FRED BAHNSON lives with his wife and children in Transylvania County, North Carolina, and is currently at work on a book about the spirituality of farming. Eight years ago he and his wife, then newlyweds, traveled to Nuevo Yibeljoj, the Mexican village he writes about in this issue. They were given the “honeymoon suite” in the village infirmary, where they slept on two wooden examining tables pushed together.

WALTER O. BEATON spent twenty-two years in banking before walking away to become an artist. He lives in New York City.

JON BOILARD says he writes in part because “it’s cheaper than therapy.” Every year since 2003 he has been invited to read his work at the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival in Cork, Ireland. He lives in San Francisco.

WILLIAM CARTER’s latest book of photographs is Causes and Spirits. More than 150 of his prints are in the permanent collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He lives in Los Altos Hills, California.

DOUG CRANDELL lives on a small farm outside of Atlanta, Georgia, and works at the Institute on Human Development and Disability at the University of Georgia. He sometimes writes in his chicken coop, where his flock whispers opening lines to him.

KATIE DELAVAUGHN was a Peace Corps volunteer with her husband for three years in Nicaragua, where she learned how to make guava jelly, dance the palo de mayo, and swim like a mermaid. She lives in the Bronx, New York.

JOHN FREE teaches documentary photojournalism with his son at Pasadena City College and Santa Monica College, and he has been commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to design a street-photography course for high-school students. He lives in Tujunga, California.

MICHAEL HETTICH’s most recent chapbook, Many Loves, won the 2007 Yellow Jacket Press Chapbook Contest, and a new collection, Like Happiness, is forthcoming from Anhinga Press. For the past five years he has worked with his son on a poetry-music collaboration, samples of which can be found on his website. He lives in Miami, Florida.

THOMAS HYDE owned a small community newspaper for a decade before selling it to pursue writing and photography. He lives with his wife on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula.

RAY LASKOWITZ is a commercial and fine-art photographer. Three years after relocating from New Orleans due to Hurricane Katrina, he says Albuquerque, New Mexico, is finally starting to feel like home.

JOHN MALKIN is the author of Sounds of Freedom: Musicians on Spirituality and Social Change and The Only Alternative: Christian Nonviolent Peacemakers in America. He is a musician, journalist, activist, and radio-show host who lives with his wife and four-year-old son in Santa Cruz, California.

SY SAFRANSKY is editor and publisher of The Sun.

RAPHAEL SHEVELEV was born in South Africa and lives in El Cerrito, California. Prior to becoming a photographer, he was a professor of political science. He is the author of Liberating the Ghosts: Photographs and Text from the March of the Living (LensWork Publishing).

CELESTE SMALL lives in Ruston, Louisiana, and is a photography student at Louisiana Tech University.

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.

SPARROW has moved back to Phoenicia, New York, where he lives with his wife, Violet Snow. He is still a Yankees fan, despite certain political misgivings, and is addicted to Sudoku, YouTube, and pretzels.

ERIN STALCUP lives in Brooklyn, New York, and, after years of tending bar, now teaches English at Yeshiva University. Her fiction has appeared in Puerto del Sol and the Seattle Review and is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review Online.

MARK UZMANN lives in Savannah, Georgia, and teaches psychology at the Savannah College of Art and Design. He is working on a photography project documenting spectators at Martin Luther King Day parades.

DAN WESTFALL travels to Europe several times a year to photograph forgotten or little-known works of art. He is the author of the self-published book Obscure Destinations and lives in Abingdon, Maryland.