Jacob Hess has been fascinated by this conversation ever since landing in the middle of a pack of (wonderful) liberal classmates and professors as an (innocent) conservative Mormon boy. His first dialogue project ten years ago involved bringing gay classmates together with Mormon classmates – and the result convinced him to keep trying.  Since that time, he’s been exploring the potential of dialogue to spark collaboration and deepen understanding on difficult socio-political issues – most recently working as a partner with Living Room Conversations and director of Village Square Utah. With Dr. Phil Neisser (State University of New York, Potsdam), Jacob co-authored a book on liberal-conservative dialogue entitled, “You’re Not as Crazy as I Thought (But You’re Still Wrong) Conversations between a Devoted Conservative and a Die-Hard Liberal” – featured on NPR’s This American Life. His second book was a discourse analysis of the conversation about romance in the United States: “Once upon a time, he wasn’t feeling it anymore:  What’s killing romance in America – and what to do about it.  Jacob has published 13 peer-reviewed articles – and in collaboration with Arthur and 35 other dialogue experts, is finishing the Red Blue Dictionary in time for the nastiest election in American history. He can be reached at jzhess@gmail.com

Arthur Peña has taught Spanish and English as a Second Language for over 20 years, and is presently living and working in northern California.  He has organized public discussion forums on controversial political issues and has received training in various forms of conflict resolution.  He has spent most of his 54 years of life pondering the search for wholeness in a world fragmented by conflicting truth claims.  As a not-entirely-comfortably-gay man, a libertarian-leaning Marxist, and a mystical agnostic Christian, he finds that some of modern America’s deepest social fault lines run straight through his deepest sense of self. He can be reached at arthurmalcolmpena@usa.net