Jim Malusa has reported on assignments for The Discovery Channel and Natural History, including travels to Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, the Atacama Desert in Chile, and Three Gorges Dam in China. A botanist and a lover of maps, his specialty is the biogeography of the southern Arizona flora. He chronicled his bicycle journey to six continents in the book Into Thick Air. Malusa lives in Tucson with his wife and their two children.

Debra Marquart is the coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at Iowa State University. She is the author of Horizontal World, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, and the poetry collections Everything’s a Verb and From Sweetness. Marquart’s essays have appeared in Best American Essays, and she has won the Shelby Foote Nonfiction Prize (Faulkner Society), the Writer’s Digest Nonfiction Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a PEN USA award. She lives in Ames, Iowa.

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Jeff Martin is a retail veteran and the author of The Customer is Always Wrong. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Cris Mazza’s first novel, How to Leave a Country, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for book-length fiction. Some of her other notable other titles include Your Name Here: ___, Waterbaby, and Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? She was also co-editor of Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction, an anthology of women’s fiction. Mazza’s fiction has been reviewed numerous times in publications such as the New York Times Book Review, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times Book Review.

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Tom McCarthy is an artist and the author of several articles, essays, and books, including Remainder and Tintin and the Secret of Literature. He lives in London.

Ed McClanahan is the author of several books, including the memoir O the Clear Moment and The Natural Man, and his writing has appeared in Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Playboy. McClanahan has taught English and creative writing at Oregon State University, Stanford University, the University of Montana, and the University of Kentucky. He and his wife live in Lexington, Kentucky.

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Biographer and historian Ken McGoogan is the award-winning author of eight books, including three on exploration, such as Race to the Polar Sea: The Heroic Adventures of Elisha Kent Kane. He ranges between Tasmania and the High Arctic from Toronto, Canada, where he teaches nonfiction and lives with his artist-wife, Sheena Fraser McGoogan.

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Jenny McPhee is the author of the novels Man of No Moon, No Ordinary Matter, and The Center of Things. She lives in New York City.

Peter Charles Melman was born in New York and raised in Louisiana, where he earned his Ph.D. in English-Creative Writing from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is the author of the novel Landsman.

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