RITA BERNSTEIN is a reluctant traveler and thus takes most of her photographs close to her home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

ANNA BLACKSHAW is a writer and documentary photographer who lives in North Carolina.

ANDREW BOYD is the author of Daily Afflictions and Life’s Little Deconstruction Book and is finishing work on Pilgrimage to Nowhere, a travelogue of his skeptic’s journey around the world. He cofounded Agit-Pop Communications, an award-winning “subvertising” agency, and for a decade led the satirical media campaign Billionaires for Bush. He lives in New York City.

BRIGITTE CARNOCHAN is the author of Bella Figura (Modernbook Editions). She lives in Portola Valley, California, where she loves to photograph her dog, Muggs, doing just about anything for a dog biscuit.

JAMES CARROLL’s first love was baseball. He pursues his second love (photography) in New York City.

LARRY CHAIT is a former research scientist who retired early to become a jazz drummer, only to find that he had no talent. He then took up photography, to which he is now totally devoted. He lives in Chicago.

JAMES CHARBONNEAU is a writer and screenwriter whose most recent screenplay is Being Michael Madsen. Since his divorce he’s had a series of failed relationships lasting from eleven hours to six years. He lives in Middletown, Connecticut, with his cat, Chance.

DAVID GROSSMAN was born in Jerusalem and is the author of six novels, two essay collections, several children’s books, and a play. He lives with his wife and children in a suburb of Jerusalem.

ROBERTO GUERRA lives in La Paz, Bolivia, where he is working on a project about coca farmers.

MARISA HANDLER is a writer, activist, and singer-songwriter living in San Francisco. Her memoir is titled Loyal to the Sky: Notes from an Activist (Berrett-Koehler). She spent this past June on a meditation retreat where she practiced total silence, except for the times she’d go far into the woods and sing to the trees and salamanders.

WAYNE HARRISON has worked as an auto mechanic, a house framer, and a corrections officer in a medium-security prison. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s and Ploughshares and is forthcoming in the Atlantic. He lives in Eugene, Oregon.

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

PETER INGRASSELINO works as a nurse in a dialysis clinic and lives in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.

ADRIE KUSSEROW lives with her husband and two children in Underhill Center, Vermont, and teaches cultural anthropology at St. Michael’s College. She recently traveled to Bhutan to teach media literacy.

GREGORY MARTIN lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife and two sons and is the author of the memoir Mountain City. When he was eight years old he received his first rejection letter from Random House, for a deeply affecting and darkly comic novel about a group of farm animals working in an army hospital. 

JULIA McHUGH is the single mother of two daughters and lives in Port Townsend, Washington.

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE’s most recent books of poems include Honeybee (Greenwillow) and You & Yours (BOA Editions). A Tom Waits fan for more than thirty years, she recently attended a concert of his in Dallas and has been able to levitate ever since. She lives with her husband, a gray cat, and two large turtles in San Antonio, Texas.

SY SAFRANSKY is editor and publisher of The Sun.

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. 

KAREN TWEEDY-HOLMES works as an editor so that she doesn’t have to photograph lipstick or salad to pay the rent. She lives in New York City and devotes one day each weekend to a palomino quarter horse named Lucky, though she insists that she’s the lucky one.