Niles is a 16-year-old student at Berkeley High School and Independent Studies program. He's a student advocate, which means he participates in tutoring and mentoring other students, and is a slam poet.

His father is half German, half Jewish; his mother is half Chinese and half Malaysian. During World War II, the Japanese sent some members of his mother's family to internment camps. He didn't learn about those camps in school when he was taught about World War II and found it disturbing that his teachers either didn't know about them or chose not to include that information in their lesson plans. In Malaysia, Niles' family had owned a coffee shop. When soldiers came in, his grandmother would try to get the soldiers drunk and then tried to hide in the back of the shop hoping she would escape the fate of her cousins: they had been raped. Last summer, Niles visited Malaysia and was moved to write a piece about the stories he had heard about the war. The name of the piece is Selamat Jelan Malaysia, or Goodbye Malaysia.

Niles Xi'an Beh-Lichtenstein's poem "Goodbye Malaysia" was inspired by stories his family told him about their experiences in Malaysia during World War II. On The Artists' War, Niles discussed his generation's relationship to war, "I can see my friends growing up and rushing to the wrong decisions because the realism of war has not touched their hearts."

Young people today are exposed to more information, more media, than any previous generation in history, but does this generation understand the realities of war?