ANDREW ALEXANDER is a graduate of Vassar College and the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. His short fiction has appeared in Mississippi Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Red Cedar Review, Crescent Review, and New Stories from the South. He is a recipient of the Henfield Prize and currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is working on his first novel.

AROND ALEXANDER is a photographer living in Portland, Oregon.

POE BALLANTINE does not need bifocals, he says, as he slides his glasses to the tip of his nose to read. He is the author of the true-crime book Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere, due out in 2012, and the subject of the documentary Poe Ballantine, A Writer in America (copies of which can be purchased for $13.99, shipping included, from Al Saperstein, P.O. Box 111, Earleton, Florida, 32631). He lives in Chadron, Nebraska.

BOB BAYLES is a photographer who lives in Van Nuys, California. He likes to incorporate quotes from movies in conversation, which leads his family to playfully accuse him of being unoriginal. “Either that,” he says, “or they actually believe ‘I’m very shallow and empty, and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say’ (Annie Hall).”

CARY CLIFFORD lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and has exhibited her photographs most recently in New York, Pittsburgh, and Berlin.

ARNIE COOPER wonders if teaching English as a second language is affecting his speaking ability: he often lapses into foreign accents without realizing it. Luckily his writing remains unscathed — or, at least, his editors are being polite. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

CORTNEY DAVIS’s most recent poetry collection, Leopold’s Maneuvers (University of Nebraska Press), won the 2003 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in poetry. She is also the author of I Knew a Woman (Ballantine), a memoir about her work as a nurse practitioner, and co-editor of two anthologies of poetry and prose by nurses, Between the Heartbeats and Intensive Care (both University of Iowa Press).

SUSI EGGENBERGER likes to hike the hut-to-hut system in the White Mountains and float on Daicey Pond in Baxter State Park. She lives in Arundel, Maine.

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.

MARTIN FISHMAN died in February 2010 at the age of seventy-two. His photographs are part of the permanent collection of the Coney Island Museum in New York.

AMANDA PARALEE HART has lived in Ireland, Costa Rica, Massachusetts, and California, and now lives in Virginia. Wherever she goes, she documents life with her camera.

IRA J. HAWKINS is a student at California College of the Arts and a preschool teacher. He lives in Oakland, California.

MATT KOLLASCH is a photographer living in Warsaw, Poland.

KAREN LANDMANN speaks twelve languages, including Sranan Tongo, the creole language of Suriname. She lives in New York City.

ALISON LUTERMAN makes a mean bowl of chili. Her secret? Black olives, mustard, and red wine. She lives in Oakland, California.

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.

SY SAFRANSKY is editor and publisher of The Sun.

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

IRENE SVETE lives in Seattle, where she splits her workday between freelance writing and a NASA program at the University of Washington. Her fiction has appeared in Bricolage and Gargoyle.

PTOLEMY TOMPKINS is the author of This Tree Grows out of Hell (HarperSanFrancisco) — a study of Aztec myth and ritual — and two memoirs: Paradise Fever (Quill) and The Beaten Path (William Morrow & Company). He lives in New York City.

SUZI Q. VARIN is a photographer, skater, sudoku addict, and late-blooming cook who lives with her husband in the great state of Texas. Her work has been featured in Southern Living, Town and Country, and Exquisite Weddings.

BILL WITT provides volunteer photo services for several nonprofit organizations and drives a truck for the Northeast Iowa Food Bank once a week. He is the author of Orchids in Your Pocket: A Guide to the Native Orchids of Iowa and Enchanted by Prairie. He lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa.