Robert Fisk is the Middle East correspondent of The Independent. He holds numerous awards for journalism, including two Amnesty International UK Press Awards and seven British International Journalist of the Year awards. During the thirty years that he has been reporting on the Middle East, he has covered every major event in the region, from the Algerian Civil War to the Iranian Revolution, from the hostage crisis in Beirut to the Iran-Iraq War, from the Russian invasion of Afghanistan to Israel's invasions of Lebanon, from the Gulf War to the invasion and ongoing war in Iraq. His most recent book is The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East.
click here for a selection of Robert Fisk's most recent columns

Noam Chomsky is one of the country’s leading intellectuals and scholars. A MIT Professor of Linguistics and long-time activist, prolific writer and popular lecturer, Chomsky speaks widely on a range of social and political issues, both national and international. From linguistics to philosophy, from history to contemporary issues, from international affairs to U.S. foreign policy—Chomsky’s clear, straight-forward honesty is legendary. Chomsky has lectured at many universities in the U.S. and abroad, and is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and awards. His most recent books include A New Generation Draws the Line; New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind; Rogue States; 9-11; Understanding Power; On Nature and Language; Chomsky on Democracy and Education; Middle East Illusions; and Hegemony or Survival.
www.chomsky.info

David Barsamian is founder and director of Alternative Radio, the independent award-winning weekly series based in Boulder, Colorado. He is a radio producer, journalist, author and lecturer. He has been working in radio since 1978. His interviews and articles appear regularly in The Progressive and Z Magazine. His latest books are Imperial Ambitions with Noam Chomsky and Speaking of Empire & Resistance with Tariq Ali. Barsamian lectures on U.S. foreign policy, the media, propaganda, and corporate power in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, India and Europe. He is the winner of the ACLU's Upton Sinclair Award for independent journalism and of a Democracy Media Award.
www.alternativeradio.org/barsamian

Ragip Zarakolu is a radical Turkish publisher who has long faced legal harassment for publishing books that the government does not like, especially on minority and human rights in Turkey. Several books he published on the Armenian Genocide - such as George Jerjian's book History Will Free All of Us/Turkish-Armenian Conciliation - brought new criminal charges in 2005.
click here for the PEN American Center page on Zarakolu

Levon Chorbajian is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he teaches courses on genocide, politics and mass media. He has edited, translated, and written seven books including Armenia in Crisis; The Caucasian Knot, Studies in Comparative Genocide; The Making of Nagorno-Karabagh; and, most recently, Power: A Critical Reader with Daniel Egan. Dr. Chorbajian is a two time Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Armenia.

Nancy Kricorian is a New York City-based writer and political activist. She has published two novels: Zabelle (1998) and Dreams of Bread and Fire (2003), and is the NYC co-ordinator for CODEPINK: Women for Peace, a grassroots peace and social justice movement founded in 2002.

Leontina Hormel is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Worcester State College specializing in the sociology of international development in post-Soviet societies. In 2005, she served as an election observer in Nagorno-Karabagh. A personal account of her experiences can be found on her website.

Maria Armoudian is a journalist, singer/songwriter, a leading environmental activist in Southern California, Commissioner for the Environmental Affairs Commission for the City of Los Angeles, and an ANC-Burbank activist. As a journalist, she hosts the weekly, drive-time public affairs show, the Insighters, at KPFK in Los Angeles, and she has written for New York Times Syndicate, the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, Salon.com, among many others. Her first CD, Life in the New World, has just been released and can be accessed on her website at www.armoudian.com . 

Kibibi Tyehimba is the female co-chair of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA). She previously served as the co-chair of the NCOBRA Legislative Commission which lobbies members of Congress for passage of Congressman John Conyers' H.R 40 bill that would establish a commission to study the era of enslavement and its affects on present day African American Life and to determine proper remedies.

Robert Krikorian earned a Ph.D. in History and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, where he was an Associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He has worked with a wide range of organizations, including Medecins sans Frontieres and USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (USAID-OFDA). Dr. Krikorian is currently a Professorial Lecturer at GWU’s Elliott School of International Affairs, where he teaches courses on the modern history and politics of Transcaucasia and Eurasia. His research interests include Armenia’s political systems during the Soviet and current periods.

Nina Ognianova is Europe and Central Asia Research Associate for the Committee to Protect Journalists. Before joining CPJ in 2003, she worked as a staff writer for the International Journalists' Network, the media-assistance Web site of the nonprofit International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) in Washington, D.C. She covered the countries of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe.

Rachel Denber is deputy director for Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia division, where she supervises work on the countries of the former Soviet Union. In her fourteen years with Human Rights Watch she has traveled widely throughout the region, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and researched and reported on a number of human rights issues. She was director of Human Rights Watch’s Moscow office from 1992-1997.

Marc Mamigonian is Director of Programs and Publications at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) in Belmont, MA, and serves as editor of the Journal of Armenian Studies. He has written numerous reviews and essays on literary and popular culture topics and is the co-author of scholarly articles and commentaries on James Joyce’s Ulysses and Stephen Hero.

Dikran Kaligian is a leading activist in fighting defamation by mainstream media outlets regarding denial of the Armenian Genocide. He is chairperson of the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) Eastern United States and is a national board members of the ANCA in Washington. He teaches history at Westfield State College.

Antranig Kasbarian is a former editor of The Armenian Weekly, based in Watertown, MA, and currently is a member of the ARF Central Committee, Eastern United States. He holds a PhD in Geography from Rutgers University. Kasbarian currently works as a Program Director for the New York-based Tufenkian Foundation, supervising activities in Nagorno-Karabagh focusing on economic recovery and refugee resettlement.

Lucine Kasbarian has written about marginalized peoples and cultures for Bust magazine, Hope Dance, The Indypendent and Paper magazine. Lucine is author of Armenia: A Rugged Land, an Enduring People (Simon & Schuster) and has interviewed Noam Chomsky for Publishers Weekly and David Barsamian for the Armenian Weekly.  Lucine is the founder/director of Progressive Book Publicity, a private concern that promotes social justice activist/authors and their books. She has served on executive boards of the Armenian Youth Federation and the Land & Culture Organization.

Neery Melkonian is an independent critic and curator based in New York City. As Associate Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies Museum at Bard College, and the Director of Visual Arts programming at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, Melkonian has organized over twenty solo exhibitions and two traveling group-exhibits. She has contributed reviews/interviews to publications such as Afterimage, AIM, Al-Jadid, Art Papers and more recently ARARAT. She has talked on topics related to aesthetics of displacement, globalization and trans-cultural geographies.

Markar Melkonian is a teacher, writer and veteran solidarity worker. He holds several graduate degrees, including a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Melkonian's books include My Brother's Road , Marxism: A Post-Cold War Primer, and Richard Rorty's Politics: Liberalism at the End of the American Century.

Hayg Oshagan has taught at Stanford University, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and is currently an associate professor in the Communication Department at Wayne State University in Detroit. His current work is on media representations of minorities and on issues of social diversity. Oshagan chairs the Central Committee of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation based in the Eastern United States.