LOST Magazine - Our Contributors

Mark Abley, the author or editor of ten books of poetry and prose, lives in Montreal, Canada. He is now working on a book about the future of languages.

Kreg Abshire lives in Denver, Colorado, and teaches English at the Kent Denver School. A few years ago he received a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of South Carolina; many more years ago, a B.A. in English from the University of Texas, Austin. His has published essays in You are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography, The Columbia Journal of American Studies, and, once before, in Lost.

Carlos Albaladejo lives in Barcelona and works for the Open University of Catalonia. He publishes his own pictures at Flickr, where he created the "I Found This Picture In The Street" group and sometimes writes corrosive commentaries on his blog and spins records as DrGonzisnotadj.

Alice Sparburg Alexiou is the author of Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary. She is currently writing a book about the Flatiron Building.

Peter Allison set off for a yearlong stay in Africa in 1994. More than a dozen years later, he's still leading safaris and collecting stories. Allison's safaris have been featured in National Geographic, Conde Nast Traveler, and on television programs such as Jack Hanna's Animal Adventures.

Shannon Applegate, also author of Skookum: An Oregon Pioneer Family's history and Lore, is the chair of Oregon's Commission on Historic Cemeteries and an active member of the national cemetery preservation movement. She lives in Yoncalla, Oregon.

David Arthur-Simons is a New York painter who holds a Masters Degree in visual arts from the Sydney College of the Arts in Sydney, Australia, where he grew up. He moved to Chelsea in New York in 1995. For the last 3½ years David has been working on the "Miracle Days" series and expects to finish the series in 3 to 4 years. View more of his work here.

Michael Atkinson is the author of six books, most recently, Hemingway Deadlights (St. Martin's Press/Minotaur Books), and a regular contributor to IFC.com, Sight & Sound, The Believer, Moving Image Source, Boston Phoenix, In These Times, TCM.com and The L Magazine. His blog appears at www.mike-atkinson.com. The pilot of Babylon Fields can be viewed here.

Roger Atwood is a regular contributor to ARTnews and Archaeology magazines, and his articles on culture and politics have appeared in The New Republic, Mother Jones, The Nation, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He was a fellow at the Alicia Patterson Foundation and a journalist for Reuters for 15 years, reporting from Peru, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. He lives in Washington, D.C. and Maine.

Sandy Balfour is the author of two previous books, Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8) and, most recently, Nursing America. He has produced numerous documentaries, dramas, and educational programs for the BBC, Canal+, CNN, and Discovery. His travel writing, book reviews, and columns appear regularly in The Guardian, The Spectator, and other publications. He lives in London.

Grant Barrett is project editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang for Oxford University Press and a minor contributor to the New Oxford American Dictionary, second edition. He is also editor of the forthcoming Official Dictionary of Unofficial English (McGraw-Hill, May 2006), editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Political Slang, and editor of the Double-Tongued Word Wrester Dictionary website.

Jason Bartholomew has written two off-off Broadway plays that played at LaMaMa ETC, and for the Huffington Post. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter, but he's making the great leap and moving to London.

Sam Bartlett has demonstrated the art of Stuntology all over the United States, and has self-published 32 issues of a Stuntology 'zine, as well as two books. He is also a professional musician banjo and mandolin who tours the country. He lives with his family in Bloomington, Indiana, and has been kicked out of restaurants in many states.

Jenny Barton grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia and currently resides in New York City, where she recently completed her MFA in Creative Writing at The New School. She is at work on her first novel.

Bella Bathurst is the author of The Lighthouse Stevensons, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, and of the novel, Special. Her journalism has appeared in The Washington Post, The London Sunday Times, and other major periodicals. Born in London, she lives in Scotland.

Chelsea Bauch is a writer, editor, and part-time adventurer. She has written for The A.V. Club, Boldtype, Flavorpill, Time Out, PopMatters, Travelers Tales, and Geek Monthly, and is currently pursuing a master's degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University.

Terry Richard Bazes is the author of Goldsmith's Return and of the recently completed Lizard World two chapters of which have been published in The Evergreen Review. His essays have appeared in a number of publications, including The Washington Post Book World, Newsday, Columbia Magazine, and Travelers' Tales: Spain.

Andrew Beahrs is the author of Twain's Feast: Searching for America's Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens, and of two historical novels. His writing on food has appeared in The New York Times, Gastronomica, The Atlantic Food Page, The Huffington Post, and other publications. He lives in California with his family. Please visit his website at www.andrewbeahrs.com .

Dr. William Beaumont (1785-1853) was born in Lebanon, CT and served as a surgeon's mate in the War of 1812. His study of a live patient whose gastrointestinal wound would not close contributed greatly to our understanding of human digestion.

Justin Bednarz, born in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, has been educated at Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen Michigan, the College of Ceramic Arts at Alfred University in Alfred, New York, and is currently tackling the remainder of a BFA as a part time student at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. His department of focus has gone from Ceramic Art to Painting to Interactive media and he is currently focusing in General Sculpture Studies. He is also a poet and singer for the Rock 'n' Roll band "Man Alive!" based out of Baltimore.

Peter Behrens is a Canadian screenwriter based in downeast Maine. He was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. He is the author of a book of short stories, Night Driving (Macmillan, 1987) and a novel, The Law of Dreams, soon to be released by Steerforth Press.

Robert Bevan is former editor of Building Design and writes regularly on architectural, design, and housing issues for national newspapers. He lives in Australia.

Tom Bissell is the author of Chasing the Sea, a travel narrative; God Lives in St. Petersburg, a story collection; and (with Jeff Alexander) Speak, Commentary, a volume of fake DVD commentaries. He is currently finishing a book about his journey to Vietnam with his father that Pantheon will publish in late 2006. He is contributing editor for Harper's Magazine and The Virginia Quarterly Review and lives in New York City

Kyle Boelte lives in San Francisco. His last piece for Lost was Communications in No. 35. Visit his website at kyleboelte.com.

Alex Boese: Recognized as a hoaxpert by CNN and The New York Times, among others, ALEX BOESE holds a master's degree in the history of science from the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The Museum of Hoaxes and the creator and curator of www.museumofhoaxes.com. He lives in San Diego.

Clyde L. Borg served as a high school social studies and English teacher for 38 years. Retired, he works part time in adult education and as mentor for new secondary teachers. He has been writing nonfiction and poetry since 1998. Some of his work has appeared in Cause and Effect magazine, The Verse Marauder, Fate magazine, History magazine and Skipping Stones magazine. He resides with his family in Fords, New Jersey.

Stephen R. Bown is a history graduate of the University of Alberta and author of Scurvy and A Most Damnable Invention, both published by Thomas Dunne Books. He lives in Alberta, Canada. Visit his website at www.stephenrbown.net.

James Brady commanded a rifle platoon during the Korean War and was awarded the Bronze Star for valor. He captured these experiences in The Marine, his New York Times bestselling novels Warning of War and The Marines of Autumn, and in his highly praised memoir The Coldest War. His weekly columns for Advertising Age and Parade magazines are considered must-reads by millions. He lives in Manhattan and in East Hampton, New York.

Annie Breeding is a recent graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program. Her first published story appeared in the 2008 Chariton Review. She lives and writes on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.

Martha Brockenbrough is the founder of SPOGG, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, as well as a writer for Encarta.com and the former editor-in-chief of MSN.com. She is the author of It Could Happen to You and lives in Seattle with her family. Please visit her websites at www.SPOGG.org, www.thingsthatmakeussic, and www.nationalgrammarday.com.

Lou Brooks, artist/designer/author, has long been a hefty contributor to the iconography of our popular culture from the pages of Playboy and The New Yorker to covers for Time and Newsweek. His top-hatted "Mr. Monopoly" logo design for Parker Brothers is known by anyone who has ever played the game and is arguably as famous throughout the world as Mickey Mouse himself. His book, Skate Crazy, is considered to be the bible of vintage roller skating graphics, and he has recently illustrated Totally Irresponsible Science, due out this Fall from Workman Publishing. His paintings will be featured in the "Now Brow" show, opening September 20 at Wal*Art Gallery in Los Angeles. Visit Lous Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies (over a hundred items!) at http://www.drawger.com.

Bryan Bruchman & Mary Phillips-Sandy: Bryan Bruchman is a web designer, photographer, and musician. Mary Phillips-Sandy is a writer and editor. They live in Brooklyn with two borrowed cats.

Fred Bruemmer is the internationally acclaimed author and photographer for more than 20 books, including Seasons of the Seal, Arctic Memories, and Glimpses of Paradise. He has spent his life traveling extensively throughout the circumpolar regions and to other remote parts of the globe. He speaks nine languages and has written more than 1000 articles for publications around the world, including Canadian Geographic, Natural History, National Geographic, and Smithsonian. Fred Brueummer and his wife live in Montreal.

Frank Woodruff Buckles was born in 1901 and entered the U.S. Army in July, 1917. He lives in Charlestown, West Virginia.

Phil Buehler has been photographing "modern ruins" for 25 years, since his first trip to Ellis Island in 1974. He's lived in New Jersey and New York City, surrounded by modern ruins.

He's since photographed modern ruins around the world, including the airplane graveyard, the Cape Canaveral launch pads, and military ruins in England and Germany. He created a website of his photos in 1995, becoming an early recipient of Yahoo! Cool Sites recognition. His site, modern-ruins.com, has had over 500,000 visitors to date.

A few years ago he received his Masters in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts and in addition to photograph now includes video and archival material in his installations.

His book, Wardy Forty: Woody Guthrie at Greystone Park, documents Woody Guthrie's life while he was a patient suffering from Huntington's Disease. The book juxtaposes photographs of the abandoned hospital buildings with material from the Woody Guthrie Archives and interviews with people who knew Guthrie. It will be released by the University of Illinois Press in the fall of 2007.

Austin Bunn's plays have been developed at the New Harmony Project, the Playwrights Center of Minneapolis, and the Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in One Story, American Short Fiction, Best American Fantasy, Best American Science and Nature Writing, The New York Times Magazine, and a bunch of other magazines now dead to him. He is a graduate of Iowa Writers Workshop in fiction and playwriting. Find out more at austinbunn.com.

Rachel Kramer Bussel is a New York-based author, editor, blogger and event organizer. She is Senior Editor at Penthouse Variations, writes the "Secrets of a Sex Writer" column for SexIs Magazine, and hosted In The Flesh Reading Series from 2005-2010. She has edited 38 anthologies, including Surrender, Gotta Have It, Best Bondage Erotica 2011, Fast Girls, Passion, Orgasmic, Spanked, Bottoms Up, Please, Sir, Please, Ma'am, Crossdressing, and Best Sex Writing 2008, 2009 and 2010, and won 5 IPPY (Independent Publisher) Awards for them. She writes frequently about sex, dating, books and pop culture. Visit her at rachelkramerbussel.com and her blogs Lusty Lady and Cupcakes Take the Cake.

Susan Buttenwieser's fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared or is forthcoming in Storyglossia, Failbetter, Nth Position, and 3am. She teaches writing in the youth program of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center and at a homeless shelter for LGBT youth in New York City.

