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).”

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

J.R. CARRIGAN is a photographer living in Burlington, Vermont.

WILLIAM CARTER calls himself “a professional photographer hoping to become an amateur.” He lives in Los Altos Hills, California.

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.

ERIN CORBAL is a photographer and compulsive list-maker who took great satisfaction in writing up this biographical note and crossing it off her list. She lives with her husband in Altadena, California.

VIRGINIA ELIOT is a writer living in New York City.

FRANK HAMRICK’s photography career began at age ten, when he traded an old hat for a cheap 35mm camera. He is the author of i found it when i stopped looking (Nexus Press). He lives in Gray, Georgia.

JEFFREY HERSCH is a photographer who has unloaded cod from fishing boats and mucked out horse stalls. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

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.

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

ANNA KAUFMAN MOON’s photographs have been published in Newsweek, Life, and the New York Times. She lives in Cobleskill, New York, where she grows peas, lettuce, and chives.

DEIRDRE PETERSON is a writer living in New York City. After years of helping businesspeople say what they want to say, she is now writing what she wants to say.

ROGER PFINGSTON is now retired after teaching photography and English to high-school students for thirty-one years. His photographs and poems having been widely published, he disproves the adage “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

MICHAEL POLLAN is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. His books include The Botany of Desire (Random House), A Place of My Own (Delta), and Second Nature (Grove Press). He lives in Berkeley, California.

MELANIE A. RAWLS lives in Tallahassee, Florida, and is a writing instructor at Florida A&M University.

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.

MANDELIENE SMITH has waited tables, scooped ice cream, taught writing, weeded gardens, and translated books into Braille to support her writing habit. Her stories have appeared in the Massachusetts Review and the New England Review. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

SPARROW resides in a double-wide trailer in Phoenicia, New York (a hamlet of the Catskill Mountains), with his wife, Violet Snow, and daughter, Sylvia. He is reading the works of Freud — two pages a day. His latest book is called America: A Prophecy (Soft Skull Press).

MARK TOWNSEND lives in Brooklyn, New York.

MORGAN TYREE, who calls himself a “walking typo,” lives in Powell, Wyoming, and has the letter R tattooed on his left foot and the letter L on his right. His work has been published in America West, Harper’s, and Shots.

JANINE POMMY VEGA is the author of twenty books of poetry and prose. Her most recent book of poems is The Green Piano (Black Sparrow Books). She has performed her work — in English and Spanish, with and without music — at festivals, nightclubs, college campuses, and prisons. She lives in Bearsville, New York.

ELLEN WALLENSTEIN teaches photography at the School of Visual Arts and Pratt Institute. She divides her time between New York City and Sherman, Connecticut.