Travel Writer Profiles

Laura Kiniry is a freelance journalist specializing in travel, food, and culture. Born on the East Coast, she still considers herself a Jersey Girl (South Jersey, near Philadelphia), despite making her home in San Francisco for the last three decades. She writes regularly for such publications Smithsonian, Atlas Obscura, Conde Nast Traveler, and VIA, and…

Rosie Bell is a location-independent freelance writer, editor, and author of Escape to Self. She writes for publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including Condé Nast Traveler, BBC Worklife, Travel + Leisure, National Geographic Traveller, Atlas Obscura, Lonely Planet, Hemispheres, and Fodor’s Travel. She has appeared as a travel expert on the likes of ABC News, NBC News,…

James Michael Dorsey is an award-winning author, explorer, and lecturer who has spent three decades researching remote tribal cultures in fifty-six countries. His separate passion is working as a cetacean naturalist on whale boats in California and Mexico, a parallel career he has pursued for three decades. These combined journeys have resulted in over 800…

Shahnaz Habib is the author of Airplane Mode, a cultural history of travel, and the translator of the Malayalam novel Jasmine Days, which won the JCB Prize 2018.  How did you get started traveling? When I was a kid, my family would often take long-distance train journeys around India. We lived in the south Indian…

Megan Harlan is an American travel writer, essayist, and fiction writer who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and Brittany, France. She is the author most recently of Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays (University of Georgia Press), winner of both the AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction and the Independent Book Publishers Gold…

Oliver Smith is an award winning travel journalist based in London. For 10 years he traveled the world working for Lonely Planet Magazine. Today his work can be found in various outlets – FT Weekend, The Times and National Geographic Traveller – he also writes a regular walking column for Waitrose Weekend. Oliver has been named Travel Writer of the Year on…

Zoey Goto is a journalist and author covering culture and travel, all things Americana, vintage style, musical icons and mid-century pop culture. She is the US travel specialist for The Times and a regular contributor to National Geographic Traveller, plus writes for titles including BBC Travel, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Wallpaper, Lonely Planet, Vogue, Architectural Digest,…

Jonathan (Jon) DeHart is a Tokyo-based writer focused on travel, culture and society in Asia. He is the author of two guidebooks for Moon Travel Guides (Moon Japan and Moon Tokyo, Kyoto and Hiroshima) and a journalist with more than 500 published articles. His work has been selected for various “best of” lists by the…

Aaron Millar is an award-winning travel writer, broadcaster and author. He contributes regularly to The Times of London, National Geographic Traveller (UK), Wanderlust, and many other international publications. He was the 2014 and 2017 British Guild of Travel Writers Travel Writer of the Year, and the 2019 & 2020 US IPW Travel Writer of the…

Bart Schaneman is an editor at The Daily by Outdoor Retailer, focused on business news for the outdoors industry. He also covers the Colorado literary scene for the Boulder Weekly. Prior to that he was on the cannabis beat for MJBizDaily, the editor in chief of the Scottsbluff Star-Herald as well as national editor of…

Mike Nixon is an author, world traveler, and entrepreneur who has been traversing the globe for nearly two decades. Life Travel And The People In Between is his debut memoir, a story that explores his travels as an exchange student, Peace Corps Volunteer, NGO worker, U.S. Navy sailor, and adventurer who loves off-the-grid travel. Born…

Claire Polders is a Dutch author of fiction and nonfiction. Her latest of five books is A Whale in Paris (Atheneum, Simon & Schuster), a historical novel for younger readers. Her short stories and essays have been widely published in literary journals, including TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, and Electric Literature. She’s currently finishing a…

Marlin Darrah is perhaps the world’s most traveled filmmaker.  His 45 years of award-winning production experience have taken him to more than 140 countries worldwide, yielding more than 90 documentary, travel-adventure films, and suspense-thriller movies. He’s co-written, produced and directed three dramatic feature films – “Monsoon Wife,”  “Amazon Queen”  and “An Egypt Affair.” Together these movies have won 170…

Tharik Hussain is an author and travel writer specializing in Muslim heritage and culture. His debut book, Minarets in the Mountains; A Journey into Muslim Europe won the British Guild of Travel Writers’ Adele Evans Award for Travel Narrative Book of the Year. Hussain is also a guidebook author for Lonely Planet, and has written guides…

Nguher Zaki is a multidisciplinary creative with a penchant for storytelling and traveling. As a documentary photographer, she has worked with local and international organizations covering social issues. She has also documented political stories in Nigeria and authored two books in this regard. Nguher is currently on a long-term slow travel experience, exploring West Africa…

