Michael Pollan is the author of *In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto*, winner of the James Beard Award, and *The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals* (2006), which was named one of the ten best books of the year by both *The New York Times* and *The Washington Post*. It also won the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the James Beard Award for best food writing, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Pollan is also the author of *The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World* (2001); *A Place of My Own* (1997); and *Second Nature* (1991). In 2009 Pollan appeared in the documentary *Food, Inc.* and the PBS documentary *The Botany of Desire*. A contributing writer to the *New York Times Magazine*, Pollan is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003 and the Reuters-I.U.C.N. 2000 Global Award for Environmental Journalism. Pollan served for many years as executive editor of *Harper’s Magazine* and is now the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley.

Bethanne Patrick has always been an enthusiastic and engaged reader of books, so when she started writing about authors and publishing in 1996, she brought her own interest to the stories she told and the writers she interviewed. In 2001, after years of freelance writing, Patrick joined the team of *PAGES Magazine* as editor at large. In 2004 she launched the now defunct AOL Books Channel, reaching more readers than ever before through the largest web portal in the world and where her book critic channel, "The Book Maven," was born. Under "The Book Maven," Patrick started a blog for Publishers Weekly, became the moderator for Barnes & Noble's first online book club, "Centerstage," and became managing editor of "The WETA Book Studio" a project of WETA Public Broadcasting in Washington, D.C. Patrick also regularly writes for AARP, PEOPLE magazine, *The Washington Post* Book World, Barnes & Noble Review, and Bookreporter.com. She has also written a book for National Geographic entitled *An Uncommon History of Common Things*, out now. Currently, Patrick is working on a memoir entitled *Broken*.