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 grew up in Texas and now teaches English at Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts. A few years ago, he received a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of South Carolina. More recently, he spends his spare time teaching himself to write creative nonfiction. Before this piece, you haven't seen his work in any of the journals you like.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wayne Curtis has written about travel, history, cocktails, and architecture for The Atlantic Monthly, Preservation, American Heritage, Canadian Geographic, American Scholar, and The New York Times. He's the author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in 10 Cocktails, which is due out from Crown in July 2006. He lives in Maine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 W. Hirshfeld is 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, published in 2006 by Walker Books.

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.

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 two books: Ten Point and Mississippi in Africa (the latter now available in paperback from Gotham Books). He has contributed to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; The Los Angeles Times; Washington Post Magazine; Smithsonian; Preservation; Outside; and The Oxford American. He lives near Bolton, Mississippi, and his website is www.mississippiinafrica.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.

Peter 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

K.C. Mason lives in St. Louis, Missouri. She works for a local weekly newspaper and is a journalism student at Washington University. You may find her blog at www.the-girl-friday.com.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 managing editor at LOST, a graduate of Boston University, and a former literary agent. She is fascinated by lost masterpieces, chief among them the Vermeers stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Simon Dubnow's missing volume from his History of The Jews, still buried somewhere in the Riga ghetto.

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.

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.

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.

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 lives on an island in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and young daughter. He works full-time for a theater program as publisher and has written freelance for the L.A. Times, Boston Globe, Lexus Magazine, and Swindle, amongst others. He maintains a blog (http://jonathanshipley.blogspot.com) and is currently at work on a fictional interpretation of the life and times of Thomas "Boston" Corbett.

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.

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.

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.