NASRIN ALAVI is a journalist who grew up in Iran. She has studied and taught engineering in Britain and the U.S., and currently lives in London.

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

ROBERT BLY is the author of nineteen collections of poetry, as well as numerous books of translations and prose. He has also been a prominent antiwar activist and leader in the men’s movement. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

KRISTA BREMER lives in Carrboro, North Carolina, with her husband and two children and works at The Sun. She dedicates her essay in this issue to her eight-year-old daughter, who toasted her parents’ belated wedding last year by saying: “I feel very lucky to be able to see my parents get married. Most kids don’t get to do that!”

MICHAEL CHITWOOD’s seventh collection of poems, Clamor, will be published by Tupelo Press in 2010. He teaches at the University of North Carolina and lives in Chapel Hill with his two children, who sigh whenever they see him trying to send a text message.

JACOB COWGILL is a photographer doing graduate work in the environmental-studies program at the University of Montana. His bicycle collection is bordering on an obsession, and he is currently seeking the ultimate single-speed mountain bike. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

ELLEN GIAMPORTONE’s work was included in a book of photographs called Our Beautiful Children (PQ Blackwell). She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she works in an attic office making reservations for vacation rentals.

STEVE KOWIT sent the army a letter of resignation in 1969 and was visited soon after by army intelligence officers with a tape recorder. He later received a transcript of his interview that the army wanted him to sign. A San Francisco lawyer said his testimony was excellent — and that he should get out of town fast. Kowit and his wife spent the next several years in Mexico. He now lives in Potrero, California.

JAMES LEPORE lives in South Salem, New York.

IGOR MALIJEVSKY is a photographer, poet, and short-story writer living in the Czech Republic.

JOAN MARCUS lives with her husband and young daughters in the hills outside Ithaca, New York, where she spends half the year tending her vegetable garden and the other half huddled over her wood stove. Her fiction has appeared in the Georgia Review, Puerto del Sol, and the Beloit Fiction Journal. She is seeking a publisher for her first novel, titled Saturn Returning.

GARY MATSON lives in Sunnyside, New York. He recently received an e-mail from his ex-wife, with whom he had lost contact, after her daughter from another marriage told her, “That guy you used to be married to? I think he’s got a photo in The Sun.”

JENN REIDEL is a photographer and writer who lives with her son, Robyn, in Vashon, Washington.

BRUCE HOLLAND ROGERS lives in Eugene, Oregon, where the winter rains have taught him to swallow antidepressants. He is the author of Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer (Invisible Cities Press).

SY SAFRANSKY is editor and publisher of The Sun.

CRAIG J. SATTERLEE travels the world in search of the best images and also the best pizza. He lives in Powell, Wyoming, with his wife and their two fox terriers, Pokey and Picasso.

S. LONDON SCHERTZER is a photographer living in Dillon, Colorado.

JASON SCHOSSLER’s stories and poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Confrontation, and Willow Springs. He lives in Catasauqua, Pennsylvania, where he works as a legal journalist and remains convinced that reading a judgment non obstante veredicto beats the pants off Ulysses.

RAMIN TALAIE is a journalist and photographer who was born in Iran and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

JENNIFER WARREN is a freelance photographer whose work has been published by the BBC, Al Jazeera, and Amnesty International. She lives in New York City and is proficient in Arabic, Spanish, and American Sign Language.

LYNNE JAEGER WEINSTEIN’s photographs have been published in Orion, Parenting, and O, the Oprah Magazine. She lives in Putney, Vermont, where she likes to take pictures of people doing domestic chores.