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently Sansei and Sensibility), all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and a United States Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Lisa See is a best-selling author of fiction and nonfiction, including the family history On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family (1995); the historic novels The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, and Shanghai Girls; and the mysteries Dragon Bones, The Interior, and Flower Net. Her books have been published in thirty-nine languages. She wrote the libretto for an opera based on On Gold Mountain, has curated museum exhibitions, and designed a walking tour of L.A.’s Chinatown. She is a member of the board of directors of the Los Angeles Opera. lisasee.com
Carey McWilliams wrote many books, including Factories in the Field (1939), Brothers Under the Skin: African-Americans and Other Minorities (1943), Prejudice: Japanese-Americans, Symbol of Racial Intolerance (1944), Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946), and A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America (1948). He was also a lawyer and public servant (California Division of Immigration and Housing), chaired the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee in the early 1940s, and was editor of The Nation from 1955 to 1975.
Jonathan Gold, the first food critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, did just that in 2007 for his “zestful, wide-ranging restaurant reviews, expressing the delight of an erudite eater.” A native Angeleno, he was a proofreader at L.A. Weekly while still a student at UCLA, and within a few years wrote music and restaurant reviews as well. His “Counter Intelligence” column ran from 1986 to 1990, when he moved it to the L.A. Times, where it appeared until 1996. In 1999, he and his wife, editor Laurie Ochoa, moved to Gourmet magazine, then later returned together to L.A. Weekly and revived “Counter Intelligence.” Gold published a collection of his columns in 2000, was profiled in The New Yorker in 2009, was a National Magazine Award finalist for criticism, was the subject of the 2015 film documentary City of Gold, and was a frequent James Beard Award nominee or winner from 1996 until his death in 2018.