KAEL ALFORD is a freelance photographer based in the Balkans, where she has been covering the final phases of the disintegration of Yugoslavia since 1996. Her work has been published in the New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, and Time. She is currently reporting from Jordan and Iraq.

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. 

GREG AMES is the author of the novel Buffalo Lockjaw (Hyperion), which won the 2009 Book of the Year Award from the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and has taught creative writing and literature at Brooklyn College and Binghamton University.

ALYSSA H. AXSOM is a photographer living in Lafayette, Colorado.

RITA BERNSTEIN is a reluctant traveler and thus takes most of her photographs close to her home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

BRIGITTE CARNOCHAN is the author of Bella Figura (Modernbook Editions). She lives in Portola Valley, California, where she loves to photograph her dog, Muggs, doing just about anything for a dog biscuit.

DIANE DEATON-STREET is a photographer living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

STEPHEN ELLIOTT’s fourth novel, Happy Baby, is being co-published this month by MacAdam/Cage and McSweeney’s. He lives in San Francisco but is currently on the road following the Democratic primaries and working on a book about the 2004 election.

BILL EMORY has been a janitor, plumber, auto mechanic, and cat-scan technologist and has also taken photographs for more than thirty-five years. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

PETER FOLEY is a native New Yorker and freelance photojournalist. His work with New York City firemen is featured in the History Channel documentary The Day the Towers Fell. He recently returned from the Middle East, where he covered the effects of the war on the economy of Iraq.

IRVING GOLDWORM started taking pictures in 1962. Before that he was "an English major and left-of-center snob who thought that pictures were for people who moved their lips when they read." He lives in Sherman Oaks, California.

DUNCAN GREEN recently got married for the first time at the age of fifty-three. He works as a bicycle advocate for the transit agency in Olympia, Washington.

JOHN HODGEN is the author of the poetry collection Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press). He lives in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, and is a visiting assistant professor of English at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts.

CHARLOTTE HOLMES's stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the Antioch Review, and New Letters. The title story of her collection Gifts and Other Stories (Confluence Press) will appear in the anthology After O'Connor: Contemporary Georgia Stories, forthcoming this fall from the University of Georgia Press. She teaches at Pennsylvania State University.

RUSSELL JOSLIN is a photographer living and working in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is also the editor and publisher of Shots, an independent quarterly journal of photography.

KEN KLONSKY recently retired from teaching and is the author of a book of short stories about troubled young people titled Songs of Aging Children (Arsenal Pulp Press). He lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

KAYO LACKEY was born and raised in Japan and has lived in Portland, Oregon, since 1997.

LESLEA NEWMAN is the author of forty books for adults and children, including the poetry collections Still Life with Buddy and Signs of Love (both Windstorm Creative Limited). She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation.

RACHEL PFOTENHAUER is a therapist who lives with her husband and two children in Dolores, Colorado.

LAURIE SERMOS recently returned home to her dachshund, Hugo, after teaching photography for three months in Tuscany, Italy. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

STARHAWK is a global-justice activist and the author or coauthor of ten books, including The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (Harper SanFrancisco). Her latest book is The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature (Harper SanFrancisco).

JERRY N. UELSMANN’s most recent book of photographs is The Mind’s Eye, and his work is in the permanent collections of art museums worldwide. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.

GENIE ZEIGER was a longtime contributor to The Sun who lived in Shelburne, Massachusetts. She died on December 24, 2009.