Todd Zuniga is the founding editor of Opium Magazine, the president of Opium for the Arts (a 501(c)3 nonprofit), and a co-founder of the Literary Death Match, now featured in 28 cities worldwide. His fiction has appeared in Canteen, and online at Lost Magazine and McSweeney’s. Based between Paris and couches all over the United States, he longs for a Chicago Cubs World Series and an EU passport.

Derek Beres has devoted his life to exposing people to international music, yoga and mythology, and better nutritious choices as a means of creating both better individuals and a more understanding global culture. In the global music industry, he works as a journalist and DJ as well as producer and presenter. He has published five books, and has contributed to dozens of magazines and websites regarding the traditional and digital realms of global music, currently writing for Rolling Stone Middle East, National Geographic, Yoga Journal, Huffington Post, and Relix, among others. He is one half of global music producers EarthRise SoundSystem, which creates innovative contexts for 21st century music and cultures to be explored. He currently teaches eleven weekly yoga classes at Equinox Fitness and two at Pure Yoga. Derek has been featured in the NY Times, NBC Weekend Today, ABC Eyewitness News, Fox Business, BBC, and NY1, as well as in print and online by Fitness, Yoga Journal, Boston Globe, AOL’s Spinner, Newsday, MTV, NPR, and PRI.

Dr. Ogi Ogas won $500,000 on an episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire that aired on November 8, 2006, using his cognitive science research to guide his game strategy. Since playing, he has appeared 22 times as the syndicated show’s “Ask The Expert” Lifeline.

Ogas is co-author of A Billion Wicked Thoughts, a study of human sexuality and desire.

Praise for A Billion Wicked Thoughts:

“In a stroke of ingenuity, Ogas and Gaddam circumvent the deepest limitation of standard psychological surveys: that they merely tap undergraduates’ socially acceptable responses, a flaw nowhere more damaging than in the touchy realm of sexuality. A Billion Wicked Thoughts is a goldmine of information about this hugely important topic, and, not surprisingly, gripping and sometimes disturbing reading.”

—Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate

Robert Egger is the Founder and President of the DC Central Kitchen, the nation’s first “community kitchen”, where unemployed men and women learn marketable culinary skills while donated food is converted into balanced meals. Since opening in 1989, the DCCK has distributed over 20 million meals and helped 700 men and women gain full-time employment.

Robert served as the Co-Convener of the first Nonprofit Congress in 2006, and was the founding Chair of the Mayor’s Commission on Nutrition, and Street Sense, Washington’s “homeless” newspaper.

Robert has been on the Non Profit Times “50 Most Powerful and Influential Nonprofit Leaders” list in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. He was the recipient of the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington’s 2007 “Lifetime Achievement” award and the 2004 James Beard Foundation “Humanitarian of the Year” award. He has also been named an Oprah Angel, a Washingtonian of the Year, a Point of Light and one of the Ten Most Caring People in America, by the Caring Institute. He is also a 14-gallon blood donor to the American Red Cross.

Robert’s book on the non-profit sector, Begging for Change, received the 2005 McAdam Prize for “Best Nonprofit Management Book” by the Alliance for Nonprofit Management.

Robert currently leads the V3 Campaign, which educates politicians to the economic contributions of America’s nonprofit sector. Robert speaks nationally and internationally on hunger and homelessness, social enterprise and nonprofit unity. For a complete list if speaking engagements, or to access Robert’s op-ed, podcasts, videos or blogs, please go to www.robertegger.org.

Barton Seaver has been at the helm of some of Washington, DC’s most acclaimed restaurants. He brought the idea of sustainable seafood to DC at Hook restaurant in Georgetown. After Hook, he opened Blue Ridge restaurant, where he was named as Esquire’s 2009 Chef of the Year.

