Joel Garreau
Principal, The Garreau Group

Joel Garreau is the author of Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies – and What It Means to Be Human, published in 2005 by Doubleday. Joel’s latest book takes an unprecedented, sometimes alarming, always spellbinding look at the hinge in history at which we have arrived. For hundreds of millennia, our technologies have been aimed outward at altering our environment in the fashion of fire, agriculture, or space travel. Now, for the first time, we are increasingly aiming inward at modifying our minds, memories, metabolisms, personalities, progeny and possibly our immortal souls. Radical Evolution is about altering human nature – not in some distant tomorrow, but in the next 10 or 20 years.

Joel burst onto the culture and values scene with the 1981 publication of The Nine Nations of North America, a book that described how the continent was behaving not so much like 50 states and three countries, but nine separate and powerful civilizations or economies that paid scant attention to political boundaries in the course of forging their own destiny. Nine Nations won critical acclaim and was embraced by readers, marketers, political operatives and academics, putting Joel on the short list of the world’s most prominent cultural demographers.

Ten years later, Joel focused on who we are through the prism of the modern metropolis we are building in Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. In what was termed “groundbreaking” work by The New York Times, Joel pointed out that we are building the biggest change in 150 years on how we live, work, play, pray, shop, and die. The cities of the 21st century are not the 19th century versions like downtown Chicago or Philadelphia. Rather, they are the more than 180 enormous new centers of commerce that have sprung up in the last 30 years – places like Silicon Valley in California and the Route 128 corridor outside Boston, places shaped by the automobile, the jet passenger plane, and the networked computer.

Joel is a reporter and editor at The Washington Post and principal of The Garreau Group, the network of his best sources committed to understanding who we are, how we got that way, and where we’re headed, worldwide. He has served as a senior fellow at the University of California at Berkeley and George Mason University, and is a member of Global Business Network, the pioneering scenario-planning organization. He is the troll of a small forest in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge where he lives with his wife and two daughters.

Ruben Navarrette, Jr.
Columnist and Editorial Board Member, The San Diego Union-Tribune

Ruben Navarrette Jr., a columnist and editorial board member of The San Diego Union-Tribune, is a fresh and increasingly important voice in the national political debate. His twice-weekly column offers new thinking on many of the major issues of the day, especially on thorny questions involving ethnicity and national origin. His column is syndicated worldwide by The Washington Post Writers Group.
After graduating from Harvard in 1990, Navarrette returned to his native Fresno, Calif., where he began a free-lance writing career that produced more than 200 articles in such publications as the Los Angeles Times, The Fresno Bee, the Chicago Tribune and The Arizona Republic.
In 1997 he joined the staff of The Arizona Republic, first as a reporter and then as a twice-weekly columnist, before returning to Harvard in the fall of 1999 to earn a master's in public administration from the Kennedy School of Government. He joined the editorial board of The Dallas Morning News in July 2000, and in 2005, moved to the Union-Tribune. His column has been in syndication since 2001.
Navarrette draws on both his knowledge of policy and politics and his life experiences to provide meaningful and hard-hitting commentary. He is a gifted and widely sought speaker on Latino affairs, has worked as a substitute teacher in classes from kindergarten to high school, and has hosted radio talk shows. Navarrette has also served as guest host of public television's "Life & Times" and has discussed current affairs on CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, National Public Radio and The PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer. He also does regular commentary for NPR's "Morning Edition."
His book, "A Darker Shade of Crimson: Odyssey of a Harvard Chicano," drew favorable reviews after it was published in 1993. In 2000, he contributed an installment to "Chicken Soup for the Writers Soul," of the best-selling "Chicken Soup for the Soul" series.
His columns won second place in the 2004 National Headliner Awards presented by the Press Club of Atlantic City. In 2002 and 2003, the Dallas Observer named him "Best Columnist at a Daily Newspaper."

Navarrette was born May 11, 1967, in the farm country of the San Joaquin Valley. He attended public schools in Sanger, Calif., a town of deep roots where all four of his grandparents lived. His father is a 34-year law enforcement officer in Fresno. Ruben Sr. recently became an investigator for the California Labor Commissioner's Office where he enforces fair labor practices in some of the very same grape fields and peach orchards where he and his brothers, along with his parents, worked in the 1930s and 1940s.

