The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books began in 1996 with a simple goal: 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.

Karen Grigsby Bates is a Los Angelesbased correspondent for NPR. Previously she was a news reporter for People magazine and a contributing columnist to the Op Ed pages of the Los Angeles Times. Bates is the author of several books, including Chosen People.

Geneva Overholser has been a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group and an editorial board member of the New York Times. She is the coeditor of the recent book The Press as an Institution of Democracy. She is director of the School of Journalism at USC Annenberg.

Russ Stanton, an 11year veteran of the Los Angeles Times, is the newspaper's 14th editor. Prior to his appointment as editor, he was named the newspaper's first innovation editor in 2007. In that position, he oversaw the online news report and started to integrate The Times' print newsroom with its Web operation.

Jacob Weisberg is chairman and editorinchief of the Slate Group. Before joining Slate, Weisberg wrote about politics for magazines, including the New Republic, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times Magazine. His most recent book, The Bush Tragedy, was a New York Times best seller. in 2008.

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