Jeff Byles has written about architecture, urbanism, and culture for The New York Times, Village Voice, Cabinet, The Believer, and other publications. He lives in New York City. For more about his work, see www.jeffbyles.com.

Ann Marie Byrd, Ph.D., lives in Florida and is working on The Time of Our Life: Women's Stories of World War II Army Life. She is a founding editorial member of EAT, an annual CD of story and song, and has published in America in WWII, Literary Mama, and Fiction Fix. Learn more about the Army vets she is writing about by visiting www.annmariebyrd.com.

Robert G. Byrnes lives in Yonkers, N.Y., where he serves as a police officer. He received his B.S. in Police Science from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, N.Y. and is presently working on a Master of Science in Physical Education at Queens College, N.Y. He routinely visits his family in Ireland whenever there is a wedding or, as this past spring would have it, the opening of the "Fighting Irishmen Exhibit," where Frank Moran's gloves and photo were proudly displayed.

Michael Bywater is a writer and broadcaster and writes the Lost World column for the Independent on Sunday in the UK. His books include The Chronicles of Bargepole, Godzone, Over the Outback and Into the Drink, and Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost and Where Did It Go? He currently teaches at Cambridge.

R. Cade is LOST Magazine's videogame correspondent.

David Caplan lives in Chicago, where he works as a writer for a company that produces materials about tax law. His stories have appeared in the Chicago Reader and Potpourri.

Katherine Carlson lives in Brooklyn. Before visiting Gleeson, she had never been west of the Mississippi. She completely lost it when she saw her first cactus.

Candy Chang is a public installation artist, designer, and urban planner working to redefine the ways we use public space to share information important to our neighborhoods and our individual well-being. She is a co-founder of Civic Center, an urban design studio in New Orleans that makes thoughtful public spaces and communication tools to help people navigate and shape their cities. Shes a 2011 TED Senior Fellow and a 2011 Tulane University/Rockefeller Foundation Urban Innovation Challenge Fellow. She holds a B.S. in Architecture, a B.F.A. in Graphic Design, and a Masters degree in Urban Planning from Columbia University. She was an art director at The New York Times and a design researcher at Nokia, and she has collaborated with community organizations on urban design projects in New York, Nairobi, Vancouver, New Orleans, Johannesburg, and Fairbanks. Her work has been exhibited at the National Design Museum, Koltsovo International Airport, and many humble sidewalks. She believes that one of the greatest things in life is spending time in public places with the people you love. She also believes that these spaces can better serve the people who live, work, and play in them.

Clay McLeod Chapman is the creator of the Pumpkin Pie Show, a rigorous storytelling session backed by its own live soundtrack. He is the author of rest area, a collection of short stories, and miss corpus, a novel.

Craig Childs is a commentator for NPR's Morning Edition and has written several highly acclaimed books including The Secret Knowledge of Water, House of Rain, and most recently The Animal Dialogues. He lives in Colorado.

Craig Childs is a commentator for NPR's Morning Edition and has written several highly acclaimed books including The Secret Knowledge of Water, House of Rain, The Animal Dialogues, and most recently Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession. He lives in Colorado.

Michael Chorost (pronounced "kor-ist") was born in 1964 with severe hearing losses in both ears due to an epidemic of rubella, and didn't learn to talk until he got hearing aids at age 3 1/2. He grew up in New Jersey, graduating from Brown in 1987 with a B.A. and from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000 with a Ph.D. In 1999 he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and lost his remaining hearing in July 2001, hence his inclusion in LOST. Two months later he got a cochlear implant in his left ear, an experience chronicled in his memoir, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (Houghton Mifflin, 2005). In 2006 the book won the PEN/USA Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Dr. Chorost now lives in San Francisco, where he teaches at the University of San Francisco and writes for television. His website is www.michaelchorost.com.

Edward Chupack is an attorney and lives near Chicago. He is the author of the novel Silver: My Own Tale as Written by Me with a Goodly Amount Murder. Read more at www.silverpirate.com.

Jane Ciabattari is author of the short-story collection, Stealing the Fire. Recent stories have appeared in KBG Bar Lit, Chautauqua magazine, LiteraryMama.com, VerbSap, Ms. Magazine, and in the anthology The Best Underground Fiction. She serves as president of the National Book Critics Circle. For more information, visit www.janeciabattari.com.

Richard Clewes is an internationally recognized creative director whose work has won prizes in the UK, the United States, and Canada and at the Cannes Advertising Film Festival. Prior to a career in advertising, Clewes was a high school teacher in the Bahamas. He lives in Toronto. For another experience of the book from which this excerpt is drawn, visit: www.findinglily.com.

Donna L. Clovis, photographer and journalist, has created projects for New York University and ABC Television in New York. She has served as a Fellow at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has taught art at the Institute for the Gifted at Princeton University. Clovis has photographic work internationally exhibited and archived at the Museum of Fine Art in Havana, Cuba, The U.S. Holocaust Museum of Washington, DC, the Venice Biennale for Film in Venice, Italy, and the New York Historical Society of New York. Her photographic exhibition of Governors Island, along with excerpts from oral histories of Governors Island residents, is designed to capture the memories and the history of a community and culture that once flourished on the island, now mostly abandoned.

Christopher Cokinos is the winner of the Whiting Writers Award, the Glasgow Prize for an Emerging Writer in Nonfiction, and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. He has won fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Utah Arts Council. He is the author of Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds. His nonfiction, reviews, and poems have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Orion, Science, and Poetry. He is a professor of English at Utah State University.

Ellen Collett graduated from Yale and works at the L.A.P.D. She's finishing her first novel.

Margaret Combs began her writing life as a National Public Radio reporter and producer in New England and education correspondent for the Boston Globe. She is a recipient of both the Associated Press Award for Arts Reporting and the United Press International Award for Best Documentary. Herin-depth reporting on learning and child health has been awarded four Excellence in Journalism awards from the Parenting Publications of America. Now transplanted to Seattle, she is an independent writer and is working on a memoir about growing up with a brother who has autism.

Maureen Ann Connolly is a former journalist. Her poetry has been published in MARGIE and Off The Coast and is forthcoming in the anthology "Lavanderia: A Mixed Load of Women, Wash, and Word" (City Works Press). She won the 2006 Maine Literary Award (Individual Poem) and was the Judson Jerome Poetry Scholar at the 2006 Antioch Writers' Workshop. She wrote the play "My Hands Remember," produced by Wheelock Family Theatre, Boston. Her essays have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor. She lives in Maine.

Chantal Corcoran was born in the single-stoplight town of Chapleau, Ontario. She's lived many places since. Currently, she resides in Des Moines, Iowa and soon she'll be relocating to Las Vegas, Nevada. She's due to graduate this month, from the Bennington Writing Seminars, with an MFA in fiction. Her non-fiction work has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. This is her first published story.

Meredith Cornett: After two years as a Community Forester in Panamá, she moved to Minnesota to attend graduate school in 1993. A native of Georgia, Cornett fell in love with Minnesota's woods and waters, and resolved to stay put. She is Director of Conservation Science for The Nature Conservancy in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Cornett's writing centers on memoir and the natural world. She lives in northern Minnesota with her husband, Ethan, and daughter, Charlotte.

Art Corriveau's short fiction has been published in literary journals such as Story, American Short Fiction, and Southwest Review. Both Faber & Faber London and Time Out UK have anthologized his stories in their prestigious collections of new world writers. His first novel, Housewrights, was published by Penguin in July of 2002 and was made a "Book Sense 76" selection. As a travel writer, he has lived in and written about England, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Thailand, and Hong Kong. He currently makes his home on Cape Cod.

Connie Corzilius was born and raised in Granite City, Illinois and holds degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Calyx, Willow Review, Mississippi Review (online), storyglossia, and Small Spiral Notebook. Her story, "The Interminable Yes," was nominated for a Pushcart Prize last year. She has worked as a bookseller, editor, and writer for the college bookstore industry for an embarrassing number of years and currently lives in Augusta, Georgia with her husband and two truly fabulous daughters. "The Divide" is an excerpt from a much longer work-in-progress, entitled Subterranean.

John Cotter is a founding editor of the review site Open Letters Monthly. His fiction has appeared in Hanging Loose, Pebble Lake, and The Lifted Brow, among others, and his poetry in Volt, Good Foot, and the Flim Forum anthology Oh One Arrow. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, where he's just completed a novel, Under the Small Lights. His website is www.johncotter.net.

Simon Critchley is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of many books, most recently, On Heidegger's Being and Time and Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. The Book of Dead Philosophers was written on a hill overlooking Los Angeles, where he was a scholar at the Getty Research Institute. He lives in Brooklyn.

Bunny Crumpacker, a New York native, has been a professional caterer, editor, newspaper columnist, and school public relations officer. Her book reviews appear in The Washington Post. She is the author of The Sex Life of Food, Perfect Figures, and two cookbooks based on food and recipe pamphlets issued from 1875 to 1950 a chronicle of American cooking in those years. She and her husband, a record producer, live in the Hudson River Valley region, just north of New York City.

Wayne Curtis has written about travel, history, cocktails, architecture, historic preservation and other subjects for Atlantic Monthly, Preservation, American Heritage, Canadian Geographic, American Scholar, Smithsonian and the New York Times. He's also written guidebooks to New England and eastern Canada for Frommer's and Globe-Pequot. Most recently he took up drinking in earnest to write And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in 10 Cocktails, a cultural, economic, and political history of America's most reviled spirit. He lives in New Orleans and eastern Maine.

Mary P. Curtis has returned to creative writing as a welcome diversion from a career as CEO of Pacifico Inc., a leading Silicon Valley PR and strategic communications firm.

A graduate of Northwestern University, Mary currently serves on the boards of the Children's Musical Theater and the San Jose Jazz Society, as an Arts Commissioner for the Town of Los Gatos and on the founding advisory committee for San Jose Rocks. A recipient of the American Advertising Federation's Silver Medal Award recognizing both excellence in the industry as well as social responsibility, Mary is a frequent speaker on topics pertaining to branding and marketing, and participates actively in the Public Relations Society of America, and the Business Marketing Association.

Mary's poetry and prose have been published on Languageandcultures.net and Longstoryshort.us

Andrea Curtis is a winner of Canada's National Magazine Award and has worked as an editor and writer at This Magazine, Toronto Life, and Shift. She lives in Toronto. Into the Blue is her first book.

T. D. is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn. He writes about megayachts, business trends, cheap beer specials, C-grade rock bands, obscure Southern political trends and alligators, and recently began dabbling in zine writing.

David Damrosch is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of books on the Bible and on world literature and is the general editor of The Longman Anthology of World Literature. He lives in New York City.

Randall Dana is a native New Yorker with a variety of interests excelled in music, science, and art. He dropped out in the 10th grade to salvage ornaments from around the city full-time. With a supportive father who helped pay rents, and by driving moving trucks, his storage spaces quickly filled up. Eventually working five jobs to pay the rent, and making molds of a number of sculptures, he soon wound up consolidated into a Brooklyn loft. After a building condemnation and moves to Vermont and Oregon, he settled into a small town in Iowa where he sculpts original clay models and sells casts of these on his web site (and eBay) for home decoration, restoration, and new construction. In recent years he began what he calls "the collection version two" and is rapidly filling up the walls and rooms in his house with more architectural salvage.

