JOHN BARGOWSKI lives in the rural northwestern corner of New Jersey, where eagles sometimes roost in the trees. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His work has been published in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares.

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

JOANNA CALAZANS was born and raised in Brazil and now lives in Richmond, Virginia.

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.

TAMA HOCHBAUM is an artist and photographer living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She is represented by George Lawson Gallery in Los Angeles, California.

EVAN JAMES’s writing has been published in The Onion, Mother Jones, and Portland Monthly. He is an mfa student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches rhetoric at the University of Iowa. He is also an avid tennis player, an obsessive reader, and a P.G. Wodehouse fan. “I Just Died” is his first published short story, and he is working on a comic novel set on an island in the Pacific Northwest, the plot of which involves a great deal of interior decorating.

HEATHER KIRN LANIER is the author of the forthcoming memoir Teaching in the Terrordome: Two Years in a West Baltimore High School. Her poetry chapbook The Story You Tell Yourself won the 2011 Wick Poetry Open Chapbook Competition and is forthcoming from Kent State University Press in February. She is a visiting assistant professor of English at Miami University and lives in Lebanon, Ohio.

JAMES LePORE is a photographer and writer whose latest novel is Sons and Princes. He lives in South Salem, New York.

ALISON LUTERMAN makes a mean bowl of chili. Her secret? Black olives, mustard, and red wine. She lives in Oakland, California.

PAT MacENULTY’s most recent book is Wait until Tomorrow: A Daughter’s Memoir. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with a roommate, a blind cat, and two electric pianos. She teaches writing at Johnson & Wales University, a school known for its culinary college, but she still can’t cook. She blogs on writing at www.transformativewriting.blogspot.com.

SUSAN ALTA MARTIN is a sculptor and photographer who lives in the mountains of North Carolina with her husband, son, two cats, and two dogs. She can often be found sitting in the dirt, trying to remember the lessons that her garden taught her the year before.

JARROD McCABE lives in Framingham, Massachusetts, and takes portraits and landscape photographs.

JONATHAN A. MEYERS’s photographs have been published in The New York Times, Sierra, and New Mexico Magazine. He taught photography workshops and seminars in New Mexico for more than twenty years and recently relocated to Ohio.

SY SAFRANSKY is editor and publisher of The Sun.

SHERYL ST. GERMAIN’s most recent book is Let It Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems, and her collection of lyric essays Navigating Disaster is forthcoming from Louisiana Literature Press. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and directs the mfa program in creative writing at Chatham University. A native of New Orleans, she says her favorite place in the world is the Atchafalaya Swamp in south Louisiana.

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. 

NICHOLAS WALSTER has been a photographer, an acupuncturist, and a minister. He was born and raised in Yorkshire, England, and now lives in Stuyvesant, New York.

JOE WILKINS is the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, and two collections of poems, Notes from the Journey Westward and Killing the Murnion Dogs. He lives with his wife and children in north Iowa. His most recent opponent on the basketball court was his two-year-old son; the contest involved no thrown elbows and lots of tickling.