FRED BAHNSON’s essays have appeared in Orion and Best American Spiritual Writing 2007 (Mariner Books). He lives with his wife and two sons in Efland, North Carolina. Despite being a full-time farmer who works in the dirt, he is terrified of germs and always flushes the toilet with his foot.

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 plays the clarinet and chairs the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation. His new book of photographs, Causes and Spirits, will be published by Steidl in 2010. He lives in Los Altos Hills, California.

DOUG CRANDELL was born in Wabash, Indiana, the first electrically lighted city in the world and the hometown of singer Crystal Gayle. He wishes he had even a fraction of her hair. He lives with his family in Douglasville, Georgia.

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 and edited a small community newspaper for a decade before selling it to pursue his passions, one of which is photography. He lives on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula with his wife, Sue.

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 (Parallax Press) and The Only Alternative: Christian Nonviolent Peacemakers in America (Wipf & Stock). He lives in Santa Cruz, California, where he hosts a radio show on Free Radio Santa Cruz, a commercial-free, collectively run station that has been operating without a government license since 1995.

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 says she goes to extremes to help right what she perceives to be wrong. She studies photography at Louisiana Tech University and lives in Ruston, Louisiana.

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).

SPARROW lives in Teaneck, New Jersey, where he does Sudoku and follows the Yankees. He is the author of America: A Prophecy (Soft Skull Press).

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’s self-published book of photos is called Obscure Destinations. He goes to Europe often to take pictures of historic places and cemeteries. At home in Abingdon, Maryland, he plays with his two dogs on the shore of the Chesapeake Bay, which is just fifty feet from his front door.