John Darling: Since 1976, JOHN DARLING has written and published numerous short stories, poems, and magazine articles. He has also written one play that a Canadian Performing Arts School produced. He has two books to his credit as well. One is a book about what inspired bands to choose their stage names and the other is a book of short stories entitled Woman In Black, which is currently available on Amazon.com. In February, he launched two new projects. The first is The Ivory Tower, which is a free writer's market database, the other is a new webzine called The Ivory Tower: your eclectic electric ezine. The first issue of the webzine is due out on March 1, 2008.

Crane Davis currently lives in New York's Hudson Valley, where he is working on a book on the American experience in Vietnam. His former employers include TIME magazine and public television.

Marq de Villiers was born in South Africa, is a veteran Canadian journalist and the author of eight books on exploration, history, politics, and travel, including Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource (winner of the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction), Down the Volga in a Time of Troubles, and Into Africa: A Journey Through the Ancient Empires, written with Sheila Hirtle. He has worked as a foreign correspondent in Moscow and through eastern Europe and spent many years as Editor and then Publisher of Toronto Life magazine. More recently he was Editorial Director of WHERE Magazines International.

Gary Dexter is the writer of a long-running column for the Sunday Telegraph (UK).

Liz Dolan has published poems, memoir, and short stories in New Delta Review, Rattle, Harpweaver, Mudlark, and Natural Bridge, among others. She has received a fellowship and grants from the Delaware Division of the Arts and a Pushcart nomination in fiction, 2005. She is one of eight Delaware poets recently chosen for the masters level retreat with Fleda Brown, Delaware Poet Laureate. Liz was recently accepted as an associate artist in residence with Sharon Olds at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Susan Doll teaches film at Oakton Community College and is the author of Marilyn and The Films of Elvis Presley.

Douwe Draaisma is Professor of History of Psychology at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He is the author of Metaphors of Memory.

Maureen Duffy is a writer and poet who recently earned an MFA in literature and writing from Bennington College. She is also an attorney and former Peace Corps Volunteer who continues to travel widely. The United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland and, if possible, the Mountains of the Moon are on her list of destinations for next year. "Pax Ishango" is an excerpt from her current book-in-progress about that very large lost place, Zaire. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Howard Dully is a tour bus driver who lives happily with his wife in San Jose, California. This is his first book.

Captain Elias is one of Lost's links to the blogosphere. He writes daily at superpowersthatbe.blogspost.com.

Shelley Emling has been a journalist for 20 years. She is a foreign correspondent for Cox Newspapers, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Fortune, USA Today, and the International Herald Tribune. She lives in New York.

Alan Emmins has written for GQ, The New York Post, Dazed & Confused, FHM, Playboy, and The New York Daily News. He is also managing editor of the fiction magazine and website Edit Red. Emmins is British, but has worked mainly in New York. He now lives in Denmark.

Bruce Falconer is in the DC bureau of Mother Jones magazine, where much of his work has focused on military contracting and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Originally from Chicago, he has also worked as a grocer, a cashier, a parking-lot attendant, a middle-school janitor, and a writer and editor at the Atlantic Monthly.

John Falk is the author of Hello to All That (currently out in paperback from Picador). He is a freelance journalist who has written for various magazines including Esquire, Details, Vanity Fair, and New York Magazine. He lives in New York City and is currently working on his new book, entitled How To Quit Smoking In Twenty Years or Less.

Marguerite Feitlowitz is the author of A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, a New York Times Notable Book and Finalist for the PEN New England/L.L. Winship Prize. Her fiction, essays, and translations have appeared in BOMB, Tri-Quarterly, Salmagundi, Les Temps Modernes, Americas, and many other magazines, newspapers, and anthologies. Currently at work on a novel, she teaches literature at Bennington College.

Leslie Leyland Fields lives with her husband and six children on Kodiak Island, Alaska, where she has worked in commercial fishing for 28 years. She currently teaches in Seattle Pacific University's low-residency MFA program. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Orion, Image, Best Essays Northwest, and many others. She is the author of five books, the most recent Surviving the Island of Grace (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's) and Surprise Child (Waterbrook). Her website is http://www.leslie-leyland-fields.com.

Karin Finell left Berlin in 1952 and now lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Charles Fleming is a former Newsweek correspondent and Vanity Fair contributor and the coauthor of a number of bestselling nonfiction books. He lives in Los Angeles.

David Fogg is a freelance photographer and full time student at Portland State University. He hopes to earn his degree in English and, one day, teach. He enjoys painting, drawing, and other visual arts. He currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

Jeff Foust is the editor of The Space Review, a weekly online publication, and blogs about space policy at Space Politics. He works as a space industry analyst for the Futron Corporation in Bethesda, Maryland, and has a Ph.D. in planetary sciences from MIT. Opinions expressed in the article represent the views of the author alone.

Abby Frucht lives in Wisconsin and is a mentor and advisor at the newly independent Vermont College of Fine Arts. You can read more of her essays and stories online at Narrative Magazine, Brevity, and Salon, or learn a little more about her by visiting www.abbyfrucht.net. If you check out her email and ask for a book, she'll send you one of her out-of-print novels for free.

William G. Gabler holds a bachelor's degree in art history from the university of Minnesota and is a self-employed writer, photographer, and house repairman. He has worked as senior managing photographer at the Space Science Center at the University of Minnesota and as a production editor at West Publishing Company in St. Paul, MN. Born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, he lives in St. Paul and operates an experimental fruit farm in Chanhassen, MN, where he grows many varieties of apples. An amateur geologist, Gabler became aware of the widespread deterioration of 19th-century farmhouses while driving around to study rocks and land forms in Minnesota and neighboring states. He is the author of Death of the Dream: Farmhouses in the Heartland and the forthcoming work, The Dream Unabridged.

Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski was born and raised in Pilsen on the south side of Chicago. His work has appeared in many journals including Triquarterly, Ploughshares, and The Alaska Quarterly Review. He still lives and works on the south side of Chicago.

Crystal Gandrud has been teaching and studying writing and literature for the past ten years in New York City. Most recently she completed an MFA in Creative Writing at The New School for Social Research. She also holds a BFA in Classical Theatre from Boston University. This fall she will be presenting at the Iris Murdoch Conference, Kingston University, London on Vajrayana Buddhist influences in Murdoch's ethics and writings. Crystal currently divides her time between New York City and Providence, Rhode Island, where she lives with her husband and menagerie.

Ramin Ganeshram is a journalist and professional chef and the author of Sweet Hands: Island Cooking From Trinidad & Tobago (Hippocrene NY 2006; 2nd expanded edition 2010) and Stir It Up (Scholastic 2010) and The Pass It Down Cookbook (Smiley books/Hay House 2010). In addition to contributing to a variety of food publications including Saveur, Gourmet, Bon Appetit, and epicurious.com, Ganeshram has written food/culture/travel articles for Islands (as contributing editor); National Geographic Traveler; Forbes Traveler; Forbes Four Seasons and many others. She is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of World Foods (Greenwood Press 2010) and has been a peer review for the Journal of Food, Culture and Society.

For two years she volunteered as a reporter, writer and editor for Molly ONeills magnum One Big Table (Simon & Schuster, November 2010) exploring the foodways of real Americans through history and today.

Ralph Gardner is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, a columnist for the New York Observer, and a frequent contributor to The New York Times. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker and Spy, in addition to other publications. He lives in New York City.

Emma Garman: Born and bred in England, Emma Garman received a master's in literature from the University of London and a master's in creative writing from the City College of New York. She has written for Nextbook, New York and The Huffington Post, among other publications, and can be visited online at www.emmagarman.com.

Anne Germanacos' work has appeared recently in Santa Monica Review, Descant, Quarterly West, Blackbird, Salamander, Florida Review, Pindeldyboz, Agni-online and many others. She lives in San Francisco and on Crete.

George Getschow, writer-in-residence of the nationally acclaimed Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, has been writing professionally since 1972, when he was hired as a general assignment reporter for the Mason City (Iowa) Globe Gazette. He spent 16 years at The Wall Street Journal as a writer and editor. At the Journal, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for "distinguished writing" about the underprivileged. He covered Mexico for several years and directed the newspaper's coverage of the Southwest. Many of his protgs have won Pulitzer Prizes and other literary achievements. Today, he is principal lecturer at the University of North Texas' Frank W. and Sue Mayborn School of Journalism and a writing coach for a number of newspapers. He was recently inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters for his "distinctive literary achievement." He's finishing a book, Walled Kingdom, that grew out of two narratives he wrote for The Wall Street Journal.

Kirsten Giebutowski lives and writes and aches for the things she's lost from a small town in New Hampshire. She is a recent graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and her last published essay appeared in Etude. These days she's writing about borsch, a statue of Pushkin in a Ukrainian park, and a departed root cellar.

Avery Gilbert is a psychologist, smell scientist, and entrepreneur. His groundbreaking studies in odor perception have been published in scientific journals, and he has helped design commercial scents for everything from perfume to kitty litter. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey. Visit him at www.averygilbert.com.

Terry Glavin is an award-winning Canadian journalist and author whose several books traverse anthropology, natural history, and cultural geography. They include A Death Feast in Dimlahamid, This Ragged Place, and The Last Great Sea: A Human and Natural History of the North Pacific Ocean. His latest book, on global extinctions, is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne Books.

Ann Goldstein is an editor at The New Yorker. The recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award, she has translated works by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alessandro Baricco, among others, and is the editor of the forthcoming collected works of Primo Levi.

Jeff Gomez is senior director of online consumer sales and marketing for Penguin Group USA. He lectures on digital information trends at publishing industry events throughout America, and has written four novels. Visit his blog to read a new introduction to Print is Dead.

Sarah Maria Gonzales grew up in Alaska, and now lives in Los Angeles. Her writing has been published in Ms. Magazine, Boldtype, Ostrich Ink, The Summerset Review, and The Dragonfly Review. Please visit her website for more information: www.sarahgonzales.com.

Wayne Grady has written eight books of non-fiction, including the bestseller Tree: A Life Story, written with David Suzuki. He is also a prolific magazine writer and French to English translator.

Angela M. Graziano's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Apple Valley Review, Ariel, Dislocate, A Long Story Short, Miranda Literary Magazine, and Toasted Cheese Literary Journal. She is a candidate in the MFA program at Fairleigh Dickinson University. "Orange Dreams" is an excerpt from her first memoir, which she hopes will be complete this year.

Rebekah Doyle Guss explores mainly by bike, kayak, and foot. When not dreaming or writing about wilderness adventures, she enjoys Québec pop music and victory gardening with neighborhood children. She declined the invitation to join this season's family fantasy football league.

