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 is a writer, a knitter, and an associate publisher at The Sun. In the mornings, after dropping her kids off at school, she rolls up the car windows and indulges her guilty pleasure: sexist, raunchy rap music with a thundering bass line. Her essays have appeared in Utne Reader and Brain, Child.

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 is a Lithuanian photographer living in Portland, Oregon.

CLEMENS KALISCHER signed up for his first photography course in 1947 and has been taking pictures ever since. He lives in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he has run the Image Gallery for more than thirty years.

KAYO LACKEY is a photographer who was born and raised in Japan and now lives in Portland, Oregon.

KAREN LANDMANN is a photographer and social worker who lives in New York City. She speaks twelve languages and is working on her thirteenth: Twi, a language spoken in Ghana.

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 the author of The Licorice Daughter: My Year with Ruffian (Texas Review Press), Another Woman Who Looks like Me (Black Sparrow and Godine Press), and Barbaro, a poetry collection in progress. 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. His translation of Ana Istarú’s selected poetry, Fever Season and Other Poems, is due out this fall from Unicorn 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.