The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books began in 1996 with a simple to bring together the people who create books with the people who love to read them. The festival was an immediate success and has become the largest and most prestigious book festival in the country, attracting more than 130,000 book lovers each year.K.C. Cole is the author of The Universe and the Teacup and other popular books on science. She is a faculty member in the School of Journalism at USC Annenberg and her new book, Something Incredibly Wonderful Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up was published in August.
Avery Gilbert is a psychologist, smell scientist and entrepreneur. He is the author of What the Nose Knows, a 2008 finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology.
Leonard Susskind has been the Felix Bloch Professor in theoretical physics at Stanford University since 1978. His book The Black Hole My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics is a 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist in Science and Technology.
Carl Zimmer is the author of six books on science, including E coli and the New Science of Life, a finalist for the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times. Zimmer won the 2007 National Academy of Sciences Communication Award.
I’m a sensory psychologist specializing in odor perception. In real life, I’m an independent scientific consultant. In fantasy life, I’m the creator of Nick Zollicker, smell expert and man of mystery. Somewhere in between I appear in Shiseido TV commercials in Japan.