Zack Hample is officially obsessed with the National Pastime. A former college shortstop and four-time student at Bucky Dent's Baseball School, Hample has worked as both a baseball instructor and spokesman. He is best known for having collected an obscene number of baseballs 2,961 and counting at 41 major league stadiums, including Barry Bonds's 724th career home run. His first book, How to Snag Major League Baseballs, was published in 1999, landing him coverage in Sports Illustrated, People, Playboy, The New York Times, The Canadian National Post, FHM, Parade Magazine, TIME Magazine for Kids, and on National Public Radio, CNN, FOX Sports, SportsNet NY (the Mets' cable network), The Rosie O'Donnell Show, and the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. Hample, a New York City native, currently writes for minorleaguebaseball.com and has a popular blog, "The Baseball Collector," about his favorite hobby. He has other interests, of course; they just aren't evident during baseball season. For more about Zack's ever-growing collection, visit his blog at snaggingbaseballs.mlblogs.com.

Edward Hardy, the author of the novels Keeper and Kid and Geyser Life, grew up in Ithaca, N.Y., has an MFA from Cornell, and has published stories in Ploughshares, GQ, Witness, The Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and other literary magazines. His work has been included in The Best American Short Stories.

Edward Hardy, the author of the novels Keeper and Kid and Geyser Life, grew up in Ithaca, N.Y., and has published stories in Ploughshares, GQ, Witness, Epoch, TheQuarterly, Boulevard, and many other literary magazines. His work has been included in The Best American Short Stories. He lives in Rhode Island and his website is: www.edwardhardy.com.

Denise Frame Harlan writes from scenic Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband, two children and a kitten named Satchmo. She is currently writing a book about road trips and former boyfriends titled The Absence of Reliable Transportation. Her blog address is www.dvivid.blogspot.com.

Lisa Harper is Adjunct Professor of Writing in the MFAW program at the University of San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in Gastronomica, Literary Mama, The Emily Dickinson Journal, Switchback, and Literary Couplings. She has completed a memoir, Inside Out, and is a contributor to the forthcoming anthologies, Mama PhD (Rutgers, 2008) and Educating Tastes: Food, Drink, and Conoisseur Culture.

Benjamin Hart is a waste management consultant living in Brooklyn, New York. He wishes he had Billy Crudup's haircut in the movie Jesus' Son.

Bret Harte (18361902) was an American author and poet. In 1987 he appeared on a $5 U.S. Postage stamp, as part of the "Great Americans" Series.

Stephanie Hartka is a world traveler, writer, and visual artist living between Latin America and New York. Her work has appeared in publications such as Remezcla, Whats Up Buenos Aires,NYCgo,inTravelmag, and Cultural Survival. Stephanie recently spent six months living in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest with the very isolated Achuar people for a future book project.

Bill Hayes (www.bill-hayes.com) is the author of the national bestseller Sleep Demons: An Insomniac's Memoir and Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine and Details, among other publications. He has also been featured on many NPR programs, as well as the Discovery Health Channel. He lives in New York City.

Paul Hehn holds a Masters degree in history from Northeastern University. His reviews of websites have appeared in Yahoo! Internet Life magazine and he contributed several entries to the third edition of Scribner's A Dictionary of American History (2002). For two years he wrote the television column Tuned Out for Lycos. He lives with his family in Portland, Oregon.

David Helvarg is an author and President of the Blue Frontier Campaign. His latest book is a memoir titled: Saved By the Sea: A Love Story with Fish. (St. Martin's, 2010).

Robin Hemley is the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He has published seven books of fiction and nonfiction, and his new book, DO-OVER!, is now available in stores.

Brandi Dawn Henderson is an international story seeker, currently living in Alaska, residing in a trailer house on an airstrip, and saving for future airfares.

Katy Hershberger is a writer and book publicist living in New York. Her work has appeared in WashingtonPost.com, Death + Taxes magazine, Popmatters.com, and Flavorwire.com.

Lawrence Hill, an award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, is a former Globe & Mail and Winnipeg Free Press reporter. His recent books include The Book of Negroes and Any Known Blood.

Alan Hirshfeld is a professor of physics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and an associate of the Harvard College Observatory. He is the author of The Electric Life of Michael Faraday and Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Dan Hirshon has been performing standup comedy throughout the Northeast for almost five years. During that time he has competed several times in the Boston Comedy Festival and also as a finalist in the Las Vegas Comedy Festival. While spending several months in South Africa, he performed in Cape Town and Johannesburg, publishing his exploits in Sheckymagazine.com and Glimpse Magazine. For more on Dan, visit www.danhirshon.com.

Sheila Hirtle is an experienced editor and researcher with a background in fine arts, design, advertising and journalism. Her projects have included a wide-ranging study of African art and music, and she has for a number of years provided writers with extensively researched dossiers for works of historical non-fiction. She is the author of House of Imagination, a book on architecture, and has co-authored four books with Marq. They currently live in Port Medway, Nova Scotia, but travel the world to research their book projects.

Christina Holzhauser was raised in a town of 85 along the Missouri river. Since leaving home shes worked as a ranch hand on a dude ranch, a pee collector at a nuclear plant, a histology technician, an archaeologist, and an expert hiking boot fitter. While living in a cabin with no running water in Fairbanks, Alaska, she earned her MFA in Nonfiction as well as the right to say shes put on her coat to use the outhouse in the middle of the night, seen the northern lights, and watched the sun never set. Currently, she lives in Missouri with her wife and teaches college English when shes not doing archaeology. Her blog is: http://totalmitigation.blogspot.com.

Fritz Holznagel is an Emmy-winning animation scriptwriter turned reference and Internet author; he edited the 1996 book The World Wide Web 1000 and created the popular feature The Lycos 50. In a TV-age sidelight, he was the winner of the 1995 Tournament of Champions on the game show Jeopardy! He lives in Mountain View, California.

Antonio Hopson is a writer, teacher, and photographer who lives in Seattle, WA. He has published a number of short stories in both print and electronic format, including Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse Magazine, Quiet Magazine, and Farmhouse Journal. His current project is a novel addressing the harms of discrimination, hitchhiking, bank-robbery, and false divinity. To see more of his work, go to http://www.antoniohopson.com.

Alan Huffman is the author of three books: Ten Point, Mississippi in Africa, and Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History. He has contributed to the New York Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution; The Los Angeles Times; Washington Post Magazine; Smithsonian; Preservation; Outside; and The Oxford American. He lives near Bolton, Mississippi. For more information, please visit alanhuffman.com.

Frank Huyler is an ER doc in Albuquerque, NM. He is the author of The Blood of Strangers and the novel The Laws of Invisible Things (Holt/Picador), and he is currently at work on another novel. His essay, "The Cook's Son," is forthcoming in The American Scholar, and he has published poems in Poetry, The Atlantic, and The Georgia Review, among others.

Tim Jackson is a writer in Radford, Virginia. He has been published in several magazines and newspapers. He currently works at Radford University and is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College.

Josh Jackson is a writer and planning consultant in New York City. He's worked with the NYC2012 Olympic Bid, Alex Garvin & Associates, and the Project for Public Spaces. He lives in Brooklyn and writes the Built Environment Blog.

Patrick Wyse Jackson is a lecturer in Geology and curator of the Geological Museum in Trinity College, Dublin, and is a member of the International Commission on the History of Geological Sciences.

J.D. Jahangir was born in Bangladesh and subsequently forced to grow up in various middle-eastern countries, Malta, London, Pittsburgh, and Somerville, Massachusetts, where he now lives. He is revising a novel called "Ghost Alley," which is a ghost story that flirts with the fancies of the post-postcolonial experience.

Marilyn Johnson has been a staff writer for Life and an editor at Esquire, Redbook, and Outside. Her essays, profiles, and stories have appeared in these magazines and others. She has written obituaries for Princess Diana, Jacqueline Onassis, Katharine Hepburn, Johnny Cash, Bob Hope, and Marlon Brando.

Arthur Jones is a designer, illustrator, animator, and writer, living in Brooklyn, New York. He's collaborated with Cassette From My Ex editor Jason Bitner on DIRTY FOUND magazine and Foundmagazine.com, and worked with Starlee Kine on the Post-It Note Reading Series. His work can be seen at byarthurjones.com.

Peter Joseph is an editor for LOST.

Jamie-Lee Josselyn lives in Philadelphia and works at the Kelly Writers House, a literary arts organization on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has previously been published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Pennsylvania Gazette, and Peregrine. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in May of 2005 with a BA in Creative Writing and French.

Sam Kean is a writer in Washington, DC, and the author of The Disappearing Spoon. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Mental Floss, Slate, Air & Space/Smithsonian, and New Scientist. In 2009 he was a runner-up for the National Association of Science Writers Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for best science writer under the age of 30. He currently writes for Science and is a 20092010 Middlebury Environmental Journalism fellow. His website can be found at www.samkean.com.

Allan Kellehear is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bath, UK.

Stuart Kelly studied English language and literature at Balliol College, Oxford, where he gained a first-class degree. He is a frequent reviewer for Scotland on Sunday and lives with his wife in Edinburgh.

Joshua Key was born in 1978 in Guthrie, Oklahoma. In 2003, he left the U.S. Army after serving a seven-month tour of duty in Iraq. Key currently resides in Canada with his wife and four children. This is his first book.

Mark Kingwell is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, a contributing editor of Harper's Magazine, and the author of nine books of political and cultural theory. He also publishes widely on art, film, architecture, and design. Classic Cocktails is based on his award-winning drinks column in Toro Magazine.

Rob Kirkpatrick is a senior editor with Thomas Dunne Books at St. Martin's Press. He is the author of The Quotable Sixties, Cecil Travis of the Washington Senators: The War-Torn Career of an All-Star Shortstop, and Magic in the Night: The Words and Music of Bruce Springsteen.

Jeffrey Kluger is a senior writer at Time and the author of several other books, including Splendid Solution.

Sharon M. Knapp recently earned an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College. Her work has been published in a variety of newspapers and magazines and is included in the creative non-fiction anthology, The Middle Distance. She lives in Pennsylvania with her partner, Kim.

Nick Kolakowski is an editor and freelance writer living in New York. He is currently the technology editor at eWeek.com but has written for The Washington Post, AARP The Magazine, Sound & Vision, Trader Monthly and several other publications. His first (co-authored) book, The Playboy Guide to Cigars, is coming out in July.

George Konrád, a former president of International PEN and the Academy of Arts in Berlin, is the author of The Case Worker and The Invisible Voice, among many other widely translated books. He lives in Budapest.

Jeanne Koskela has worked as a nurse for the last 25 years and has finally decided what she wants to be. She lives near Detroit, Michigan and is a student in the MFA program at Bennington College, Vermont.

John Kretschmer is a travel and sailing columnist for The Miami Herald, a longtime contributing editor to Sailing Magazine, and regular contributor to Souther Boating and Cruising World. He has logged more than 200,000 offshore sailing miles, including 15 transatlantic and two transpacific passages. He has weathered several storms at sea and teaches aspiring bluewater voyagers in seminars, lectures, and training voyages. John lives aboard a 47-foot cutter in Florida. He and his student, Carl Wake, the subject of his book, were close friends.

