Anne Taylor Fleming is a nationally recognized journalist and CNN NewsNight with Aaron Brown contributor. She is a regular on-camera essayist for the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and the author of Motherhood Deferred: A Woman’s Journey. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, New Yorker, Vogue, and Redbook. She has been a radio commentator for CBS and a TV commentator for NBC.

After 20 years in San Francisco's Mission District, writer Jim Paul moved to the wilderness of southern Arizona. His time in the desert has changed his writing, which in the city had been creative nonfiction (such as Medieval in LA). Last year he completed a novel, Elsewhere in the Land of Parrots, a romance about a flock of parrots native to Ecuador. He began his writing life in poetry, publishing in The New Yorker at 26 (a rather gloomy atmospheric poem about the autumnal equinox, as he characterizes it). He was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford. After his first nonfiction book, Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Paul lives with the writer Michelle Grijalva and various animals, wild and domestic.