Paul Theroux began his travels after graduating from the University of Massachusetts in 1963. He taught briefly in Urbino, Italy, before joining the Peace Corps in Malawi, Africa, and eventually ended up teaching English at the Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. In 1971, he gave up teaching to write full time and England became his 17-year, on-again, off-again home.

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.

Larry McMurtry received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1985 novel Lonesome Dove and an Academy Award and Golden Globe for his screen adaptation (co-written with Diana Ossana) of the film Brokeback Mountain.

Born in Alabama in 1945, Tobias Wolff traveled the country with his mother, finally settling in Washington State, where he grew up. He attended the Hill School in Pennsylvania until he was expelled for repeated failures in mathematics in his final year, whereupon he joined the Army. He spent four years as a paratrooper, including a tour in Vietnam. Following his discharge he attended Oxford University in England, where he received a First Class Honours degree in English in 1972. Returning to the United States, he worked variously as a reporter, a night watchman, a waiter and a high school teacher before receiving a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University in 1975. He is currently Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the Humanities at Stanford.

Father Gregory J. Boyle, S.J. is a Jesuit priest who is Founder/Executive Director of Jobs for a Future/Homeboy Industries, an employment referral center and economic development program located in Boyle Heights, a community with arguably the highest concentration of gang activity in Los Angeles.

In 1992, as a response to the civil unrest in Los Angeles, Father Boyle formed Homeboy Industries, to create businesses that provide training, work experience, and above all, the opportunity for rival gang members to work side by side.

Father Boyle was born in Los Angeles. He received his BA in English from Gonzaga University, an MA in English from Loyola Marymount University, a Master of Divinity from the Weston School of Theology, and an STM degree from the Jesuit School of Theology. Before becoming Pastor of Dolores Mission (1986-1992), Father Boyle taught at Loyola High School and worked with Christian Base Communities in Cochabamba, Bolivia. He has also served as Chaplain of the Islas Marias Penal colony in Mexico and Folsom Prison. He is currently a member of the State Commission on Juvenile Justice, Crime and Delinquency Prevention, and serves on the National Youth Gang Center Advisory Board.

Since her breakout performance in Urban Cowboy Debra Winger has been regarded as one of the screen's finest actresses. Her roles in Shadowlands, An Officer and a Gentleman and Terms of Endearment garnered wide praise and three Academy Award nominations.

Donna Foote is a freelance journalist who has spent most of her career at Newsweek Magazine where she covered a range of issues and personalities both here and abroad. While based in London she reported on the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto, tensions in the Middle East, the troubles in Northern Ireland, Princess Diana and the British Royal Family, and UK politics and culture. While Deputy Bureau Chief in Los Angeles, she covered the Rodney King riots and both the criminal and civil trials of OJ Simpson. She also wrote extensively on education, health, and justice issues.

Honor Moore is the author of three collections of poems: Red Shoes, Darling, and Memoir. She is the editor of Amy Lowell: Selected Poems for the Library of America and co-editor of At the Stray Dog Cabaret, A Book of Russian Poems translated by Paul Schmidt. Her biography, The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, was a New York Times Notable Book in 1996, and she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 for The Bishop's Daughter. Her play Mourning Pictures, was produced on Broadway and published in The New Women's Theatre: Ten Plays by Contemporary American Women, which she edited. Moore is also a theatre critic for The New York Times. She teaches in the graduate writing program at the New School and Columbia.

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.

Katha Pollitt, the author of Virginity or Death!, is a poet, essayist, and columnist for The Nation. She won the National Book Critic Circle Award for her first collection of poetry, Antarctic Traveller, as well as two National Magazine Awards for her essays and criticism.