POE BALLANTINE does not need bifocals, he says, as he slides his glasses to the tip of his nose to read. He is the author of the true-crime book Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere, due out in 2012, and the subject of the documentary Poe Ballantine, A Writer in America (copies of which can be purchased for $13.99, shipping included, from Al Saperstein, P.O. Box 111, Earleton, Florida, 32631). He lives in Chadron, Nebraska.

ELLEN BASS’s poetry books include The Human Line and Mules of Love. She teaches in Pacific University’s low-residency mfa program and lives in Santa Cruz, California.

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.

JEAN BRAITHWAITE lives in Edinburgh, Texas, where she teaches English, directs the MFA program, and struggles to improve her Spanish, all at the University of Texas-Pan American. Her work has appeared in the New York Times and Bayou.

AKHIM YUSEFF CABEY is originally from the Bronx but now lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he is working on a childhood memoir called Little Red Love Machine.

THOMAS CLARK is a part-time photographer, writer, tennis player, and recluse. He lives in St. Albans, New York.

KAREN CUNNINGHAM is a photographer who lives in New York City.

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

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.

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

ERIK HOFFNER is a renewable-energy activist who works for Orion magazine. He lives in Ashfield, Massachusetts.

JON HUGHES is a photojournalist who has been on assignment around the world, but his hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, is his ongoing documentary project.

PRESCOTT MOORE LASSMAN is a photographer and lawyer whose work has been published in the Washington Post and B&W. He lives in Washington, D.C.

DIANE LEFER sometimes goes out in public dressed as a Guantánamo prisoner as a form of protest. Once, she found herself with her hands in the air and two guns pointed at her head after she was mistaken for a terrorist by the police. She is the author of the short-story collection California Transit (Sarabande Books) and collaborated with theater artist and therapist Hector Aristizábal on Nightwind, a play about his arrest and torture at the hands of the U.S.–supported military in Colombia. She lives in Los Angeles.

ALISON LUTERMAN makes a mean bowl of chili. Her secret? Black olives, mustard, and red wine. She lives in Oakland, California.

ROBYN McDANIELS lives in Audubon, Minnesota.

DOUG McMAINS is a photographer and cinematographer who lives in Herman, Nebraska. His work is represented by Getty Images.

LAKE NEWTON is a photographer who lives in Las Vegas, Nevada.

MADEENA SPRAY NOLAN published two novels so long ago that everyone, including her, has forgotten about them. Her darkest secret is her attendance at the 1960 Republican convention as a fanatic Kansas Youth for Nixon. She finally confessed this to her son and daughter-in-law, who have regarded her with a shade of suspicion ever since. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

SANDRA-LEE PHIPPS worked as a photographer for The Village Voice for eight years. She now lives in Decatur, Georgia, and creates artwork out of things growing in her yard, including her children.

SY SAFRANSKY is editor and publisher of The Sun.

CRAIG J. SATTERLEE teaches photography at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming.

A.J. SHUMER is a photographer living in Westport, Massachusetts.

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.

RICK STEWART is a photographer who lives in San Francisco.

CHIP THOMAS works as an Indian Health Service physician at a remote clinic on the Navajo Nation in Arizona. In 1993 he earned a Guinness World Record with two others for cycling twelve thousand miles from the northernmost point in Africa to the southernmost point in nine and a half months.

PETER C. TRAGNI has been a police officer in Danbury, Connecticut, for twenty years. In 2004 he went to Iraq as a volunteer to help train the Iraqi police force. While he was there he took thousands of photographs. He lives in Waterbury, Connecticut.

JENNY WARBURG’s photographs have been published in Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and Time. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.