VELVY APPLETON is a photographer who plays guitar in a Brazilian dance band. He lives with his wife and daughter in Fairfax, California.

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).”

BEN BOBLETT is a family physician who also surfs and takes photographs. He lives in Half Moon Bay, California.

ARNIE COOPER wonders if teaching English as a second language is affecting his speaking ability: he often lapses into foreign accents without realizing it. Luckily his writing remains unscathed — or, at least, his editors are being polite. He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

PEG DÍAZ is a photographer who lives in Barstow, California.

STEVE DONOSO is the director of the International Film Festival of the Spirit. He lives in Rockland, Maine.

NOËLLE GABERMAN lives in Occidental, California. When she was young, she thought her father was in Kool & the Gang because his band covered their song “Celebration.”

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.

J.R. HELTON lives in San Antonio, Texas, and is the author of Below the Line (Last Gasp Books), a memoir about his experiences as a set painter on more than twenty films. His friend R. Crumb, the legendary comic-book artist, did the cover art for the book.

NANCY HILL is working on a photography project about fools and has a closet full of jester and harlequin costumes. She lives in rainy Portland, Oregon.

JACK HITT is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and the public-radio program This American Life. His work recently appeared in The Best Science Writing 2006 (Harper Perennial). He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

CLEMENS KALISCHER was born in Bavaria, Germany, and has been taking photographs for more than sixty-five years. He lives in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he runs the Image Gallery.

GINA KELLY is a photographer living in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.

GARY MATSON once appeared on television in New Orleans, Louisiana, dancing under the stars, wearing one orange and one yellow sneaker. He lives in Sunnyside, New York.

BETH MAYER’s work has appeared in the Threepenny Review and the Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies. She performs with the organization TalkingImage Connection and teaches writing at Metropolitan State University. She lives in Lakeville, Minnesota.

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.

PAMELA HOPE MOSELEY lives in Chicago, Illinois, and is learning digital photography. She has been a Montessori elementary-school teacher for twenty years.

VICTORIA PATTERSON recently won the Snake Nation Press prize for her nonfiction. She lives in South Pasadena, California, and has worked as a waitress for most of her adult life.

JIM RALSTON was raised on a farm in upstate Michigan, when there was still a taste of wilderness in the north. He now lives in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and teaches at Blue Ridge Community and Technical College. He recently returned from six weeks in Brazil, where he visited the healer John of God in Abadiania and was healed of his resentments. He says, “I arrived a skeptic and left a skeptic but was healed anyway.”

DOUG RHINEHART’s first book of photographs is Desert Adagio (People’s Press). He is a retired community-college administrator and photography instructor who lives in Woody Creek, Colorado.

BRUCE HOLLAND ROGERS lives in Eugene, Oregon, and is trying to simultaneously learn Finnish, Hungarian, and Japanese.

SY SAFRANSKY is editor and publisher of The Sun.

CAROL SAMOUR’s photographs have been published in Potomac Review, Kalliope, and Shots. She lives with her husband and two cats in Germantown, Maryland.

MARK SMITH-SOTO is the director of the Center for Creative Writing in the Arts at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the longtime editor of International Poetry Review. His most recent book of poetry is Any Second Now, and he translated Fever Season: Selected Poetry of Ana Istarú.

KIM STAFFORD directs the Northwest Writing Institute. His most recent book is A Thousand Friends of Rain: New and Selected Poems (Carnegie-Mellon University Press). He lives in Portland, Oregon.

CARROLL ANN SUSCO’s writing has been published in Gulf Coast and the Beloit Fiction Journal. She teaches English at Halifax Community College and lives in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina.

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.