Peter Richardson teaches humanities and American Studies at San Francisco State University. He has written critically acclaimed books about the Grateful Dead, the iconic Bay Area rock band; Ramparts magazine, the legendary San Francisco muckraker; and Carey McWilliams, the Los Angeles author and editor of The Nation magazine. He serves as a senior literary advisor to the Bay Area Book Festival and won the National Entertainment Journalism Award of Online Criticism in 2013. He earned a Ph.D. in English at the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in San Francisco.

Shayne Watson is an award-winning architectural historian based in the San Francisco Bay Area and an ardent advocate for the preservation of LGBTQ historic sites. She began specializing in LGBTQ heritage preservation with the completion of her graduate thesis for the University of Southern California in 2009, which developed a preservation plan for San Francisco’s post-Prohibition lesbian community in North Beach. In 2013, Ms. Watson, along with public historian Donna Graves, was awarded a grant from the City of San Francisco to author the Citywide Historic Context Statement for LGBTQ History in San Francisco. Completed in 2016, the report is the most comprehensive research yet conducted on LGBTQ historic sites in the United States. She is a member of a number of important LGBTQ groups, such as the Rainbow Heritage Network and has presented on LGBTQ heritage preservation at conferences and panels numerous times. She lives in Mill Valley, CA with her wife and two cats.

A native to the Bay Area, Justin Charles Hoover is a practicing visual art, curator and an avid student of Kung Fu. He holds bachelor degrees in Peace Studies and French Literature from Colgate University, a Master Degree in New Genres Fine Art from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Master Degree of Public Administration of International Management from the Middlebury Institute at Monterey. Since 2004 Hoover has worked as a museum curator and gallery director, developing communities and empowering audiences through exhibitions, public programs, festival and special events. These range from conventional white wall shows, to black box screenings, popup happenings and art in alternative contexts. Hoover has performed, curated, and exhibited at numerous venues around the world including the 2016 Sculpture Quadrenniale Riga, Latvia; 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale as an artist featured in the US Pavilion (Design Action for the Common Good); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among other venues.