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.

RITA BERNSTEIN is a former civil-rights lawyer who fantasizes about being a veterinarian or a neuroscientist. She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

MARK BRAZAITIS is the author of An American Affair: Stories (Texas Review Press), which won the 2004 George Garrett Fiction Prize. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Morgantown, West Virginia, and prefers swimming, hiking, bike riding — just about any recreational activity — to golf.

JAMES CARROLL lives in New York City.

JED DEVINE teaches photography at Purchase College, State University of New York, in Westchester County.

RALPH EARLE’s poems have appeared in the Carolina Quarterly and Main Street Rag. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and has recently started raising tropical fish.

MARTIN FISHMAN lives in Brooklyn, New York.

GARY HARWOOD is coauthor of Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community (Kent State University Press). He lives in Kent, Ohio.

DAVID HASSLER has published two books of poems and is the program and outreach director for the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. He also conducts writing workshops in schools and senior centers. He lives in Kent, Ohio, with his wife and daughter.

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

STEPHANIE KOVEN’s writing has appeared in the Antioch Review, Epoch, and the Green Mountains Review. One of her short stories was listed in the O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 (Anchor) as a “recommended story.” She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

FRANCES LEFKOWITZ reviews books for Body+Soul magazine and is now working on a memoir “about poverty, escape, and the downside of upward mobility.” She divides her time between northern California and southern Maine.

STEPHEN J. LYONS’s latest book is A View from the Inland Northwest: Everyday Life in America (Globe Pequot). He lives in Monticello, Illinois, and teaches in the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois. To help overcome his recently discovered fear of bridges, he has been driving over short spans that cross the Mississippi River. His goal is to drive across the I-57 bridge over the Ohio River — more than three-quarters of a mile long — with his eyes open.

MERRITT MICHAEL MARGOLIS grew up in New Jersey and worked as a news photographer for the Newark Star Ledger. In his later years he lived in Phoenix, Arizona, and focused on nature photography. His work can be found in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He died in 2003.

ROBERT MEYER is a photographer and one of nine children, eight of whom are boys. (Yes, he says, his mother is still alive.) He lives in Red Wing, Minnesota, home of the narrowest navigable turn on the Mississippi River.

GERALD PARKER lives in Manomet, Massachusetts.

SY SAFRANSKY is editor and publisher of The Sun.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO is the author of A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk about Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration (Travelers’ Tales). He lives in Sebastopol, California, and volunteers for a group that takes disabled people on sea-kayaking and river-rafting adventures.

CAROL STERNKOPF is a photographer who lives in Bend, Oregon, with her loving husband, precocious ten-year-old, and irreverent dog.

MARK TOWNSEND lives in Brooklyn, New York.