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Andrew Lam is a Vietnamese American writer. He was born in South Vietnam, where he attended Lycée Yersin in Đà Lạt.

Lam left Vietnam with his family during the fall of Saigon in April 1975. He attended the University of California, Berkeley where he majored in biochemistry. He soon abandoned plans for medical school and entered a creative writing program at San Francisco State University. While still in school he began writing for Pacific News Service and in 1993 won the Outstanding Young Journalist Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

A PBS documentary produced by WETA in 2004, My Journey Home, told 3 stories of Americans returning to their ancestral homelands, including of Lam's return to Vietnam.

He is currently the web editor of New America Media. He is also a journalist and short story writer. In 2005, he published a collection of essays, Perfume Dreams, about the problem of identity as a Vietnamese living in the U.S. Lam received the PEN Open Book Award in 2006 for Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora. He is a regular contributor to National Public Radio's All Things Considered. His second book, "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres" is a meditation on East-West relations, and how Asian immigration changed the West. It was named Top Ten Indies by Shelf Unbound Magazine in 2010.

Birds of Paradise Lost, his third book, is a collection of short stories about Vietnamese newcomers struggling to remake their lives in the San Francisco Bay after a long, painful exodus from Vietnam.

Cathleen Miller is an internationally best-selling American nonfiction writer based in California. Her 2013 book, Champion of Choice, is the biography of United Nations leader Nafis Sadik.

She is also the author of Desert Flower (1998), co-written with Waris Dirie—a Somali nomad turned model turned activist—who shared her experience with female genital mutilation to bring about global awareness. The book has been cited by the United Nations as having played a major role in the advocacy against female genital mutilation. Desert Flower was made into a feature film in 2009 and released in 34 countries. The print version sold over 11 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 55 languages.

Miller was born in the United States but has traveled widely in pursuit of research, adventure, and experience. She has interviewed diplomats and heads of state on five continents, patients in an Addis Ababa Hospital, rape camp survivors in Kosovo, and midwives in the mountains of East Timor. Her work sometimes places her in strange circumstances, for example cruising St. Petersburg in a Winnebago to interview prostitutes, and running down a Brazilian mountain at midnight fleeing bandits.

Miller earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Pennsylvania State University in 1997 and has been teaching Creative Writing at San José State University since 2004 and is the current Editor-in-chief of Reed Magazine.

Miller co-founded Wild Writing Women, a group of women writers who travel worldwide and come together to write their stories of adventure. She is also a member of the Bay Area Travel Writers organization. Her work has appeared in many magazines and newspapers in the United States, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times.

Interview by Joanna Jackson and Andre Jaquez at San José State University.