Nina Krieger eventually completed her 1,850 mile bicycle journey from Vancouver to Tijuana. Originally from New York, she's lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for eight years and has an MFA from the University of San Francisco. She has received a Travelers' Tales Solas Award and won a Bakpak Traveler's Guide essay contest. She blogs at www.ninaherenorthere.com.

Noah Kucij is from upstate New York. He lives and teaches in Akaike, a small town on Kyushu, Japan that will be wiped off the map next month when it merges with two other towns. But that's another story.

Mark Kurlansky is the author of numerous nonfiction books including Cod, A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Salt: A World History, Non-Violence: The History of a Dangerous Idea, and most recently The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of Dan Pedro de Macors. He is the author of a novel, Boogaloo on Second Avenue: A Novel of Pastry, Guilt and Music and a short Story collection The White Man in the Tree and other stories. His third book of fiction, a cycle of interconnected short stories about food, Edible Stories will be published in November 2010.

Glenn Kurtz is a graduate of the New England Conservatory-Tufts University double degree program. He also holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University in German Studies and Comparative Literature. His writing has been published in ZYZZYVA, Artweek, Tema Celeste, and elsewhere, and he has taught at Stanford University, San Francisco State University, and California College of the Arts. He now lives in New York City and is working on a novel.

Bill Lambrecht has been a Washington correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch since 1984. His journalism prizes include the Sigma Delta Chi Award and three Raymond Clapper Awards. He is the author of Big Muddy Blues and Dinner at the New Gene Café, and he lives near Annapolis, Maryland.

Krista Landers is a former Stegner Fellow currently teaching creative writing at Stanford University's School of Continuing Studies. Her fiction has appeared in Tin House Magazine.

Patrick Lane has authored more than 25 books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and children's poetry. He has received most of Canada's top literary awards and a number of grants and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts. His writing appears in all major Canadian anthologies of English literature. He is considered to be one of the finest poets of his generation, and his gardening skills have been featured in the Recreating Eden television series.

Lane has been a writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto, Concordia University, the University of Ottawa, and the University of Alberta. He lives in British Columbia, with his wife, the poet Lorna Crozier.

Sean Lanigan lives in Somerville, MA and teaches in Boston. He has no pets, but is hopeful this will someday change.

Julie Lauterbach-Colby is a recent graduate of the University of Arizona's MFA program in nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Script, Metaphor, A Students Guide to First-Year Writing (UA Press), Back Room Live, and The Dictionary Project.

Richard Lederer, Ph.D., is the author of more than thirty books on the English language, including Anguished English, A Man of My Words, Comma Sense, and, most recently, Word Wizard. His syndicated column Looking at Language appears in newspapers and magazines nationwide, and he frequently appears on radio as a language commentator. He lives in San Diego with his wife, Simone van Egeren.

Steve and Evie Levy, the Doomsday financial experts, are the fictional creations of Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman, who live in Los Angeles and whose bestselling books include Yiddish with Dick and Jane and How to Raise a Jewish Dog.

Simon Leys is the pen name of Pierre Ryckmans, who was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. Leys is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a member of the Academie Royale de Litterature Francaise (Belgium). His most recent award was the Prix Femina, and he has also been awarded the Prix Renaudot and the Prix Henri Gal. His works include Chinese Shadows, a new translation of the Analects of Confucius, and The Death of Napoleon, which won the prestigious Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and was recently made into a film starring Ian Holm.

Laura Lifshitz was made in 1976. The youngest of four girls, she has been fighting her way through life and now can be seen on television and the stage as an actress and stand-up comic. She has been an MTV personality and has been seen on VH-1, AMC, and numerous talk shows, and she is writing a full-length memoir where, as her therapist says, she can appropriately let out her anger. To experience the full Lifshitz visit her at Steinbergtalent.com and MySpace.

Charles Lindsay is the author of several books of photography, including Upstream: Fly Fishing in the American West; Turtle Islands: Balinese Ritual and the Green Turtle; and Mentawai Shaman: Keeper of the Rain Forest. Lindsay's work has appeared in numerous international publications and has been profiled on NPR and on CNN International. His website is www.charleslindsay.com.

Steve Lohse's writing has appeared in literary journals such as Stringtown, The Dead Mule, and LOST (No. 1). He is the former editor of Muzzle, out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and now lives with his wife and cats in Seattle.

Corinne Loveland writes nonfiction because she believes in the power of the everyday. Regardless of what happens to us be it shocking or simple life as it happens is artistically worthwhile. As a writer and as a photographer, Corinne aims to capture the nuances of life and portray them as art. Originally from the New Jersey Shore, Corinne now lives in Santa Cruz a less crowded Jersey Shore with easy access to her favorite city. She received her MFA from the University of San Francisco and her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies.

Jim Lovell joined NASA in 1962 and flew a total of four missions before retiring in 1973. He continues to lecture across the country, speaking about space exploration.

Simon Loxley, typographer, designer, and teacher, lives in London. The Secret History of Letters is his first book.

David Lynch: Three-time Oscar-nominated director David Lynch is among the leading filmmakers of our era. From the early seventies to the present day, Lynch's popular and critically acclaimed film projects, which include Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire, are internationally considered to have broken down the wall between art-house cinema and Hollywood moviemaking.

Justin Marcello created Unseenworld as an expansion of the successful national project Unseenamerica. Unseenamerica is an initiative of the Bread & Roses Cultural Project of 1199SEIU and has completed over 300 photography workshops throughout the country. For more information about Unseenworld visit: UnseenMaeLa.blogspot.com

Albert E. Martinez grew up in Southern California and Northern New Mexico. A graduate of New Mexico State University's creative writing MFA program, he received the Frank Waters Fiction Fellowship and scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His stories have been featured in Best New American Voices 2006 and Nerve Magazine. He is currently working on a novel.

R. Matie is senior correspondent on international shipping for LOST.

Edward McClelland: Edward "Ted" McClelland is the author of The Third Coast, a Great Lakes travelogue to be published this fall by Chicago Review Press. His writing has appeared in Mother Jones, Utne, Salon, Stop Smiling, and Potomac Review. This article is a companion piece to his essay "Living the Lansing Dream," which was included in the anthology Next: Young American Writers on the New Generation. That book was published by W.W. Norton in 1994, when McClelland was still young. McClelland also perpetrated Horseplayers: Life at the Track, an account of his jones for playing the ponies. He lives by the water, in Grand Beach, Michigan.

Grant McCrea, formerly homeless, or perhaps just dissolute, is now one of the "World's Leading Litigation Lawyers," at least according to the 2005 Euromoney Guide. His novel "Dead Money," a story of poker, murder, scotch and cigarettes, will be published by Random House Canada in February 2006. He lives in New York City with his laptop, delusions of poker grandeur and a lot of bad memories.

Scott McCredie has written about topics ranging from slugs to tsunamis for Smithsonian Magazine, and about travel, health, fitness, and many other feature topics for the Seattle Times, Reader's Digest, and other publications. Twice winner of the Society of Professional Journalists "Excellence in Journalism" award, Scott graduated from the University of Washington with degrees in Journalism and Russian Studies. In his spare time, McCredie practices T'ai Chi, balances on a Swiss ball, and plays ping pong to retain his sense of equilibrium. Balance: In Search of the Lost Sense is his first book.

Erin McKean is a lexicographer (go look it up). She blogs about dresses at www.dressaday.com, and about dictionaries at www.dictionaryevangelist.com. She owns four pairs of roller skates and five sewing machines and is afraid to count the dictionaries.

Linda McMeniman is a writer and family history researcher based in Philadelphia. She currently co-teaches a genealogy workshop through the University of Delaware and is a retired professor of communication and rhetoric.

Margaret McMullan is the author of four novels including In My Mother's House (Thomas Dunne Books, 2003) and the young adult novel When I Crossed No-Bob (Houghton Mifflin, 2007). Her work has appeared in Glamour, the Chicago Tribune, Southern Accents, TriQuarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Southern California Anthology, Other Voices, Boulevard, Ploughshares, and The Sun among others. Shes currently a professor of English at the University of Evansville, in Evansville, Indiana. Read more about her at www.margaretmcmullan.com.

Steve McNutt is the real name of a writer, teacher and sometimes printmaker in Iowa City, Iowa.He received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program and is at present a Ph.D. candidate at UI in Language, Literacy and Culture. More of his work can be found at www.stevemcnutt.com.

Charles L. Mee is a playwright and historian, and the author of more than a dozen highly praised books. He lives in Brooklyn.

Adrienne Mercer lives in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, where she is a member of the Big Picture Window Writers' Group. She is a former journalist and the author of a young adult novel, Rebound (Lorimer Canada, 2002).

Susan Messer has fiction and nonfiction published in Glimmer Train Stories, North American Review, Colorado Review, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Another Chicago Magazine, killingthebuddha.com, and others. Awards include an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in prose, an Illinois Arts Council literary award for creative nonfiction, and prizes in Moment magazine's short fiction competition, Chicago Public Radio's Stories on Stage competition, and the Jewish Cultural Writing Competition of the Center for Yiddish Culture. "Dearest Tabitha" was runner up in the Guild Complex nonfiction competition, judged by Alex Kotlowitz. Her novel, Grand River and Joy, will be published by University of Michigan Press in Fall 2009.

Marc Mewshaw is a writer whose short stories have appeared in a number of literary journals. He studied English at Princeton University and obtained an MFA in creative writing from New York University. He lives in Key West and is currently at work on his first novel.

Stephen L. Meyers is the author of Manhattan's Lost Streetcars, he is a longtime member of the Electric Railroaders' Association in New York and other rail groups. In Lost Trolleys of Queens and Long Island, Stephen L. Meyers gives these lines — more than 20 of them — new life. With exceptional images and fascinating detail about things like the tiny storage battery cars and the trolleys that met all the trains, he traces the streetcar era from the late 1800s to the mid-1930s.

Keith Miles is a partner at McNeely Pigott & Fox, a public relations firm located in Nashville, Tennessee. A former newspaper reporter, Miles has been a keen observer of the intersection of journalism and technology. In the evenings, he takes photographs and writes songs. Follow him on Twitter at keithmilestn, or hear him wail at www.keithmiles.com.

Christopher J. Miles currently resides in New York City. His work has appeared in Pomp and Circumstance and the Washington Post.

Megan Milks is currently working toward her Master's degree in Literature and Creative Writing at Temple University. She has written for PopMatters.com, GrapevineCulture.com, Meridian, and SparkNotes. Watch for the second issue of her zine, Mildred Pierce, soon to hit a book or record store near you.

John Charles Miller was in a well drilling group as a Peace Corps Volunteer from 1962-64, the John F. Kennedy period. Returning, he earned a Masters Degree in geology at the University of Missouri, specializing in groundwater and geochemistry. He has worked in the field for 38 years, including eight years of hydrogeological employment in Puerto Rico, Panama, Mexico, Peru, Argentina and the Dominican Republic. Most of his writing is speculative fiction. He is now writing a historical novel set in the 1890s in Citrus County, Florida. He lives in Tampa, Florida. Please visit his website at http://quarkspacetravel.com.

