JAMES AGEE was a poet, novelist, journalist, film critic, and social activist. His best-known work is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a nonfiction book about the lives of poor Southern farmers, on which he collaborated with photographer Walker Evans. A native of Knoxville, Tennessee, Agee died of a heart attack in 1955 at the age of forty-four.

DAVID BARSAMIAN founded and directs the award-winning radio program Alternative Radio. His latest book is a collection of conversations with Howard Zinn called Original Zinn: Conversations on History and Politics (Harper Perennial). He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

RITA BERNSTEIN is a former civil-rights lawyer who fantasizes about being a veterinarian or a neuroscientist. She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

JENNIFER BISBING lives in Chicago and has been taking photographs for more than ten years.

BEN BROWN is a photographer living in Brooklyn, New York.

CHRIS BURSK lives in Langhorne Manor, Pennsylvania. He is the author of several books of poetry, including The Improbable Swervings of Atoms (University of Pittsburgh Press). When he’s not teaching or writing poetry, he spends much of his time chasing his grandchildren.

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.

KRISSY HALL lives and takes photographs in Newton, Georgia.

OTIS HASCHEMEYER has an MFA from the University of Arkansas and was a recent Stegner Fellow. He currently lives in Paris, where he is working on a novel.

JEFFREY HERSCH is a photographer who has unloaded cod from fishing boats and mucked out horse stalls. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

MARIE HUARD lives in Philadelphia. Her photograph in the February 2006 issue was taken with a pinhole camera on a day trip to New York City.

MICHAEL KANE lives in San Francisco.

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.

JENNIFER MERANTO is a fine-art photographer based in the West Indies.

JACQUELINE MOREAU is a photographer who works as a special-education teacher during the school year and as a fire lookout at a national forest during the summer. She lives in White Salmon, Washington, with her son, a horse, a cat, and chickens that lay blue-green eggs.

DION OGUST lives in Woodstock, New York, and is a staff photographer for the Woodstock Times. Her portraits of writers and musicians have appeared on book and CD covers.

SUSAN PARKER’s memoir Tumbling After (Crown) has been optioned for film rights by HBO. She teaches writing classes in the Bay Area.

SY SAFRANSKY is editor and publisher of The Sun.

GORDON STETTINIUS is an artist, teacher, and photographer living in Richmond, Virginia. His work has been exhibited in New York City, the Netherlands, and Seattle, Washington.

CARROLL ANN SUSCO’s writing has been published in Gulf Coast and the Beloit Fiction Journal. She teaches English at Halifax Community College and lives in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina.

GREGORY THORP lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and takes photographs commercially for several barge lines on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. His personal subject of choice, however, is corn, in all its forms.

MARK TOWNSEND lives in Brooklyn, New York.

HIROSHI WATANABE made commercials for Japanese television for twenty years before he quit to devote himself full time to fine-art photography. He lives in West Hollywood, California.