Phillip Lopate is the author of three personal essay collections, two novels, two poetry collections, a memoir of his teaching experiences, and a collection of his movie criticism. He has edited the following anthologies, and his essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, The Paris Review, Harper's, Vogue, Esquire, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, and New York University. He currently holds the John Cranford Adams Chair at HofstraUniversity, and also teaches in the MFA graduate programs at Columbia, the New School and Bennington.

Minal Hajratwala was born in San Francisco and raised in New Zealand and suburban Michigan. In the course of researching Leaving India, she spent seven years traveling the world and interviewed over seventy-five members of her extended family. A poet and performer, she worked as an editor and reporter for eight years at the San Jose Mercury News.

Page Stegner was born in Salt Lake City in 1937. He attended Stanford University, where he received his B.A. in history and his Ph.D. in American literature. From 1967 to 1995 he was a professor of American literature and director of the creative writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A prolific author and editor, he recently published The Collected Letters of Wallace Stegner.

Tom Curwen is staff writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times. He was editor of the Outdoors section, a writer for the features section and deputy editor of the Book Review. He has been honored by the American Association of Sunday and Features Editors for three pieces he did for Outdoors on caving with nature writer Barbara Hurd, on Alaskan bush pilots and the annual migration of sand hill cranes to the Bosque del Apache. He has a master's degree in Creative Writing from USC and was a recipient of a 1991 Academy of American Poets prize. In 2002, he received a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for mental health journalism.

David L. Ulin is book editor of the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, LA Weekly, Los Angeles, and National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."

Jenny Price is a writer whose work focuses on L.A. environment. Author of Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America, she has published in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, L.A. Weekly, Audubon, Believer, and GOOD, and is a regular contributor to the "Native Intelligence" column on LA Observed. She has written often about the Los Angeles River and gives frequent tours. She has a Ph.D. in history from Yale University, and has been a Research Scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women since 1999. She is currently working on a new book, Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A.

Diane Ackerman is the author of several works of nonfiction including, most recently, An Alchemy of Mind, a poetics of the brain based on the latest neuroscience; Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden; Deep Play, which considers play, creativity, and our need for transcendence; A Slender Thread, about her work as a crisis line counselor; The Rarest of the Rare and The Moon by Whale Light, in which she explores the plight and fascination of endangered animals; A Natural History of Love; On Extended Wings, her memoir of flying; and the bestseller A Natural History of the Senses. Her poetry has been published in leading literary journals and various anthologies. She also writes nature books for children: Animal Sense; Monk Seal Hideaway; and Bats: Shadows in the Night. She is co-editor of a Norton anthology, The Book of Love. Ms. Ackerman has received many prizes and awards and she also has the rare distinction of having a molecule named after her --dianeackerone.

Mary Gordon is the author of the novels Spending, The Company of Women, The Rest of Life, Final Payments, The Other Side, and Pearl, as well as the memoir The Shadow Man. She has received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 1997 O. Henry Award for Best Short Story. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.

Steve Coll is a writer for The New Yorker and author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. He is president of the New America Foundation, a public policy institute in Washington. Previously he served, over twenty years, as a reporter, foreign correspondent and ultimately as managing editor of the Washington Post. He is also the author of On the Grand Trunk Road, The Deal of the Century, and The Taking of Getty Oil. Coll received a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism and the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for outstanding international print reporting and the 2000 Overseas Press Club Award for best magazine reporting from abroad. Ghost Wars, published in 2004, received the Pulitzer for general non-fiction and the Arthur Ross award for the best book on international affairs.

Pico Iyer is the author of six works of nonfiction and two novels, including The Open Road: The Global Journey of the XIVth Dalai Lama. He has covered the Tibetan question for Time, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications for more than twenty years. He lives in suburban Japan.

Born in San Jose in 1979, Caille Millner was first published at age sixteen, and in 2002 she was named one of Columbia Journalism Review's Ten Young Writers on the Rise. A graduate of Harvard University, she is the coauthor of Doubleday's The Promise: How One Woman Made Good on Her Extraordinary Pact to Send a Classroom of First Graders to College. She's received the Rona Jaffe Fiction Award as well as prizes from the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts, the National Press Club, and the New York Black Journalists Association. Currently on the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle, she has also written for Newsweek, Essence, The Washington Post, and The Fader.