Thorpe Moeckel teaches in the writing program at Hollins University. His latest book is a long poem entitled Venison (Etruscan Press, 2010). Other books include Odd Botany (Silverfish Review Press, 2002) and Making a Map of the River (Iris Press, 2008). His writings have appeared in many journals, among them Orion, Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, Open City, Verse, and Field. He lives on 18 acres in Western Virginia, where he helps his wife and daughter and many dairy goats raise good eats. He recently completed a children's novel and a book of nonfiction, which includes "A Hog Butchering." Read more about him at etruscanpress.org.

Elizabeth Monoian is an interdisciplinary artist who uses the internet, found objects and spaces, electronic noise, video, and performance to tease apart and question cultural relationships to time, history, and memory. Her work has screened and exhibited in venues including: the XXIII Moscow International Film Festival, Moscow, Russia; Anthology Film Archives, NYC; Open Screen Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia; Festival of Actual Kino, Novosibirsk, Russia; The Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; and the International Media Art Festival at the Armenian Center of Contemporary Experimental Art, Yerevan, Armenia. Elizabeth received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University.

Suzanne Montagne grew up in the woods of Connecticut. After studying art and life in New York City, she moved to Seattle, Washington, where she has been a Labor and Delivery nurse for many years. She lives and writes by the waters of the Puget Sound.

Rick Moody is the author of Right Livelihoods, his eighth book. He has received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Addison Metcalf Award, the Paris Review's Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

E. B. Moore is a metal sculptor, who also builds art books, writes poetry, and renovates houses. Her work has been published in The Brattler, Charles River Review, Summer Home Review I and II. She is the recipient of the Mary C. Barret Prize for a poetry chapbook.

Anne Elizabeth Moore is a writer, artist, and activist based in Chicago. Her most recent book, Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity (The New Press, 2007), received favorable reviews from Forbes, the LA Times, and the Guardian, and was called "an anti-corporate manifesto with a difference" by Mother Jones, and "sharp and valuable muckraking" by Time Out New York. Her work recently brought her to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to teach a group of young women self-publishing in an age when freedom of expression and women's rights are difficult to come by in Southeast Asia. Co-editor and publisher of now-defunct Punk Planet, founding editor of the popular Best American Comics series from Houghton Mifflin, outspoken media critic, and exhibiting artist, Moore's work has been the subject of films, college lectures, and police investigations.

Kristina Moriconi, who would almost always rather be in New York City, divides her time between there and suburban Philadelphia. Her nonfiction work has appeared in Flashquake and apt and will appear in the forthcoming issue of The Shine Journal. She has been accepted into the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Pacific Lutheran University.

David Morrow has edited reference works for The New York Times and written articles for Insider magazine and the Encyclopedia Britannica online.

Gabrielle Moss's writing will appear in the upcoming anthology BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine. She is also a frequent contributor to Venus magazine. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and dislikes chocolate-covered peanuts for a variety of reasons.

Edmund Eugene Mullins is the film editor at Blackbook magazine. He lives in Brooklyn. The Sting and the Honey is an excerpt from his novel of the same name.

Audie Murphy was the most decorated American soldier during World War II. He went on to a long film career, starring in The Red Badge of Courage, The Quiet American, and his own To Hell and Back. He was killed in a plane crash in 1971 at age 46.

Zoeann Murphy created Unseenworld as an expansion of the successful national project Unseenamerica. Unseenamerica is an initiative of the Bread & Roses Cultural Project of 1199SEIU and has completed over 300 photography workshops throughout the country. For more information about Unseenworld visit: UnseenMaeLa.blogspot.com

James Nagle: Capt. James Nagle served in Co. B, 1st Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers and his is one of the few soldiers' diaries from the Mexican-American War. Read the rest of his diary here; learn more about Nagle here.

Lucy Neave recently returned to Canberra, Australia from New York to teach creative writing at Australian National University. Besides publishing fiction, poetry and academic papers in a range of Australian and international literary journals, including Southerly, Overland and New Writing, she has held various jobs. In previous lives she has been a veterinarian and a scientific writer for a non-government organization in Nepal. Her first novel, "Not a Love Story," is almost finished.

Henry Loomis Nelson (1846-1908) was the editor of Harper's Weekly.

Randy Noles is a group publisher for Gulfshore Media, a publisher of city/regional magazines, business magazines and other niche magazines in Florida. He has won numerous awards for feature-writing, opinion columns and investigative reporting over a 25-year career. He was recently named by Florida Monthly magazine as one of the "100 Most Intriguing Floridians" in the category of literature. "Fiddler's Curse" is his second nonfiction book. Naturally, he is working on a novel. He lives in Orlando with his wife and two children.

Wendy Noritake has been a publisher of periodicals such as Amazing Stories, Dragon Magazine, Dungeon Adventures, and The Duelist. She is a scuba diver and naturalist for the Salish Sea (Puget Sound) and continues family traditions of relationship with this beloved body of water. She is working on a memoir about three generations of her family.

Sarah Norris has published poetry in the Waverly Review and worked as a reporter for The Tennessean newspaper, in Nashville. Though she received an MFA in creative nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College, Sarah credits her yoga mat, her writing friends Phoebe and Suzie, and the occasional abuse of frozen yogurt with helping her to master the even finer art of accepting rejection.

Eric Nuzum is a recovering pop culture critic, VH1 pundit, and author of Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America. He writes a lot of inane stuff that falls somewhere between the styles of Ted Kaczynski and Robert Frost, with a dash of inappropriate jokes thrown in for good measure. Nuzum was awarded the 2002 National Edward R. Murrow Award for News Writing and his work has appeared in a few publications you've heard of and many more that you haven't heard of. He works for National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. and lives with his wife in that same general area. He opines regularly on his Web site, www.ericnuzum.com.

Kelan O'Connell, a freelance writer and playwright, holds a degree in Theatre Arts from San Francisco State University and has seen two of her plays produced in San Francisco. She has worked in production and post production for the entertainment industry but recently traded Los Angeles for the Russian River Wine Appellation of Northern California, taking up residence in a small cottage near the vines, the river, and the sea. She is currently putting the finishing touches on Triptych, a trilogy of one-act plays and working on her first novel for young adults.

Peter Olszewski is an Australian journalist who has enjoyed a varied career, which he kicked off as a rock magazine editor. He has written for most major antipodean publications, was editor of Australian Playboy magazine, created the pro-marijuana cult hero JJ McRoach, rode shotgun for Hunter S. Thompson during his Australian career, and worked as a university lecturer in journalism. He has written three books and his most recent, Land of a Thousand Eyes, is the result of a lengthy stint as a journalism trainer in Yangon Myanmar (Rangoon, Burma).

Peter Orner is the author of Esther Stories, winner of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Best American Stories, and he was LOST's second guest fiction editor. His new novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, was published by Little, Brown in April 2006.

Cecily Parks's poems appear or are forthcoming in Antioch Review, Boston Review, Tin House and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Cold Work, was selected by Li-Young Lee for the 2005 Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship. It was published in December.

John Parsley is the Editorial Director of LOST.

Peter Patnaik grew up tall and strong in the great land of North Carolina. That is where he currently resides and attends to Honey Where You Been So Long? a mp3 blog documenting the pre-war era of blues music. Hang the DJ: An Alternative Book of Music Lists contains his most recent published work. His blog grew up tall and strong at www.prewarblues.org.

Joe Nick Patoski has been writing about Willie Nelson for 35 years and is also the author of Stevie Ray Vaughan: Caught in the Crossfire and Selena: Como la Flor. He lives near the Texas Hill Country hamlet of Wimberley.

Clara Paulino: born in Portugal, educated in Portugal, England (Cambridge University) and the U.S. (Fulbright Scholar), Clara Paulino has taught Art Criticism at universities in Portugal and the U.S. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Porto, Portugal. She holds degrees in English Literature and Art History (Ph.D), has done translation work for years and is fluent in five languages. A mother of twin daughters, Clara wrote for magazines on the topic of raising twins in Portugal for four years before moving to the U.S. in 2003, and had a book published in Portugal in 2001 called Dancing with Twins (memoir/diary of raising twins from 6 - 10). Since April this year, Clara began writing in English on her blog, Writing In The Margins, where she explores life in-between languages, cultures and disciplines.

Rebecca Peters-Golden, M.A., grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan and is currently a doctoral student in Literature at Indiana University. Her poetry won Academy of American Poetry prizes in 2002, 2003, and 2004.

Brenda Peterson is a novelist and nature writer, author of over 15 books, including the memoir Build Me an Ark: A Life with Animals, and the novel, Duck and Cover, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Brenda Peterson is the author of 16 books, including Duck and Cover, a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year." Her new memoir, I Want To Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth, is just out and was selected as an "IndieNext" Top Pick by independent booksellers nationwide. Read more at www.IWantToBeLeftBehind.com.

Ian Phillips works as an illustrator and designer for books, magazines, and newspapers. In his spare time, he runs a small press. His small hand-bound books are on the shelves of book collectors worldwide and have appeared in galleries from Moscow to San Francisco. He makes his home in Toronto.

Andrew Phillips is a reformed fast-food junkie and non-Vegan currently shoveling cultural snow from the inner bounds of Brooklyn. He was recently named National Music Editor for Flavorpill.com, an honor which he celebrated with a salad.

Kevin Phillips has been a political and economic commentator for more than three decades. A former White House strategist, he has been a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and National Public Radio and has written for Harper's and Time. He is the author of ten books, including the New York Times bestsellers American Theocracy and American Dynasty. He lives in Goshen, Connecticut.

Andrew Phillips is an uprooted entertainment writer/editor living in the East Bay, by way of Brooklyn. A former editor at Flavorpill and Earplug, he now traces the edges of the cultural fringe as the Editor-in-Chief of streaming service/blog powerhouse MOG. In addition to these publications his work has appeared in a number of others, including the very tiny boxes in Newsweek, Blender, and the Washingtonian.

Mary Phillips-Sandy grew up in Waterville, Maine, where she was a co-founder and assistant director of the Maine International Film Festival. She now lives in Brooklyn and is the editor of RuinedMusic.com. Her writing has appeared in BUST, KGB Bar Lit, Yankee Pot Roast, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, and Monkeybicycle, among other places. People never believe her when she says she has a degree in economics, but it's true.

Kate Pickert is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn. Her work appears most frequently in New York Magazine.

Karen Piper is an associate professor, Department of English, University of Missouri-Columbia and author of Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race, and Identity. She lives in Columbia, Missouri.

Ivy Pochoda www.iveypochoda.com grew up in Brooklyn, New York in a house filled with books. In high school she fell in love with playwriting, poetry, and classical languages. She attended Harvard University, where she studied classical Greek. In 1999, she moved to Amsterdam, where she got lost for six years among the narrow streets and misleading canals. While there, she worked a number of different jobs and began to write The Art of Disappearing, which will be published by St. Martin's Press on September 15, 2009. She was the writer in residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut from February to August 2009.

