GREG AMES is the author of the novel Buffalo Lockjaw (Hyperion), which won the 2009 Book of the Year Award from the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and has taught creative writing and literature at Brooklyn College and Binghamton University.

JOSEPH BATHANTI’s most recent book, a collection of poems, is Restoring Sacred Art. Named by the North Carolina Poetry Society as a Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet, he is professor of creative writing at Appalachian State University and also writer-in-residence at the university’s Watauga Global Community. He lives in Boone, North Carolina.

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.

CHUCK CONNER has been taking photographs for forty years, and his work has been published in Cats, American Photographer, and Countryside. He lives in Spencer, West Virginia.

DAVID COOK teaches peace studies at the University of Chattanooga and lives in Signal Mountain, Tennessee, with his wife and two children. An essay he wrote about his ninety-two-year-old grandfather will appear in the forthcoming anthology Wondrous: The Life Lessons, Challenges, and Joys of Grandparenting (North Atlantic).

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.

JASON DORFMAN lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

BRIAN DOYLE is not the Canadian novelist Brian Doyle, nor the Brian Doyle who played for the New York Yankees in the 1978 World Series, nor the astrophysicist Brian Doyle, nor the Australian comedian Brian Doyle. His most recent book is Bin Laden’s Bald Spot & Other Stories, and he is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland in Portland, Oregon.

CHRIS ELLINGER is an engineer who lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

HAROLD FEINSTEIN’s photographs are represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, and the George Eastman House. Bulfinch Press has published six books of his work, including One Hundred Flowers and The Infinite Rose. He lives in Merrimac, Massachusetts.

NOËLLE GABERMAN lives in Occidental, California. When she was young, she thought her father was in Kool & the Gang because his band covered their song “Celebration.”

ROBYN McDANIELS lives in Audubon, Minnesota.

BARRY PEHLMAN is a photographer, magician, and personal trainer to his Bernese mountain dog. He lives in Exton, Pennsylvania.

SANDRA-LEE PHIPPS worked as a photographer for The Village Voice for eight years. She now lives in Decatur, Georgia, and creates artwork out of things growing in her yard, including her children.

SY SAFRANSKY is editor and publisher of The Sun.

ROSIE SARAGA has been practicing Transcendental Meditation since 1972. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon.

WAYNE SCOTT says he is a typical Oregonian who rides his bicycle nearly everywhere, despite rain, snow, flying gravel, grouchy drivers, insidious leaf blowers, and vanishing bike lanes. A former family therapist, he now teaches social work at Portland State University.

SUSAN STRAIGHT’s seventh novel, Take One Candle Light a Room, will be published in October by Pantheon. Her short stories have received an O. Henry Award and an Edgar Award. She lives with her three daughters in Riverside, California.

JOHN THORNDIKE bought his farm in Athens, Ohio, in the 1970s, when he was writing and gardening. He enjoys the same activities today, except that he has thirty tomato plants — instead of three thousand — and more time to write. He is the author of The Last of His Mind: A Year in the Shadow of Alzheimer’s (Swallow Press), which the Washington Post named as one of the best books of 2009.