2025 Events

Eric Avila is a professor in the History, Chicana/o Studies, and Urban Planning departments at UCLA. He is a twentieth-century U.S. urban historian and the author of three books: Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2004), The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), and American Cultural History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2018). Over the years, he has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in History at the University of California Berkeley. His current book project is on the cultural history of late twentieth-century Los Angeles, titled On the Verge: Los Angeles Between Watts and Rodney King.

James D. Newland is a historian, project manager, and planner for the California State Parks Department.   He is currently serving as the Division Chief for the Strategic Planning & Recreation Services Division of California State Parks, where he has been employed for over 28 years. He has been professionally involved in cultural resources, land use planning, community history and historic preservation since 1991.   With State Parks, Jim has served as historian and project manager for the initial planning efforts at Los Angeles State Historic Park (LASHP) as well as leading preservation projects at Will Rogers State Historic Park, Pio Pico State Historic Park, Malibu Lagoon State Beach, Los Encinos State Historic Park, Topanga State Park and Crystal Cove State Park.

Sissy Trinh is the founder and Executive Director of the Southeast Asian Community Alliance (SEACA) in Los Angeles. SEACA engages in innovative organizing with youth on land use policy and equitable development campaigns and a new wave of gentrification slated for Chinatown that was proceeding with no meaningful input from residents. Under SEACA’s mentorship, the youth learn about how decisions are made within City Hall and how abstract concepts such as zoning impact rent, racial justice, and their community’s overall quality of life in order for them to become powerful advocates to advance a comprehensive vision of social, economic and racial justice.

Alissa Walker is a writer based in Los Angeles where she has covered transportation, housing, urban design, public space, and environmental policy for two decades. She edits the newsletter Torched, which tracks the legacy improvements that LA is making for its megaevent era, including the 2026 World Cup, 2027 Super Bowl, and the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. Alissa is the 2021 recipient of the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary for her writing on design and urbanism, and played herself on the traffic safety episode of Adam Conover’s show Adam Ruins Everything, “Adam Ruins a Murder.” She lives in L.A.’s Historic Filipinotown neighborhood, where she is the co-host of LA Podcast, an avid ice cream consumer, and a mom to the city’s two most enthusiastic public transit riders.

Jennifer Carr is a writer from San Pedro, California, and is a USC alumna (class of 2001). Her fiction and nonfiction grapple with what life in a globalized, automated world means for union towns like San Pedro, where immigrant families have come to live and work and stay for generations. Aside from her essay in Writing the Golden State, Jennifer’s work has appeared in Zócalo Public Square, Boom California, and Baltimore Review, among others. She teaches creative writing at Chapman University.

Wendy Cheng is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at University of Southern California. She is the author of Island X: Taiwanese Students, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism (University of Washington Press, 2023) and The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and coauthor of A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2012). Her creative nonfiction essays have been published in the Cincinnati Review, Boom: A Journal of California, Zócalo Public Square, and Los Angeles Review of Books, and have been nominated for the University of Iowa Krause Essay Prize and the Pushcart Prize, as well as selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays and for inclusion in the Best Spiritual Literature anthology. 

Romeo Guzmán is a historian, editor, and cultural worker from the San Gabriel Valley. He is the co-director of the South El Monte Arts Posse and ran C.A.S.A Zamora from 2023-24. From 2019 to 2022, he co-edited Boom California; he is currently an editor-at-large at Zócalo Public Square. You can find his writing in the Journal of American History, Journal of American Ethnic History, The History of the Family, KCET, Tropics of Meta, and Air/Light. He co-edited Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California (Angel City Press: 2024) and East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte (Rutgers, 2020). Guzmán is currently as assistant professor at Claremont Graduate University.

David Helps is an urban historian and writer from Southwestern Ontario, Canada and the territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishnaabe peoples. His research has been published in the Journal of Urban History and American Quarterly and his essays and reportage have appeared in The Nation, Public Books, and the LA Review of Books, among other places. Currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California, he is writing his first book: a people’s history of global Los Angeles.

David Ulin is Professor of the Practice of English, and editor of the journal Air/Light. He is the author or editor of nearly 20 books, including the novel Thirteen Question Method; Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay; and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. The former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times, he has written for The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, and The New York Times; his essay “Bed” was selected for The Best American Essays 2020. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and Ucross Foundation, as well as a COLA-IMAP Master Artist Grant from the City of Los Angeles. Currently the books editor at Alta Journal, he has also edited Didion: The 1960s and 70s, Didion: The 1980s and 90s, and Didion: Memoirs and Later Writings for Library of America.