David L. Ulin is book editor of the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of "The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith," selected as a Best Book of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune, and the editor of "Another City: Writing from Los Angeles" and "Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology," which won a 2002 California Book Award. He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, and National Public Radio's All Things Considered; his essay "The Half-Birthday of the Apocalypse" was nominated for a 2004 Pushcart Prize. For the 2008-2009 academic year, he was a visiting professor in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts.