SANTO BARBIERI is a photographer living in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He recently completed a photo essay titled “Imagined Communities,” which examines urban public spaces and the relationships they foster.

MAUREEN BEITLER is a photographer and nurse living in New York City. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship for her photographs of Harlem.

JANE BRASWELL is the pseudonym of an author in the Pacific Northwest who divides her time among parenting, writing, and volunteerism. She is currently at work on a collection of essays.

MICHELLE CACHO-NEGRETE lives in Wells, Maine, and her essays appear in The Sun’s new book The Mysterious Life of the Heart and in Thoreau’s Legacy, an anthology from the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists. She teaches writing both in person and online and is recovering well from surgery, thanks to Dr. Jeff Thurlow.

JOHN CAMARA is a photographer living in Mill Valley, California. He spends his free time exploring the ruins of industrial-age America.

RONALD F. CURRIE JR.’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Swink, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Cincinnati Review. His fiction in the December 2005 issue is an excerpt from a novel-in-stories, for which he’s seeking an agent. He lives in Waterville, Maine.

SANDRA LOUISE DYAS is sometimes called the “rock-and-roll photographer of Iowa City, Iowa,” because she often photographs musicians. She lives with her two daughters and teaches in the art department at Cornell College.

COREY FISCHER cofounded the Traveling Jewish Theatre in 1978 and has worked in film, television, and theater for more than thirty-five years. He lives in Kentfield, 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.

CARLOS GUSTAVO is based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and is currently traveling the southeastern U.S. His photographs have been published in B&W and Oxford American.

DAVID BRENDAN HOPES is the author of A Childhood in the Milky Way (Akron University Press), which was nominated for both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. His latest volume of poetry, A Dream of Adonis, is forthcoming from Pecan Grove Press. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

BRIAN JOLLEY created his photographs in the December 2005 issue by dropping his Polaroids where he took them, then returning weeks later to retrieve the pictures and “see what nature had to say for itself.” He lives in West Tisbury, Massachusetts.

STUART KESTENBAUM is the author of two books of poems, Pilgrimage (Coyote Love Press) and House of Thanksgiving (Deerbrook Editions). He lives in Deer Isle, Maine.

STEVE KOWIT likes to point out that, although people don’t think writers earn much money, he and the nation’s leading romance novelist earn a combined income of approximately $60 million a year. He lives in California with his beloved wife, six cats, and two dogs.

JEREMY LLOYD lives in Townsend, Tennessee, in the Great Smoky Mountains. Due west, south, and east of his home are forests containing some of the richest biodiversity on the continent. Due north is good beer. He is at work on a novel.

FAWN POTASH is a photographer, educator, curator, and volunteer firefighter living in Catskill, New York.

MARTIN STEINGESSER lives in Portland, Maine, where he is the city’s first poet laureate. He has published a book of poems, Brothers of Morning (Deerbrook Editions), and a cd, The Thinking Heart, which is a performance piece in two voices and cello based on the writings of a Dutch woman who died in the Holocaust.

COLE THOMPSON is a fine-art photographer living in northern Colorado. The subjects of his photographs range from the beaches of Oregon to the Nazi concentration camps of Poland. 

KAREN TWEEDY-HOLMES works as an editor so that she doesn’t have to photograph lipstick or salad to pay the rent. She lives in New York City and devotes one day each weekend to a palomino quarter horse named Lucky, though she insists that she’s the lucky one.

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.

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.

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.