WThomas Harvey "Sean" Bonniwell was an American singer-songwriter/guitarist, who was known as the creative force behind the 1960s garage rock band, The Music Machine.
WGregory Dean Camp is an American Grammy Award-nominated songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist. He is best known as the founding guitarist and songwriter for the rock band Smash Mouth. Camp is credited as the primary songwriter, whose songs catapulted the band to acclaim with hits, awards, and multi-platinum albums. Camp left Smash Mouth after 16 years and has remained an active songwriter and music producer.
WGurbaksh Singh Chahal is an Indian-American internet entrepreneur who founded several internet advertising companies.
WIris Shun-Ru Chang was a Taiwanese-American journalist, author of historical books and political activist. She is best known for her best-selling 1997 account of the Nanking Massacre, The Rape of Nanking. Chang is the subject of the 2007 biography, Finding Iris Chang, and the 2007 documentary film Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking.
WTrinidad Escobar is an author, poet, and cartoonist active in the San Francisco Bay Area, and an educator at the California College of the Arts.
WJonathan Evison is an American writer known for his novels All About Lulu, West of Here, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving and This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!. His work, often distinguished by its emotional resonance and offbeat humor, has been compared by critics to a variety of authors, most notably J.D. Salinger, Charles Dickens, T.C. Boyle, and John Irving. Sherman Alexie has called Evison "the most honest white man alive."
WKhaled Hosseini is an Afghan-American novelist, physician, activist, humanitarian and UNHCR goodwill ambassador. After graduating from college, he worked as a doctor in California, a predicament that he likened to "an arranged marriage." He has published three novels, most notably his 2003 debut The Kite Runner, all of which are at least partially set in Afghanistan and feature an Afghan as the protagonist. Following the success of The Kite Runner he retired from medicine to write full-time.
WMichio Kaku is an American theoretical physicist, futurist, and popularizer of science. He is a professor of theoretical physics in the City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center. Kaku has written several books about physics and related topics, has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film, and writes online blogs and articles. He has written the New York Times best sellers Physics of the Impossible (2008), Physics of the Future (2011), and The Future of the Mind (2014). Kaku has hosted several TV specials for the BBC, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and the Science Channel.
WGregory Stanley Kihn is an American rock musician, radio personality, and novelist.
WRaphael Lapin is a negotiation specialist and author currently residing in California. He is the founder of Lapin Negotiation Strategies and serves as a consultant to Fortune 500 companies and governments internationally. He is a negotiation expert and was a syndicated columnist for American City Business Journals and a regular contributor to Research Magazine. He is also an adjunct professor at Whittier Law School and faculty at Southwestern Law School.
WDavid Allen Meltzer is an American journalist and sports historian who reports on professional wrestling and mixed martial arts.
WViet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American novelist. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Nguyen's debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction among other accolades, including the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from an American Author from the Mystery Writers of America, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in Fiction from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Nguyen is also a regular contributor, op-ed columnist for The New York Times, covering immigration, refugees, politics, culture and South East Asia.
WYosimar Reyes is a queer undocumented immigrant poet and activist. He was born in Guerrero, Mexico and raised in East San Jose, California. Reyes has been described as "a voice that shines light on the issues affecting queer immigrants in the U.S. and throughout the world."
WKay Ryan is an American poet and educator. She has published seven volumes of poetry and an anthology of selected and new poems. From 2008 to 2010 she was the sixteenth United States Poet Laureate. In 2011 she was named a MacArthur Fellow and she won the Pulitzer Prize.
WEugene Taylor Sawyer was a newspaper editor and author of dime novels, particularly for the Nick Carter series.
WNikki Sixx is an American musician, songwriter, radio host, and photographer, best known as the co-founder, bassist, and primary songwriter of the band Mötley Crüe. Prior to forming Mötley Crüe, Sixx was a member of Sister before going on to form London with his Sister bandmate Lizzie Grey. In 2000, he formed side project group 58 with Dave Darling, Steve Gibb and Bucket Baker issuing one album, Diet for a New America, the same year while, in 2002, he formed the hard rock supergroup Brides of Destruction with L.A. Guns guitarist Tracii Guns. Formed in 2006, initially to record an audio accompaniment to Sixx's autobiography The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star, his side band Sixx:A.M. features songwriter, producer, and vocalist James Michael and guitarist DJ Ashba.
WLuis Miguel Valdez is a Chicano playwright, screenwriter, film director and actor. Regarded as the father of Chicano film and theater, Valdez is best known for his play Zoot Suit, his movie La Bamba, and his creation of El Teatro Campesino. A pioneer in the Chicano Movement, Valdez broadened the scope of theatre and arts of the Chicano community.
WJhonen C. Vasquez is an American comic book writer, cartoonist, music video director, and voice actor. He is best known for creating the comic book Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, its spin-off comics Squee!, Fillerbunny, and I Feel Sick, and the Nickelodeon animated series Invader Zim.
WRichard Duane Warren is an American Baptist evangelical Christian pastor and author. He is the founder and senior pastor of Saddleback Church, an evangelical megachurch affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention in Lake Forest, California, which is the sixth-largest megachurch in the United States. His books include his guide to church ministry and evangelism, The Purpose Driven Church, which has spawned a series of conferences on Christian ministry and evangelism. His subsequent book, The Purpose Driven Life, has sold more than 30 million copies, making Warren a 'New York Times' bestselling author.
WKristine Tsuya Yamaguchi is an American former figure skater. In ladies' singles, Yamaguchi is the 1992 Olympic champion, a two-time World champion, and the 1992 U.S. champion. As a pairs skater with Rudy Galindo, she is the 1988 World Junior champion and a two-time national champion. In December 2005, she was inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame. In 2008, Yamaguchi became the celebrity champion in the sixth season of Dancing with the Stars.