Bob PowersBob Powers is the author of Happy Cruelty Day! He has performed at HBOs Aspen Comedy Festival, and he cohosts and performs in the monthly reading series How to Kick People in New York City. Bob has written for Flaunt magazine, The Onion A.V. Club, and the New York Press. Every day is a holiday at his Web sites, www.happycrueltyday.com and www.girlsarepretty.com.

Beth Powning was born in Connecticut, and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1972, with a concentration in Creative Writing. She studied with E.L. Doctorow. She lives in New Brunswick, Canada with her artist husband. She is the author of numerous articles, essays, and short stories, and has published four books: Home: Chronicle of a North Country Life, (essays and her own photography) (1996); Shadow Child: An Apprenticeship in Love and Loss (1999); The Hatbox Letters, a bestselling novel, long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (2004); and Edge Seasons (2005). Her new novel, The Sea Captain's Wife, is due from Knopf Canada January, 2010. For more detail, go to her website, www.powning.com, where her newsletters are archived, and her photography can be enjoyed.

T.M. Pugh is an artist working to visualize a balance between high-tech society and the organic world. For more information, visit www.visual-archaeology.com.

Andrew Pyper is the author of three novels Lost Girls, The Trade Mission, and The Wildfire Season as well as Kiss Me, a collection of stories. His new novel, The Killing Circle, is published by Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Press in September.

Dawn Raffel is the author of a story collection, In the Year of Long Division (Knopf), and a novel, Carrying the Body (Scribner). She is completing a new collection.

Erik Rhey is a fiction writer and journalist originally from Wisconsin. Ironically (in the context of this essay), he is the features editor at PC Magazine. His work has been published in The Melic Review, Plum Biscuit, and Digital Life. He is a second-year MFA student at The New School in New York City, and he currently lives in Brooklyn.

Amanda Ringer is a graduate of Millsaps College and holds an M.Ed. from William Carey University and a J.D. from the University of Mississippi. She is presently working on an MFA in Creative Writing at Sewanee and pursuing an M.A. in history at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She has previously published essays, stories, and poems in The Indigo, Greybeards, The Valley Planet, The Purple and White, and The Groundhog. In her free time, Amanda enjoys running, travel, and photography. For more information, please visit www.amandaringer.com.

Mary Roach is the author of Stiff and Spook. Her writing has appeared in Salon, Wired, Outside, GQ, Discover, Vogue, and The New York Times Magazine. She lives in Oakland, California.

Matthew Roberts is a software engineer for a publisher in Northern California. He labors under the delusion he can both write and sing, though not at the same time.

Charles Roderick is a recent MFA graduate from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. As an artist who makes things, he uses the word "production" to think of what he does as an artist as multivariate, finding ways of acting that critically and outwardly engage the world with ongoing hope and finding questions worth asking. He is currently moving to Denver, Colorado, where he intends to establish an affiliate of OPENSOURCE Art — an artist space located in Champaign, IL dedicated to the education and presentation of contemporary art.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1898 and organized the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, the "Rough Riders", during the Spanish-American War. Roosevelt was elected governor of New York State in 1898 and later became President of the United States.

Stan Rose was a founding director of the Tupelo Press, a member of the Board of the Manchester Music Festival, Manchester Dance and is a member of the League of Vermont Writers. Born in Brooklyn, New York, a good portion of Stanley's youth was happily spent on his Grandfather's farm in upstate, New York. A long time resident of Vermont, his work has appeared in the Manchester Journal.

Phillip Routh: Primarily a writer of fiction (The South Carolina Review, Third Coast, Louisiana Literature), Phillip Routh has had reviews and essays in magazines such as Rain Taxi, Arts and Opinion and Fourth Genre.

Nesta Rovina was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa. She received a degree from Rhodes University, in Grahamstown. During her 11 years in Israel, she spent eight years on Kibbutz Ein Dor and received a degree in occupational therapy in Jerusalem. Rovina has lived and worked in the Bay Area since 1980 and she completed her master's degree at John F. Kennedy University in Orinda. Her essays have been publisher locally and in England. She now works as an early intervention home health therapist.

Elizabeth Royte is also the author of The Tapir's Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest. Her writings have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, The New Yorker, and numerous other magazines. She is a former Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow and she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter.

Karen Rudnicki is assistant editor at LOST. She graduated from Boston University and edits "Lost Last Month" each issue.

Helen Ruggieri has a book of short prose pieces about Japan, The Character for Woman, from www.foothillspublishing.com and a short book of poetry, Glimmer Girls, from www.mayapplepress.com.

Sharman Apt Russell is the author of Hunger: An Unnatural History; Anatomy of a Rose; When the Land Was Young; Kill the Cowboy; and Songs of the Fluteplayer, winner of the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award. She has also been featured in American Nature Writers, Writing Nature, and other anthologies. She teaches writing at Western New Mexico University and at Antioch University in Los Angeles, California.

Scott Saalman, a widely-unread writer, works, writes and parents in Jasper, Indiana. He has been published in the Southern Indiana Review, The Evansville Review and The Flying Island, plus various newspapers. His essay, Cider Days, was published in an anthology of Indiana writers that included Margaret McMullan and Kurt Vonnegut, titled Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana (Indiana Historical Society Press).

Matthew Salesses is currently in his birth land, Korea, with his fiance. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, Mid-American Review, Glimmer Train, Pleiades, Quick Fiction, among others, and has received awards from MAR, Glimmer Train, and IMPAC. He will return to Boston in 2009 to get married, edit Redivider, and finish work on a novel.

David Scott is one of 12 men to have walked on the moon. He was selected as an astronaut by NASA in 1963. He flew three space missions: first as pilot of Gemini 8 in 1966, then as command module pilot on Apollo 9 in 1969, and finally as commander of Apollo 15 in 1971. He went on to found two private companies, applying his technological expertise in the arena of commercial space, and has also acted as technical adviser on the film Apollo 13 and Tom Hanks's award-winning series, From the Earth to the Moon.

James Scott lives in Boston. His fiction has been published in One Story and American Short Fiction, among other places, and has received awards from the Wesleyan Writers' Conference, Middlebury College, the New York State Summer Writers' Institute, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference, where he was a Tennessee Williams Scholar. He has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best New American Voices anthology. He received his MFA from Emerson College, where he was the fiction editor of Redivider.

Michael Segell is an amateur percussionist and saxophone player and a professional music lover. He is the author of Standup Guy, and his writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, and Esquire, where he wrote the popular column "The Male Mind." He has received two National Magazine Award nominations for his work. He lives with his wife and children in New York City and Long Eddy, New York.

Megann Sept grew up in Montana and currently lives in Boston where she is a third-year MFA student at Emerson College. To earn money, she attempts to teach composition to 18-year-olds.

Bob Sheasley is the author of Home to Roost (Thomas Dunne Books, 2008) and has worked more than 30 years as a staff editor at daily newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Newsday, and the Allentown Morning Call. He and his wife, Suzanne, live near Valley Forge, Pa., on a farm they call Lilyfield, with 50 chickens, two pigs, two goats, six ducks, and a peacock named B.B. King.

Abby Sher is a writer and performer living in Brooklyn with her new husband, Jay. Before moving to New York, she wrote and performed with The Second City for five years. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, REDBOOK, and Everyday with Rachael Ray. A version of "The Place This Is" has also won first prize in the Memoirs Ink Personal Essay Contest. This winter, Abby will be coming out with her first young adult novel, published by Scholastic.

Jonathan Shipley is a freelance writer living in Seattle. He's written for a variety of publications including the LA Times, Boston Globe, Lexus Magazine and Diner Journal.

Jonathan Shipley lives with his young daughter in Seattle. His work has been published in various publications including The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and Fine Books & Collections Magazine. He most recently wrote about the short-lived West Coast Negro League of the 1940s for Columbia Magazine.

Adam Simon is a painter, sometime video artist and a creator of public projects. His work has been exhibited most recently at artMoving Projects, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He founded and co-directed the legendary Four Walls artists forum in Williamsburg in the 1990s and more recently, the Fine Art Adoption Network, an online service dedicated to the diversification of art ownership, commissioned by Art in General in 2005.

Heili Simons is a freelance writer based in the Seattle area and is currently working on a memoir and humor essays. She and her husband Jeff recently celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary. With her daughters both off at college, she dotes on her four dogs and two cats. She can be found at heilisimons.weebly.com.

Floyd Skloot's essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Boulevard, Southwest Review, Antioch Review, Gettysburg Review, Commonweal, Threepenny Review, Witness, and many other magazines. Two were included in The Best American Essays (1993, 2000), three others have been cited for Distinguished Essay Writing (1994, 1996, 1998), and his work has also been published in The Best American Science Writing (2000 and 2003) and in the Pushcart Prize anthology (2004). His first collection of essays, The Night-Side, was published by Story Line Press and named one of the best books of the season by New Age Journal. Skloot has also published three novels and five books of poetry, and his work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Poetry, Southern Review, Sewanee Review, Hudson Review, and elsewhere. In the Shadow of Memory won the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the PEN Award for the Art of the Essay and The Barnes & Noble Discover Award. Its sequel, A World of Light, has just appeared.

Kathryn Small writes fiction as an escape from her role as a student journalist at the University of South Wales in Sydney, Australia, where she writes on university governance, student politics, and the role of the media; this makes her a great conversationalist at dinner parties. She is a former editor of her university's newspaper, Tharunka, and is now a founding member of The Student Leader, an ambitious national student publication.

Frank Smith's writing has appeared in Newsweek, McSweeneys.net, Pindeldyboz, and Maisonneuve. He is an Assistant Editor at Swink and has an MFA from The New School. Frank lives in Brooklyn, NY but is from Ohio originally.

Russell Smith's most recent novel,Muriella Pent, was long listed for the IMPAC Dublin Prize. His 2003 pornographic novel,Diana: A Diary In The Second Person, which had been published under the name Diane Savage, has just been reissued under his own name. He lives in Toronto.Visit his website at www.russellsmith.ca.

Rebecca Solnit is the author of eight previous books, including River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the Mark Lynton History Prize. In 2003, she received a Lannan Literary Award. She lives in San Francisco.

Piera Sonnino was arrested by the Fascist police and deported to Auschwitz in October, 1944. She later transferred to Bergen-Belsen and Braunschweig. The sole survivor of a family of eight, she returned to Italy in 1950. She died in 1999.

George Sparling graduated from Iowa Wesleyan College, majoring in social science and taking many English courses. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Red Rock Review, Potomac Review, Hunger, Word Riot, Slow Trains, Rattle, Ducts, Thieves Jargon, and the Istanbul Literary Review.

Jeff Steinbrink teaches American Lit and Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College. His commentaries can be heard on public radio's Marketplace.

Kate Stence is a writer, virtual freelance business owner, and an avid endurance runner. Her poems have previously appeared in SoMA Literary Review. At the moment, she resides in New York City.

Sam Stephenson is a writer and instructor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project and W. Eugene Smith 55. He lives in Chatham County, North Carolina.

Alexander Stille is the author of Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic and Benevolence; Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism; and The Future of the Past. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and lives in New York City.

