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 believes that singing, laughing, and memorizing beloved poems should take the place of antidepressants. 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 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.

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 was a registered nurse for twenty-two years before becoming a photographer. 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 dishwasher, janitor, plumber, HVAC repairman, auto mechanic, and CAT-scan technologist. He has also been a photographer for thirty-five years. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

MARTIN FISHMAN lives in Brooklyn, 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 photographer from Seattle, Washington.

MATT KOLLASCH lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa. He has traveled to Slovakia thirty-five times in the last ten years to photograph that country’s Roma (Gypsy) culture.

KAREN LANDMANN is a photographer and social worker who lives in New York City. She speaks twelve languages and is working on her thirteenth: Twi, a language spoken in Ghana.

ALISON LUTERMAN blogs about art, life, performance, and poetry at www.seehowwealmostfly.blogspot.com. 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 punk-rock tomboy who is more surprised than anyone to find herself photographing weddings for a living. She lives in West Hollywood, California.

BILL WITT is a photographer who has also been a Peace Corps volunteer in Afghanistan, an assembler of tractor transmissions, and an Iowa state legislator. He lives in Cedar Falls, Iowa.