STEVE ALMOND’s most recent essay collection is titled Not that You Asked: Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions (Random House). He lives outside Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife and their daughter, Josephine, who recently started walking and shows no signs of ever stopping. 

VELVY APPLETON is a photographer who plays guitar in a Brazilian dance band. He lives with his wife and daughter in Fairfax, California.

GORDON BAER is author of a book of photographs titled Vietnam: The Battle Comes Home (Morgan and Morgan) and a recipient of the Nikon World Understanding Award. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.

JAMES CARROLL has been taking photographs for forty years. He lives in New York City.

LESLEY CECCHI is a photographer who lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

VIC COCCIMIGLIO is a poet living in Long Beach, California. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, North American Review, Paris Review, Poetry, and in the anthology The Invisible Ladder (Henry Holt & Company).

ARNIE COOPER sometimes wonders if teaching English as a second language might be hurting his ability to write. Bombarded by misspellings, misplaced modifiers, and mangled syntax, he fights to maintain his own knowledge of English. Luckily, none of the magazines he writes for have detected a problem. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

RYAN FOX photographs weddings using top-of-the-line equipment, but is most proud of the pictures he takes with a plastic camera he bought for twenty-three dollars. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

RICHARD GROSSINGER is a cultural anthropologist, writer, and co-founder of North Atlantic Books, a leading publisher of alternative health, martial arts, and spiritual titles.

JEFF GUNDY’s poetry manuscript Deerflies won the 2003 Editions Prize. His most recent prose book is Scattering Point: The World in a Mennonite Eye (State University of New York Press). He teaches English at Bluffton College in Ohio.

KRISSY HALL lives and takes photographs in Newton, Georgia.

JAMES LAINSBURY has worked as a logger, editor, and many things in between. He is a Mainer by birth but is currently nestled between Interstate 90 and the rail yard in Missoula, Montana, with his girlfriend and a moody springer spaniel. His essay "Control" is part of a larger, unpublished work.

STEPHEN J. LYONS’s latest book is A View from the Inland Northwest: Everyday Life in America (Globe Pequot). He lives in Monticello, Illinois, and teaches in the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois. To help overcome his recently discovered fear of bridges, he has been driving over short spans that cross the Mississippi River. His goal is to drive across the I-57 bridge over the Ohio River — more than three-quarters of a mile long — with his eyes open.

DORIS MITSCH is a San Francisco photographer whose work has been exhibited nationally.

BRIAN PETERSON is a photographer who lives in Lower Gwynedd, Pennsylvania.

SARA SAFRANSKY is a writer and photographer from Holyoke, Massachusetts. She's spent most of the past year traveling through Europe, working on organic farms in exchange for room and board.

MELISSA SHOOK is a photographer, writer, and teacher living in Chelsea, Massachusetts. She's completed a book about how her mother's death from stomach cancer caused her to forget most of her childhood.

ELLEN SLEZAK's collection of short stories Last Year's Jesus was recently published by Hyperion. She lives in Los Angeles.

NELSON A. SMITH is a freelance advertising writer and essayist living in Manhattan. His work has appeared in Harper's, the New York Times Magazine, the Baffler, In These Times, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a cultural history of pigeons, from Genesis to Darwin to Skinner, tentatively titled "Lessons of an Organic Widget."

RAMIN TALAIE is a journalist and photographer who was born in Iran and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

JENNIFER TRIER is a "rookie photographer" living in San Diego, California. Her photograph in the April 2003 issue is her first published work.

KAREN TWEEDY-HOLMES is coauthor of Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos (No Voice Unheard). She lives in New York City, although she vanishes into the Southwestern desert at every opportunity.