Allison Arieff
Senior Content Lead, IDEO

Allison Arieff works in the realms of architecture, sustainability, and media for the global design and innovation firm, IDEO. From 2002-2006, Arieff was the Editor in Chief of Dwell, and was the magazine¹s founding senior editor. Under her tenure, Dwell won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2005, the industry¹s highest honor. Arieff is the author of the books Prefab, Trailer Travel: A Visual History of Mobile America and Spa, and she also writes the ³Living Design² column for the New York Times. Arieff began her editorial career in book publishing with stints at Random House, Oxford University Press, and Chronicle Books, where she edited titles on art, design, and popular culture including Airstream: A History of the Land Yacht and Hatch Show Print: The History of a Great American Poster Shop. She received her BA in History from UCLA; her MA in Art History from UC Davis, and completed her PhD coursework in American Studies at New York University. Arieff lives in San Francisco.

Ken McCorkle
Senior Vice President and Manager of the Agricultural Industries Group,
Wells Fargo Bank

Ken McCorkle is Senior Vice President and Manager of the Agricultural Industries Group for Wells Fargo Bank, the largest agricultural lender among U.S. commercial banks. Ken has been with Wells Fargo for 20 years, interrupted for 2 years in 1996-97 when he served as President of Early California Foods and Chairman of Sadrym-California. Early California was an international olive processing and brand marketing company with production operations in Seville, Spain and Visalia, California. Sadrym-California was a food processing equipment marketing company based in Visalia. During the late 1970s mid 1980s, Ken served as Vice President and General Manager of Sierra Wine Corporation, at that time, the largest bulk winery in California. A graduate of the University of California at Davis with B.S. and M.S. degrees in Food Science and Technology, Ken received his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1976. He is also a graduate of the California Agricultural Leadership Program. Current memberships include: the University of California President’s Council on Agriculture and Environmental Resources, the Executive Committee of UC Davis Dean’s Advisory Council for the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, an officer of the UC Davis Food Science and Technology Leadership Board, and the Executive Bulls. In addition, Ken is a co-founder, director, case writer, and instructor for the annual California Agribusiness Executive Seminar co-sponsored by Wells Fargo and University of California - Davis.

Ken resides with his wife in Chicago, Illinois.

Carol Channing
Broadway Star

CAROL CHANNING!

A recipient of the 1995 Lifetime Achievement Tony Award, Ms. Channing has been a star of international acclaim since a Time magazine cover story hailed her performance as Lorelei Lee in Gentleman Prefer Blondes writing; "Perhaps once in a decade a nova explodes above the Great White Way with enough brilliance to re-illumine the whole gaudy legend of show business." Since her 1948 Broadway debut in Blitzstein's No For An Answer, her Broadway appearances include So Proudly We Hail, Let’s Face It , Lend An Ear (Theatre World Award), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Show Girl, Pygmalion, The Millionairess, The Vamp, Four On A Garden, and Wonderful Town. Making theatrical history, she won the Tony Award in 1964 for her legendary portrayal of Dolly Levi in Jerry Herman’s Hello, Dolly!

Ms. Channing has recorded ten gold Albums and her original cast album of Hello, Dolly! was an all-time best seller in its field, which knocked the Beatles off the charts when it was released in 1964. When not performing in theatre, Ms. Channing has numerously made appearances in most every grand ballroom and concert hall in the country. Among her other acknowledgements is a Best Nightclub Act of the Year Award and Harvard University's Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year Award

In 2003, the octogenarian released of her best selling memoirs, "Just Lucky I Guess" and received the Julie Harris Lifetime Achievement Award from the Actors’ Fund of America. Carol has been touring the nation (from Broadway to the Hollywood Bowl) and abroad with her new one woman show entitled "The First Eighty Years are the Hardest," after the very successful preview given to New York audiences in Nov 2003 that prompted the New York Times to say "Back Where She Belongs: Carol Channing Reminisces . . . The audience jumped to its feet more than once. We were watching a master performer" and Associated Press declared "The audience clearly was there to worship, and Channing did not disappoint." In 2004, Broadway’s "first lady of musical comedy," also received an honorary doctoral degree becoming Doctor Carol Channing at the 44th annual California State University, Stanislaus Commencement ceremony in May 2004 (This is only the third Honorary Doctoral Degree given in CSU Stanislaus 45-year history). In addition, Carol was presented with the Oscar Hammerstein Award for lifetime achievement in musical theatre from the York Theatre Company, in New York.

Carol was recently married to her junior high school sweetheart, businessman Harry Kullijian, after a 70 year separation. She is also a proud mother, her son is a nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist, who has the distinction of being a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

The career of Carol Channing is varied and continuing. She performs with the gusto of a young aspiring actress. However, her heart will remain on stage even though she has recently committed her life to bring a refocus of the Arts in the public educational system of California. Scholarships, teaching and lecturing and performing, hoping to engage the public support for education in the Arts.