Marley Andino is a Virginia-based writer and sculptor. “Fish” is an excerpt from Dry Land, her recently completed memoir about one unforgettable winter spent traveling both sides of the Mexican border. She is currently at work on Lamb, a collection of essays about her childhood on the Chesapeake Bay.

Chelsea Biondolillo is currently writing somewhere out West, having recently completed an MFA in both creative writing and environmental studies at the University of Wyoming. Her prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Shenandoah, Passages North, The Fourth River, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Flyway, Brevity, and others. She is currently at work on a book about vultures that combines memoir, travel, ecology, and history with a lot of beautiful birds and dead animals. Chelsea is originally from Portland Oregon, and rain is a frequent figure in her dreams.

Christopher Bundy is the author of the novel Baby, You’re a Rich Man (C&R Press, 2013). He lives in Atlanta, GA.

Steven Church is the author of The Guinness Book of Me: a Memoir of Record, Theoretical Killings: Essays and Accidents, and The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst. His fourth book, Ultrasonic: Soundings will be released in 2014 by Lavender Ink. His essays have been published or are forthcoming in Brevity, Passages North, DIAGRAM, Salon.com, Creative Nonfiction, AGNI, Fourth Genre, Colorado Review, The Pinch, and many others. He’s a founding editor of the literary magazine, The Normal School, and teaches in the MFA Program at Fresno State.

Penny Guisinger’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, Solstice, Under the Gum Tree, and others. She holds an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. She’s a Libra (moon in Aries) and an ENFP, who loves sailing, drinking coffee, and that moment just before sleep. Penny lives with her wife, Kara, and the two smartest, most well-read children on earth, Abby and Owen, at the very tip of easternmost Maine.

Michelle Herman’s most recent book is Stories We Tell Ourselves, essays about the unconscious in everyday life. She directs the MFA program in creative writing at Ohio State.

Keith Lesmeister lives and works in northeast Iowa where he and his family have recently planted an apple and pear orchard. He is an MFA candidate at the Bennington Writing Seminars. This is his first published essay.

Joe Mackall is the author of Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish, and of the memoir, The Last Street Before Cleveland. He is co-founder and -editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. His work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, as well as on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” He’s director of Creative Writing at Ashland University. “Reflections of a Moderately Disturbed Grandfather” is from a memoir in progress, tentatively titled, Grandparents in Paradise: Life in the Face of the Fall.

Brenda Miller is the author of three essay collections: Listening Against the Stone (Skinner House Books, 2012), Blessing of the Animals (Eastern Washington University Press, 2009), and Season of the Body (Sarabande Books, 2002). She has also co-authored Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction (McGraw Hill, 2012) and The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World (Skinner House Books, 2012). Her work has received six Pushcart Prizes. She is a Professor of English at Western Washington University and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Bellingham Review. Her website is www.brendamillerwriter.com.

Leila Philip is the author of three books of nonfiction, including the award-winning memoir, A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family (Viking 2001, Penguin 2002, SUNY Excelsior 2009). She has received numerous awards from her writing including: the Pen Martha Albrand Citation for Nonfiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Research and Study Center, and most recently, the Guggenheim Foundation. “Water Rising” is the title piece of a collaborative project of text and image which counterparts 11 watercolors by artist Garth Evans, with 11 pieces of Philip’s writing. The book Water Rising, is forthcoming in 2014.

Kim Todd is the author of Sparrow; Chrysalis, Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis; and Tinkering with Eden, a Natural History of Exotic Species in America. Her essays have appeared in Orion, Sierra, Backpacker, and Fourth River, among other places. She teaches literary nonfiction at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. “Curious” was written with the help of a residency at the Mesa Refuge.

Nicole Walker is the author of the nonfiction book, Quench Your Thirst with Salt which won the Zone 3 creative nonfiction prize, released in June 2013, and a collection of poems, This Noisy Egg (Barrow Street, 2010). She edited, along with Margot Singer, Bending Genre: Essays on Nonfiction, published by Bloomsbury Press in 2013. She has given readings and lectures at The Center for Book Arts in New York City, at Associated Writing Programs in Chicago, New York, and Denver, at NonfictionNow, in Iowa City, as a guest speaker for the Environmental Humanities Conference in Salt Lake City, as an Emerging Writer and at the University of Wyoming. In 2007, she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A graduate of the University of Utah’s doctoral program, she is currently Assistant Professor of Poetry and Creative Nonfiction at Northern Arizona University, nonfiction editor of Diagram and editor of the artist/writer collaborative project “7 Rings” on the Huffington Post.