Karen Babine was born and raised in northern Minnesota, received her MFA from Eastern Washington University, and now teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where she is also the nonfiction editor of Mid-American Review. Her essays have appeared in such journals as North Dakota Quarterly, Lake Effect, and Ascent.

Michael W. Cox has published creative nonfiction in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The St. Petersburg Times, New Letters, and Best American Essays 1999; his short stories have appeared in a number of literary journals, including Other Voices, Columbia, ACM, and Cimarron Review. He holds a PhD in American literature and teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Pittsburgh–Johnstown, where he is currently visiting assistant professor.

Omar Eby—a former teacher in Somalia, Tanzania, and Zambia—has published books of fiction, biography, and personal experience. His latest book is Fifty Years, Fifty Stories: The Mennonite Mission in Somalia, 1953–2003. Before taking early retirement to write full time, Eby was for twenty-seven years a professor of literature and writing at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia.

Jynelle A. Gracia is a recent graduate of the University of Iowa’s nonfiction writing program.

Steven Harvey is the author of Bound for Shady Grove, a collection of personal essays about his experiences learning to sing and play the traditional music of the Appalachian Mountains where he lives. The University of Georgia Press published it in June 2000. He is also the author of two other collections of personal essays, A Geometry of Lilies (South Carolina) and Lost in Translation (Georgia), and is the editor of an anthology of personal essays called In a Dark Wood: Personal Essays by Men on Middle Age (Georgia).

Joe Kraus teaches at the University of Scranton. He is coauthor of An Accidental Anarchist (Academy Chicago, 2001), and his essays and criticism have appeared, among other places, in The American Scholar, Callaloo, The Centennial Review, and MELUS.

Sydney Lea’s eighth collection of poems, Ghost Pains, is now available from Sarabande books. His seventh collection, Pursuit of a Wound, was one of three finalists for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. His second volume of nonfiction, A Little Wildness: Some Notes on Rambling, will be published soon by Story Line Press. His stories, poems, essays, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and many other periodicals, as well as in more than forty anthologies.

Buddy Levy is the author of Echoes On Rimrock: In Pursuit of the Chukar Partridge (Pruett, 1998) and most recently, American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (Putnam, 2005). His essays on nature, sports, lifestyle, and the outdoors have appeared in the Utne Reader, Big Sky Journal, SKI, Hooked on the Outdoors, Field & Stream, Sun Valley Magazine, Canoe & Kayak, Trail Runner, and Poets & Writers. He teaches English and writing at Washington State University.

Lee Martin is the author of the memoirs From Our House and Turning Bones, the novels The Bright Forever (Pulitzer Prize finalist) and Quakertown, and the story collection, The Least You Need to Know. His essays and stories have appeared in such places as Harper’s, Ms., The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Southern Review, and Prairie Schooner. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. Since 2001 he has taught in the MFA program at The Ohio State University where he is now professor of English and director of creative writing.

Chris Offutt is the author of Kentucky Straight, Out of the Woods, The Good Brother, The Same River Twice, and No Heroes. His stories and essays have been published in Esquire, GQ, The New York Times, Best American Short Stories, and Best Stories of the South. He is the recipient of a Lannan Award, a Whiting Writer’s award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Kathryn Rhett’s essays have appeared recently in Harvard Review, Marginalia, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Tusculum Review. She is an associate professor of English at Gettysburg College, and a core faculty member of the low-residency MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte.

Mimi Schwartz is author of four books, including Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed (University of Nebraska Press) and Writing True, the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction (with Sondra Perl for Houghton Mifflin). She is professor emeritus at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and teaches writing workshops nationwide. This essay is adapted from a new book, Good Neighbors, Bad Times: In Search of My Father’s German Village.

Penelope Schwartz Robinson is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the inaugural class of the University of Southern Maine Stonecoast MFA in creative nonfiction. Her spoken essays have aired on both National and Maine Public Radio. Her work has been published in Willow Springs and Ascent, and has been recognized as Notable in Best American Essays 2005. Ms. Robinson teaches nonfiction literature and writing at Southern Maine Community College and the University of Maine–Farmington.

Floyd Skloot’s memoir In the Shadow of Memory won the PEN Center USA Literary Award. The sequel, A World of Light, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection. His recent essays appear in Boulevard, New Letters, Ninth Letter, Sewanee Review, and Southwest Review.

Kirsten Whatley lives on the island of Maui, Hawaii, where she writes about the natural world and our place within it. Her essays have appeared in Orion, Northern Lights, Yoga International, and other publications.