Award-winning journalist and bestselling author Joe Layden has written more than thirty books for adults and children, including the critically acclaimed title, The Last Great Fight and the #1 New York Times bestseller The Rock Says. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, with his wife, Susan, and their two children.

Cary Elwes is a celebrated English actor who starred in The Princess Bride before moving on to roles in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Glory, Days of Thunder, Twister, and Saw, among many other acclaimed performances. He will always be indebted to The Princess Bride, he says, for changing his life and giving him a career that has spanned decades.

Robin Wright is the Chief Diplomatic Correspondent for the L.A. Times's Washington bureau.

Wright is both an extraordinary, seasoned journalist and a highly respected Middle East scholar who lived throughout that region for five years. She has reported from more than 130 countries as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, CBS News, The Washington Post, The Sunday Times of London, and the Christian Science Monitor. She has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, Civilization, Current History, The Middle East Journal, The New York Times, and the Guardian.

Wright is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant and the 1989 National Magazine Award for her reportage from Iran in the The New Yorker. She also won the Overseas Press Club Award for "best reporting in any medium requiring exceptional courage and initiative" for the Angolan war.

Wright was a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Poynter fellow at Yale, a senior fellow at Duke, a Media Fellow at Stanford, and a Regents Fellow at UC Santa Barbara.