Cynthia Anne Brandon has lived in the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan for twenty-six years. She received her BA in writing from Grand Valley State University and her MFA in creative nonfiction from Northern Michigan University. She has appeared in Fourth Genre, is currently the nonfiction editor of Passages North, and teaches composition in Marquette, Michigan. By the time this issue is out, she will be missing Michigan from Spokane, Washington.

Rosa del Duca is largely from Montana but now lives in Northern California. She divides her time between teaching composition at San Jose State University, producing at NBC Bay Area, and writing fiction, nonfiction and songs. You can find her music at www.rosadelduca.bandcamp.com. Her work has appeared in Cutbank and Grain and is forthcoming in CALYX.

Philip Gerard is the author of three novels and four books of creative nonfiction, as well as numerous scripts, stories, and essays. “Imposter” will appear in his collection The Patron Saint of Dreams and Other Essays forthcoming from Hub City Press. His long narrative RiverRun: Adventuring Through Nature, History, and Politics Down the Cape Fear to the Sea is forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press. He is co-editor with his wife Jill Gerard of Chautauqua, the literary journal of Chautauqua Institution (N.Y.). He chairs the Department of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington.

Steven Harvey is the author of three collections of personal essays: A Geometry of Lilies, Lost in Translation, and Bound for Shady Grove. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Young Harris College and is a founding member of the Ashland MFA faculty. He lives in the mountains of north Georgia with his wife, Barbara, and is at work on a memoir about his mother.

Mary Haug grew up on the grasslands west of the Missouri River in South Dakota, the middle child of a Bohemian father and Irish mother. She recently retired after thirty years of teaching English at South Dakota State University. Her essays have appeared in two anthologies, Crazy Woman Creek: Women Rewrite the American West and Because I Love Her: 34 Women Writers Reflect on the Mother-Daughter Bond, as well as several journals including South Dakota Review, Platte Valley Review, and Passager.

Michelle Herman’s most recent book is the Kindle Single Dream Life, a novella-length essay. She teaches in the M.F.A. program at The Ohio State University. www.michelleherman.com.

Richard Hoffman is author of the Half the House: a Memoir, and the poetry collections, Without Paradise, Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2008 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club, and Emblem. A fiction writer as well, his Interference & Other Stories was published in 2009. His work has appeared in Agni, Ascent, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, The Literary Review, Poetry, Witness and other magazines. He teaches at Emerson College and currently serves as Chair of PEN New England.

Kim Dana Kupperman is the author of I Just Lately Started Buying Wings. Missives from the Other Side of Silence (Graywolf, 2010), which won the 2009 Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize in Nonfiction. Her work has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Borderlands: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction (University of Nebraska Press), Diagram, An Ethical Compass: Coming of Age in the 21st Century (Yale University Press), and the Normal School. She is the founder of Welcome Table Press, a nonprofit independent press dedicated to publishing and celebrating the essay. For her day job, she is the visiting writer-in-residence in nonfiction at Fordham University. She also teaches at the Fairfield University low-residency MFA and is the coordinator of the summer Conference for Writers at the Gettysburg Review, where she was the managing editor from 2004 to 2011.

Sydney Lea’s ninth collection of poems, Young of the Year, came out earlier this year. His tenth is scheduled for 2013. He lives in Vermont, and is the state’s new poet laureate.

Bethany Maile lives with her husband in Moscow, Idaho and teaches at the University of Idaho. She completed an MFA in nonfiction from University of Arizona. Her work has appeared (or will appear) in South Dakota Review and Prairie Schooner.

Lisa Ohlen Harris is the author of the Middle East memoir Through the Veil. She lives in a small college town in northwestern Oregon, where she teaches English as a Second Language. www.lisaohlenharris.com.