PEGGY SUE AMISON has been a photographer for more than twenty years. In 2000 she moved from California to County Cork, Ireland, where she directs the Sirius Arts Centre.

POE BALLANTINE’s latest book is 501 Minutes to Christ (Hawthorne Books). He lives in Chadron, Nebraska, where he is a school custodian. He says, “It feels good to be back in education.” 

AL BARNA is a photographer living and working in San Francisco, California.

TOM BECKER’s latest photography project centers on the county fairs of northwest Iowa. He lives in Orange City, Iowa.

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

DUNCAN GREEN began taking photographs at ymca camp in Ohio when he was eleven. He is a staff photographer for the Washington State House of Representatives and lives in Olympia, Washington.

ROY GUMPEL is a photographer, cinematographer, and volunteer firefighter in High Falls, New York. His favorite assignment was filming Route 66 for a National Geographic television documentary.

JOEL JENSEN holds to his belief that in the not-so-distant future, phone calls and handwritten letters will eliminate e-mail, and film will preside over digital images. He lives and takes photographs in Summerland, California.

CLEMENS KALISCHER was born in Bavaria and has been taking photographs for sixty years. He lives in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he runs the Image Gallery and maintains Image Photos, an archive of more than a half-million pictures.

DIANE LEFER sometimes goes out in public dressed as a Guantánamo prisoner as a form of protest. Once, she found herself with her hands in the air and two guns pointed at her head after she was mistaken for a terrorist by the police. She is the author of the short-story collection California Transit (Sarabande Books) and collaborated with theater artist and therapist Hector Aristizábal on Nightwind, a play about his arrest and torture at the hands of the U.S.–supported military in Colombia. She lives in Los Angeles.

LOU LIPSITZ wrote a song called “Throw Your Shoe at G.W.” for a local inaugural-night bash. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

ALISON LUTERMAN is adjusting to domestic bliss, milking the chickens and harvesting the cactus with her beloved on their little homestead in Oakland, California. 

ANNA KAUFMAN MOON is the author of a self-published book of photographs called Reflections of New York City: 1963–1972. Her work has appeared in Newsweek, the New York Times, and Life. She lives in Cobleskill, New York.

STEVE PATTERSON lives in Portland, Oregon, and his photographs are published regularly in the Oregonian, Willamette Week, and the Portland Mercury. The CoHo Theater in Portland will exhibit his work this month.

LESLIE PIETRZYK lives in Virginia and is the author of two novels: A Year and a Day (William Morrow/HarperCollins) and Pears on a Willow Tree (HarperPerennial).

DAVY ROTHBART is the creator of Found Magazine, a contributor to Public Radio International’s This American Life, and the author of the short-story collection The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas (Touchstone). He is currently at work on a documentary film about love, and is training to fly hot-air balloons. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

SY SAFRANSKY is editor and publisher of The Sun.

MARVIN W. SCHWARTZ is a photographer who lives in New York City. His work is in the permanent collection of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

SYBIL SMITH has been published in Dos Passos Review, Nimrod, the Harvard Review, and the MacGuffin. She lives in Norwich, Vermont.

THEA SULLIVAN lives in San Francisco and spends most of her time chasing after her two-year-old son, who was born several months after the events described in her essay in the December 2008 issue. She teaches writing, and at parties she likes to impress people by playing the William Tell Overture on her teeth.

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.

JULIA TUCHMAN lives in New York City.

JEFF WALT has worked as a bill collector, a pizza-delivery guy, a cowboy at Walt Disney World, and an English instructor. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Runes, Clackamas Literary Review, and the Comstock Review, and he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize three years in a row. He lives in Tacoma, Washington.

MARIE SHEPPARD WILLIAMS is a retired social worker who has won two Pushcart Prizes. She lives in Minnesota with a very large cat named Albert Einstein.

HARRY WILSON lives in Bakersfield, California.