Aaron Alford is an MA candidate in the Creative Writing Program at Texas Tech University, where he also works as a research assistant in The Vietnam Center and Archive and serves as a fiction editor for Iron Horse Literary Review. This is his first publication.

Matthew Davis graduated in spring 2007 with an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa. While at Iowa he was an Iowa Arts Tuition Fellow, a Stanley Fellow, a Writer-in-Residence at the Museum of Art, and a Postgraduate Writing Fellow. He won the 2005 Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Competition in nonfiction and had a notable essay in Best American Travel Writing 2006. His essays have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, and WorldView.

Lorence Gutterman had been a hematologist/oncologist who consulted in Columbus and surrounding small towns in central Ohio. Now he writes poetry and stories and teaches creative writing to medical, nursing, and public health students in the Humanities in Medicine Program at Yale University School of Medicine. His poems have appeared or will be published in Blood and Thunder, Voices Israel Anthology, Caduceus, JAMA, and The Beat. He has an essay forthcoming in Anthology of Rural Medicine in the 21st Century. Sharon, his wife and soul mate of forty-five years, their three children, and their seven grandchildren are the blessings for his muse.

William Haas eats, bikes, and breathes in Portland, Oregon.

Barbara Hurd is the author of Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains; Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark, a Library Journal Best Natural History Book of the Year; The Singer’s Temple; Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001; and Objects in this Mirror. Her essays have appeared in numerous journals including Best American Essays 1999,Best American Essays 2001, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, Orion, Audubon, and others. The recipient of a 2002 NEA Fellowship for Creative Nonfiction, winner of the Sierra Club’s National Nature Writing Award, and winner of Pushcart Prizes in 2004 and 2007, Hurd teaches creative writing at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Maryland, and in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. She lives in Frostburg with her husband, the poet Stephen Dunn.

Teddy Macker teaches at UC Santa Barbara. New stories and poems are forthcoming in Antioch Review, MARGIE, Poetry East, and elsewhere. He lives on an old farm in Carpinteria, California.

Desirae Matherly is a Harper Fellow at the University of Chicago, where she teaches in the humanities. Her most recent essays are published or forthcoming in Eureka Literary Magazine, The North American Review, and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. One essay originally published in Fourth Genre will appear in the second volume of The Best Creative Nonfiction. She is a contributing editor for Quotidiana, an online anthology of classical essays, and in 2004 she finished her PhD in creative nonfiction at Ohio University.

Bill Milligan teaches composition, journalism, mass communications, and creative nonfiction at Bay College in Escanaba, Michigan. His freelance writing has appeared in numerous regional publications including The Detroit News, Detroit Free Press, and Traverse Magazine, where he won an Editor’s Choice Award in 2004. His creative nonfiction has most recently appeared in Flashquake, Brevity, Rosebud, and the SNReview.

Jane Sandor teaches English at Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles. Her prose has appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, Phoebe, Faultline, and CALYX. In 2006 and 2007 two of her pieces were named Best American Notable Essays. She is currently at work on a novel.

Timothy Schaffert is the author of three novels, most recently Devils in the Sugar Shop. He is a contributing editor for Prairie Schooner and the director of the Nebraska Summer Writers’ Conference and the (Downtown) Omaha Lit Fest.

Jo Scott-Coe is a Pushcart-nominated essayist whose nonfiction has most recently appeared in Narrative Magazine, Fourth Genre, Swink Online, So to Speak, Ninth Letter, and the Los Angeles Times. She also has a chapter forthcoming in (Re)Interpretations: The Shapes of Justice in Women’s Experience. This essay comes from her collection Teaching at Point Blank, a meditation on gender, violence, and the teacher’s voice. She currently writes and teaches in California.

Margot Singer is the author of The Pale of Settlement, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her short stories and essays have appeared in such magazines as Agni, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, The Western Humanities Review, The North American Review, The Sun, and many others. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and Shenandoah’s Thomas H. Carter Award for the Essay. Margot is a graduate of the University of Utah (PhD, 2005), Oxford University (MPhil, 1986), and Harvard University (BA, 1984). An Assistant Professor of English at Denison University, she lives with her husband and two children in Granville, Ohio.

Janet Yoder lives with her husband on their Seattle houseboat. She is a member of the musical group Batucada, which plays traditional Brazilian and Caribbean music. Her writing has appeared in Raven Chronicles, Bayou, Porcupine, Passager, The MacGuffin, North Dakota Quarterly, The Evansville Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Pilgrimage. She is currently at work on a collection of personal essays about Upper Skagit tribal elder Vi Hilbert.