COLEMAN BARKS has collaborated with scholars for thirty-one years to translate the poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi into American free verse. He has published nineteen volumes of Rumi’s work, which have sold more than three quarters of a million copies, as well as six volumes of his own poetry. He taught American literature and creative writing at various universities for thirty-four years and is now a retired professor emeritus at the University of Georgia. He lives in Athens, Georgia, close to his two sons and four grandchildren.

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

THOMAS BOYD is the pseudonym of a writer and divorced father of two who lives in San Francisco, California.

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!”

T. PAIGE DALPORTO is a photographer, poet, and songwriter who lives in his hometown of Charlton Heights, West Virginia.

HOPE FRAZIER is working on a photography project about the impact of mountaintop-removal coal mining on eastern Kentucky and its people.

CHRIS GRUVER is a photographer who captains luxury yachts for a living. He’s also a damn good chef. He lives in Bainbridge Island, Washington.

KARI HAGA is in search of the smoothest river rock that water has ever produced. She lives in Billings, Montana.

SONYA K. HESS is a writer and practicing doula who lives in Brainerd, Minnesota, with her husband and two children. A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she’s been published in St. Anne’s Review and Heliotrope. 

TAMA HOCHBAUM lives with her husband and two children in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she cooks, sings, and plays guitar.

EDIS JURCYS was born in Lithuania, studied film in Russia, and worked for eight years at Moscow Network Television. Two books of his photographs have been published in Lithuania. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

CLEMENS KALISCHER was born in Bavaria and has been taking photographs for sixty years. He lives in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he runs the Image Gallery and maintains Image Photos, an archive of more than a half-million pictures.

KAYO LACKEY was born and raised in Japan and has lived in Portland, Oregon, since 1997.

KAREN LANDMANN speaks twelve languages, including Sranan Tongo, the creole language of Suriname. She lives in New York City.

ANDREW LAWLER is a displaced Southerner living in rural Maine whose writing has appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic, and Science. When not practicing serenity at airport baggage carousels, he’s learning to accept black flies and use a chain saw. 

LYN LIFSHIN is working on a collection titled Poets (Mostly) Who Have Touched Me, Living and Dead. Texas Review Press recently published her collection of poems The Licorice Daughter: My Year with Ruffian, about the famous, short-lived race horse. She lives in Vienna, Virginia.

VARLEY O’CONNOR lives in a suburban neighborhood in Stow, Ohio, where she walks her Burmese cat, Tadeu Jiro, on a leash. She is the author of The Cure (Bellevue Literary Review Press) and teaches writing at Kent State University.

SY SAFRANSKY is editor and publisher of The Sun.

EVAN SHOPPER lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he has been installing ducts in the basement, while his wife is lobbying for ducks in the yard; this makes for lively and confusing dinner conversation with their two young daughters. His story in the October 2007 issue is from a novel in progress, and his work has been published in Glimmer Train, the Colorado Review, and the Massachusetts Review.

MARK SMITH-SOTO lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he serves as director of the Center for Creative Writing in the Arts at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has published two books of poetry, Our Lives Are Rivers (University Press of Florida) and Any Second Now (Main Street Rag Press).

JOSEPH SORRENTINO is a photographer and playwright who lives in Rochester, New York. 

JESSICA K. STELLING is a photographer who lives with her husband and their two cats, Superfly and Gershwin, in Savannah, Georgia.

GREGORY THORP lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and takes photographs commercially for several barge lines on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. His personal subject of choice, however, is corn, in all its forms.

ANDREW WATSON is a photographer and graphic designer who lives in San Antonio, Texas. He has lately grown quite fond of eating green beans and ice-cream sandwiches, although not together.