Winter 2014 Living Writers Series. All authors in this quarter’s series are UCSC alumni!

Martha Mendoza is a Puliter Prize-winning Associated Press National Writer whose reports have won numerous awards and prompted Congressional hearings, Pentagon investigations and White House responses. She has reported for the AP since 1997, in Albuquerque, N.M., New York and Mexico City. A UC Santa Cruz graduate, she was a 2001 Knight Fellow at Stanford University and a 2007 Ferris Professor for Humanities at Princeton University.

Nick Miroff is a correspondent for The Washington Post covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. He is also a senior correspondent for GlobalPost and a contributor to National Public Radio. Miroff has a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley School of Journalism (2006) and studied Spanish and Latin American literature at UC Santa Cruz (2000). He grew up in Albany, New York.

Michael Scherer is TIME magazine’s Washington D.C. Bureau Chief. He joined TIME in December of 2007 and became the magazine’s White House correspondent following the 2008 campaign. He has written a number of cover stories in recent years, including The Informers, The Gunfighters, The New Sheriffs of Wall Street and Yo Decido: the Rise of the Latino Voter. He won the 2012 National Press Club’s Lee Walczak Award for Political Analysis for his series on how the Obama campaign harnessed technology to win the Presidential race. Before coming to TIME, he worked as a Washington Correspondent for both Salon.com and Mother Jones magazine, and as a beat reporter for the Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, Mass.