Grant Stoddard lost his sense of shame and any chance of a career in politics when he unwittingly became a gonzo sex columnist at Nerve.com. He since has made a TV pilot about being a bumbling interloper and convinced HarperCollins to publish his premature memoir, entitled Working Stiff, about the uncomfortable sexual situations to which he had subjected himself and others.

Alix Strauss is a lifestyle trend writer for national talk shows. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, Marie Claire, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, and other periodicals. She is the author of an award-winning collection of short stories, The Hoy of Funerals, and an anthology of blind date stories, Have I Got a Guy for You. Alix lives in Manhattan.

Bill Streever chairs the North Slope Science Initiative's Science Technical Advisory Panel in Alaska and serves on many related committees, including a climate change advisory panel. A biologist, he lives with his son in Anchorage, where he hikes, bikes, camps, scuba dives, and cross country skies, as often as the weather allows. He is the author of Cold, coming in July 2009 from Little, Brown and Co.

Russell Streur is a born-again dissident and a resident of Atlanta, Georgia. His works have been recently published in Half Drunk Muse, Megaera, Poems Niederngasse, Raving Dove and The Blanket (Ireland).

Dan Sturges is a classically trained actor,power-lifting, paranormal investigating resident of New York City who misses his dog named, Gus. For more on Dan go to: www.sturgesparanormal.com. Thanks to LOST Magazine for the opportunity.

Robert Sullivan is the author of The Meadowlands and A Whale Hunt, which were both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and the national bestseller, Rats. He is a contributing editor to Vogue and a contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times. He lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

Thomas Sullivan writes short essays from his home in the Pacific Northwest. His writing has recently appeared in a number of webzines and magazines, including Antipodean SF (Australia), Eleventh Transmission (Canada), The Short Humour Site (UK), Backhand Stories, Burst, Admit2, and The Externalist. He was a finalist at the 2008 Pacific Northwest Writers Association contest for his memoir Life In The Slow Lane, which recounts a hair-raising summer spent teaching driver's education. Contact the author at tmpsull@hotmail.com.

Josh Swiller: a graduate of Yale University, Josh Swiller has had a wide variety of careers: forest ranger, carpenter, slipper salesman, raw food chef, Zen monk, journalist, and teacher, among other things. In August 2005, he had successful surgery for a cochlear implant and partially recovered his hearing. Swiller now speaks often on issues facing mainstreamed deaf individuals, and works at a hospice in Brooklyn, New York, where he lives.

Nick Taggart works in the Biography, History, and Travel Division of the Columbus Metropolitan Library, where he makes professional use of his personal passion for local history and world travel. A Columbus, OH native, Nick has delivered newspapers for the Columbus Dispatch, deejayed part-time for Q-FM-96 radio, and worked for the library in various capacities for 25 years. He is a graduate of Briggs High School and Capital University. Nick lives with his wife, Michele Reinhart, in the Victorian Village neighborhood of Columbus.

Alissa Tallman is a writer, editor, and musician living in Philadelphia.

Emily Taylor's stories have appeared in Hobart (online, December 2006), Peeks & Valleys, and Dispatch. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA at The New School, where she is also a prose editor for LIT. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Justin Taylor is the editor of The Apocalypse Reader (Thunder's Mouth, May 2007), an anthology of new and selected short fiction about the end of the world. His own writing — fiction, poetry, and criticism — is archived at www.justindtaylor.net

Sharon Estill Taylor, Ph.D., is a late bloomer who was encouraged by the nuns to write stories and by her parents to be a war correspondent. In this piece, she reveals her heart's work in finding her lost father and bringing him home. Dr. Taylor teaches at Arizona State University, speaks about topics from ethics to grief and loss at professional seminars, and is looking forward to the completion of a documentary film produced by Der Spiegel TV about her search for and recovery of her father's World War II crash site. She is currently working on a children's book about loss with artist James B. Hartel, whose work is featured in this article. She divides her time between Scottsdale, AZ and her little blue houseboat in Olympia, Washington.

Shoko Tendo lives in Tokyo with her baby daughter, and works as a freelance writer. Yakuza Moon is her first book.

James Thacher, M.D. (1754-1844) was an American physician and writer, born in Barnstable, Massachusetts. From 1775 to 1783 he was a surgeon in the Revolution, in the Massachusetts 16th Regiment. Afterward, he practiced in Plymouth, Mass. until his death. Dr. Thacher was stationed at West Point in 1780 and supported the execution by George Washington of the British spy John Andr. He was also the author of Observations Relative to the Execution of Major John Andr as a Spy in 1780, American New Dispensatory, and other books. [source: Wikipedia]

Dana Thomas has been the fashion writer for Newsweek in Paris since 1995. She writes about style for The New York Times Magazine and contributes to a number of publications including The New Yorker and Harper's Bazaar.

Anthony M. Tung has been a New York City Landmarks Preservation Commissioner and an instructor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has written for New York Newsday and lectured on urban preservation throughout the world. He lives in Greenwich Village in New York City.

Townsend Twainhart has also published as Chris J. Wright. Townsend has written hundreds of articles for commercial magazines, first published in the International Game Warden in 1985. Other magazines he has written for include Wild West, True West, California Highway Patrolman, California Territorial, Inyo Album, Old West, and Gold Prospectors. He is also the author of Bill and the Purple Cow in Oz, published in 2005. He lives in Modoc County California on a small ranch near the Oregon border.

Peter Twickler is a poet and textbook editor. He holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Currently, he lives in Brooklyn, NY where he is working to develop memes to facilitate off-world colonization.

Arthur Upgren is a senior research scientist in the astronomy department at Yale, and the John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of astronomy at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He is also the author of Night has a Thousand Eyes and Many Skies. He lives in Middletown, CT.

Penn Van Isch has delivered numerous public lectures. Since his admittance to the bar, he can be found lecturing regularly at many of New York's most historic institutions such as McSorley's, Ear Inn, and Old Town.

Elijah Wald is a musician and writer whose books include Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues; Narcocorrido, about the Mexican ballads of drug trafficking and social issues; The Major of MacDougal Street (with Dave Van Ronk); and Global Minstrels: Vocals of World Music. He has been teaching at UCLA and is a frequent contributor to various newspapers and magazines. For more information, visit www.elijahwald.com.

Matt Walker is one of the world's leading science journalists. He is a senior editor at New Scientist, a magazine with a global readership of over 750,000. He joined the magazine in 1999 and has lectured at New Scientist conferences, as well as at the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

David Wallace, hailed by columnist Liz Smith as "the maestro of entertainment history," is also the author of the national bestseller Lost Hollywood, a popular history of early Hollywood, and its 2003 follow-up, Hollywoodland. Earlier in 2006 Abrams published his Dream Palaces of Hollywood's Golden Age, reviewed by Vanity Fair as "(a) ... vibrant, coffee-table book ... (providing) an all-access tour of 25 fabulous homes. Hotels, restaurants, and theaters from the 1920s to the 1940s." Mr. Wallace loves in Palm Springs, California.

Ted Weinstein is a literary agent and photographer, who has also posted a few more pictures of Stacey's liquidation.

Ted Weinstein is a literary agent and photographer who lives and cooks in San Francisco.

Alan Weisman is the author of The World Without Us and an award-winning journalist whose reports have appeared in Harpers, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Discover, and on NPR, among others. A former contributing editor to The Los Angeles Times Magazine, he is a senior radio producer for Homelands Productions and teaches international journalism at the University of Arizona.

A. M. Whittaker is a professional educational program planner and itinerary designer for curriculum-based tours throughout the United States and Canada. She is a native New Yorker who currently lives in Alexandria, VA.

Michelle Wildgen's debut novel, You're Not You, was one of People Magazine's Top Ten Books of 2006 and will be available in paperback in August. She is the editor of the anthology Food & Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, Best New American Voices 2004, Best Food Writing 2004, TriQuarterly, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She is a senior editor at Tin House Magazine and editor at Tin House Books. www.michellewildgen.com www.tinhouse.com

Philip Lee Williams is the author of 11 published books, most recently A Distant Flame (St. Martin's Press, 2004), winner of the Michael Shaara Award. Williams lives near Athens, Georgia, with his wife and daughter, and he teaches creative writing at the University of Georgia.

Robley Wilson has been a Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction and a Nicholl Fellow in Screenwriting. He was for some 30 years editor of the North American Review, a literary quarterly which twice won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. His novels are The Victim's Daughter, Splendid Omens, and The World Still Melting and his most recent story collection is The Book of Lost Fathers. He lives in Florida with his wife, fiction writer Susan Hubbard, and their five cats. He was the first Guest Fiction Editor of LOST.

Michelle Wilson graduated from Bennington College with a BA in Comparative Literature. It has been 1,795 days since she's been bitten by a bedbug.

Charles Wohlforth is a lifelong Alaska resident and author of the new book The Fate of Nature: Rediscovering Our Ability to Rescue the Earth, as well as The Whale and the Supercomputer, winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize, and many other books and articles about nature, history, politics, and travel in the North. An avid cross-country skier, Wohlforth lives during the winter in Anchorage with his wife, Barbara, and their four children. In the summer they live off the grid on a remote Kachemak Bay shore reachable only by boat. Wohforth began his career as a reporter for a small-town newspaper. As a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News he worked months in the field covering the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Learn more online at www.fateofnature.com.

Frank Womble grew up in Rich Square, North Carolina. He lives in Suffolk, Virginia on Knott's Creek with his wife Gloria. This is his third appearance in LOST magazine.

Jon Yang is no stranger to computers and the games people play on them. His first book, The Rough Guide to Blogging, is forthcoming this fall from Penguin UK. His own musings can be found in the blogosphere at www.hyperwest.net/anachronic. Jon lives and writes on the sunny beaches of San Diego, California.

Bill Yenne is the author of numerous books on history and popular culture, as well as on aviation and military technology. He has also written several novels. He lives in San Francisco.

Brenda Yun is a travel and freelance writer, writing center director, and high school English teacher in Honolulu, Hawaii. She enjoys traveling around the world and, when home, walking her pug Iris. "Saying Goodbye" is part of a larger memoir that deals exactly with loss — more specifically, three losses in her life: the loss of a boyfriend, friend, and family member. This is her first published nonfiction essay.

One Ring Zero (www.oneringzero.com) is led by Michael Hearst and Joshua Camp. The band has released seven albums, including their acclaimed literary collaboration As Smart As We Are, which features songs with lyrics contributed by such authors as Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, Neil Gaiman, and Denis Johnson, among others. Their most recent album is titled Planets, and is a collection of new compositions to represent the solar system and beyond. One Ring Zero has performed throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, and has had its music featured in films, television, and NPR programming including This American Life, Fresh Air, and Morning Edition.

Claudia Zuluaga's fiction has been published in Linnaean Street and is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine. She lives in New York City, where she teaches freshman composition, and is finishing a novel entitled Music For The Future.

Todd Zuniga, a Pushcart Prize nominee, is the founding editor of Opium Magazine and the editor of ESPN Video Games. His work has appeared in print in Small Spiral Notebook, Sweet Fancy Moses, and online at McSweeney's and elimae.com.