His focus now is on larger issues of ocean sustainability as it relates to eating. He was recently named a Fellow with the Blue Ocean Institute, to help link the environmental community with real-life, delicious applications of an eco-friendly ethic. He works with the Ocean Now program at the National Geographic Society to influence the practices of large corporations and consumers alike toward a more responsible and sustainable sourcing ethic. Barton is an appointed member of the Mayor’s Council on Nutrition in Washington, DC, where he is helping to craft a wellness policy for District residents.

For as long as he can remember Eric Weiner wanted to be a foreign correspondent. So he could hardly believe his good fortune when, one day in 1993, NPR dispatched him to India as the network’s first full-time correspondent in that country. Weiner spent two of the best years of his life based in New Delhi, covering everything from an outbreak of bubonic plague to India’s economic reforms, before moving on to other postings in Jerusalem and Tokyo.

Over the past decade, he’s reported from more than 30 countries, most of them profoundly unhappy. He traveled to Iraq several times during the reign of Saddam Hussein. He was in Afghanistan in 2001, when the Taliban regime fell.

He’s also served as a correspondent for NPR in New York, Miami and Washington, D.C. Weiner is a former reporter for The New York Times and was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. He was part of a team of NPR reporters that won a 1994 Peabody award for a series of investigative reports about the U.S. tobacco industry.

His commentary has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Slate and The New Republic, among other publications. He is author of the New York Times bestseller The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World .

The former Frugal Traveler columnist for the New York Times, Matt Gross now writes the “Getting Lost” series for the paper, the “Voyager” column for GetCurrency.com, and various other stories for Saveur and Afar magazines. Along with two other journalists, he also writes about parenting at DadWagon.com. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, and raised up and down the eastern seaboard, he now lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Jean, and daughter, Sasha.

Defying much of his formal photography training from the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, Jonas Lara has made a career tilting his camera towards the unconventional terrain of urban landscapes.

Lara strongly believes he shares a visual language with architects, engineers, painters and other artists who challenge the conventionality of gravity and space.

His fascination for and collaboration with other artists is evident in his emerging artist portrait series and his extensive portfolio of architectural photography. Lara’s camera has pointed its unique angled lens at structures on behalf of such clients as Escher Gunewardena, Patrick Tighe as well as Nike. He is now based in New York City.

Genevieve Erin O’Brien is a Vietnamese/Irish/American artist, culinary adventurer, community organizer, and popular educator. O’Brien lives and works in Los Angeles and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

She holds an MFA in Studio Art/Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has recently been conducting research for a new body of art work in Vietnam as a Fulbright Fellow in 2009. O’Brien uses performance, video and installation to explore notions of “home” and “homeland”. As a mixed race child of Vietnamese immigrant mother and an Irish-American father, she investigates issues such as war and memory, transnational identity and belonging, and multiple identities and its attendant baggage. Using food, humor, narrative and conceptual structures, she develops work that is invested in collective healing from trauma, whether personal or inherited to further social justice and cultural understanding.

In 2008, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago presented O’Brien’s conceptual performance, Peace Salon as part of the 12×12 series showcasing emerging artists. Her conceptual and durational performances, as well as installations and videos have been presented at galleries and public venues in numerous cities including Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and across the US in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington DC.

Called a “modern day Virgil” by the LA Weekly, O’Brien’s one woman shows address hate crimes, homophobia, and violence against women, with sensitivity and humor. As a community activist and popular educator, O’Brien has developed programs for Sisterfire, Southern Californians for Youth, the UCLA Labor Center’s Summer Internship Program, and APALA (Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance). She was a founding member of Arts In Action, a political and cultural arts collective space in the heart of Los Angeles.

Amanda Hesser is a co-founder of cooking site food52.com. She has been a food columnist and editor at the New York Times for more than a decade, and currently writes Recipe Redux for the Sunday Magazine. Hesser has written two award-winning books — The Cook and the Gardener and Cooking for Mr. Latte — and edited the New York Times Magazines published collection of food essays, Eat, Memory. Her most recent book is The Essential New York Times Cookbook, a compilation of recipes from the New York Times going back to the 1850′s. Hesser is also a founder of Plodt.com.