Sue Allison lives in Warrenton, Virginia. She graduated from McGill University and Vermont College, and after a stint as a freelance journalist in London she worked for Life magazine in New York and then in Washington. She is the author of Bloomsbury Reflections, a book about the Bloomsbury Group, and her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Threepenny Review, Harvard Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, and other journals. She has also had a story read as part of the Selected Shorts Series in New York, broadcast on NPR.

Tama Baldwin‘s work has recently appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Fiction International, Poetry International, Gulf Coast, Many Mountains Moving, and Green Mountains Review. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa and Macomb, Illinois.

Paul Bogard earned his MA in creative writing at the University of New Mexico. He now drives carefully in Reno, Nevada where he is a PhD candidate in the literature and environment program at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is presently working on his first book, The Geography of Night.

Kelly Grey Carlisle is a graduate student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she works as managing editor of Prairie Schooner. Her nonfiction appears in Tampa Review.

Angie Carter is currently working on an essay collection and a novel about her experiences growing up in Iowa. She holds an MFA from the University of Arizona, and her work is forthcoming in the Gettysburg Review.

Joshua Dolezal is a native of the Pacific Northwest and holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he served as assistant editor of Prairie Schooner. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Gettysburg Review, Quarterly West, Seattle Review, Natural Bridge, Nimrod International Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, Isotope, ISLE, and elsewhere. He is now a visiting assistant professor in American literature at Central College.

Katie Fallon recently received an MFA from West Virginia University and currently teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech. Her nonfiction is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, Rivendell, and Appalachian Heritage.

Amy Friedman‘s books include Nothing Sacred and Kick the Dog and Shoot the Cat, two books that grew out of her longtime newspaper column in Kingston, Ontario, which inspired her passion for creative nonfiction. She also writes an internationally syndicated newspaper column for children, Tell Me A Story (Universal Press Syndicate), which has spawned two book collections. Amy teaches creative nonfiction at UCLA Extension, is writer-in-residence for the online personal essay website Fresh Daily (www.freshyarn.com), and teaches personal essay for performance in her From Page to Stage courses around the country.

Ted Gup is the author of The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA and is the Shirley Wormser Professor of Journalism at Case Western Reserve University. A former staff writer for the Washington Post and Time magazine, he has also written for GQ, Smithsonian, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Slate magazine online, the Village Voice, the New York Times, and other publications. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and is currently writing a book with the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives with his wife and two sons in Pepper Pike, Ohio.

Stephen D. Gutierrez is the author of Elements, winner of the Charles H. and N. Mildred Nilon Excellence in Minority Fiction Award. A past contributor to River Teeth, his most recent work has appeared in Third Coast, Paterson Literary Review, Switchback, and Considering the Radiance: Essays on the Poetry of A.R. Ammons. He teaches at California State University, East Bay.

Andrea Lorenz is a recent graduate of the master’s program at the Missouri School of Journalism. She wrote this article as part of her master’s project while interning as a features reporter at the Kansas City Star.

Kyle Minor won second place for nonfiction in the 2004 Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest. His work has recently appeared in Quarterly West, the Carolina Quarterly, the Antioch Review, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He is editor of Frostproof Review and lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he is completing his MFA at the Ohio State University.

Katy Read‘s essays, articles, and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Salon, Literal Latte, Brain Child, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Brevity, Minnesota Monthly, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and other publications. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has received second place or finalist awards in a number of literary competitions, including the Chautauqua Literary Journal Prize for Prose, the Literal Latte Essay Awards, the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition, the McKnight Artist Fellowships, and the Mid-American Review Creative Nonfiction Competition. A former reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, she now lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two sons.

Benjamin Stein is currently working on his MFA in fiction at West Virginia University. His dear friends Samantha and Danny will be married in July 2005. He hereby conveys his best wishes and congratulations. This is his first publication.

Ryan Van Meter lives and works in Chicago where he is completing an MA in Creative Writing at DePaul University. This is his first publication.