Ketti Wilhelm writes the sustainable travel blog TiltedMap.com, which helps people minimize their environmental footprint, support locals with their travel budget, and live more sustainably at home. (She’s a former freelance journalist who decided to go even more rogue and publish independently.) Ketti has a Master’s Degree in Sustainable Business and Energy, and has lived…

Michael McCarthy is the author of two dozen travel books. He has previously been a radio news reporter and editor, a freelance journalist for many newspapers and magazines, an editorial columnist, and videographer. Hundreds of his travel articles have appeared in many Canadian and American newspapers. Michael has traveled to nearly 50 countries, lived for…

Sarah Stodola is the author of two books — The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach (2022), and Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors (2015). She has written for The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Daily Beast, the BBC, CNN, Slice, and many others, and is…

Kat Lewis is a fiction writer and video game narrative designer based in Seoul. Her work has appeared in Off Assignment, TriQuarterly, and The Rumpus. In 2018, she was a Fulbright Creative Arts grantee in South Korea. She is currently at work on a novel about the Black experience in Korea. How did you get…

Rick Antonson has traveled on trains in thirty-five countries and is co-author of a book of railway stories, Whistle Posts West: Railway Tales From British Columbia, Alberta, and Yukon. Rick is the former president and CEO of Tourism Vancouver, and served as chair of the board for Destinations International, based in Washington, D.C., and vice…

Nora Dunn (aka The Professional Hobo) is one of the original digital nomads and lifestyle travel bloggers, having started her full-time travel lifestyle in 2006. Specializing in slow travel, she has lived in and traveled through over 70 countries while working remotely. She combines her expertise as a former Certified Financial Planner with her lifestyle travel…

Nick Hunt is the author of three travel books about walking and Europe – Outlandish, Where the Wild Winds Are and Walking the Woods and the Water – a work of ‘gonzo ornithology’, The Parakeeting of London, and a collection of short fiction, Loss Soup and Other Stories. His articles and features have been published…

Emily Pennington is Outside’s parks and travel columnist. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Condé Nast Traveler, Lonely Planet, Adventure Journal, REI, Passport Magazine, and Backpacker, to name a few. She’s visited nearly every national park in the U.S., and her new book Feral: Losing Myself and Finding My Way…

Andrew X. Pham is an independent journalist and author. At various periods of his life, he has worked as an aircraft engineer, researcher, technical writer, startup founder, farmer, food critic, pizza chef, bungalow builder, small business owner, literary panelist, teacher, and an MFA faculty. He is a Whiting Writer and a Guggenheim Fellow. He is…

Bob Payne is a freelance travel writer who has visited more than 140 countries and had his work appear in such publications as Outside, Men’s Journal, Islands, and Bon Appétit. He was a long-time contributing editor at Conde Nast Traveler, where he believes he remains the only one of their writers to put the cost…

Bruce Kirkby is an adventurer, writer and photographer. With journeys spanning more than eighty countries and thirty years, Kirkby’s accomplishments include the first modern crossing of Arabia’s Empty Quarter by camel, a descent of Ethiopia’s Blue Nile Gorge by raft, a sea kayak traverse of Borneo’s northern coast and a coast-to-coast Icelandic trek. A columnist…

Travis Levius is a freelance travel writer and content creator loosely based between London and Atlanta. He’s written for several publications and outlets including Travel + Leisure, TIME, Condé Nast Traveler, Departures, CNN Travel, AFAR and Forbes Travel Guide, and is a guidebook author of Lonely Planet’s Experiences: London (2022). Travis is also the creator…

Matt Kepnes runs the award-winning travel site nomadicmatt.com, which helps people travel the world on a budget. He’s the author of the NYT bestseller How to Travel the World on $50 a Day and the travel memoir Ten Years a Nomad. His writings and advice have been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian,…

Heather Greenwood Davis is a contributing editor/on-air storyteller for National Geographic, a feature writer/columnist for The Globe and Mail, the travel expert on CTV’s national talk program The Social and co-host of Get, Set, Go! on CHCH TV. She is the first and only Black woman to write travel columns for both national newspapers, and…

Stuart McDonald is an Australian travel writer based in Indonesia. He cofounded Travelfish in 2004, and has been writing about the region since 1997. He currently lives in Bali with his partner Samantha, their two kids, and their dog Skye Govinda. How did you get started traveling? I started traveling early, off the back of…

Tim Bascom is author of a novel set in the Philippines, two collections of essays, and two prize-winning memoirs about years spent in East Africa as a youth: Chameleon Days and Running to the Fire.  His essays have won editor’s prizes at The Missouri Review and Florida Review, and have also been selected for the…

Anne P. Beatty’s essays on her experiences in the Peace Corps in Nepal, along with various other pursuits related to traveling and teaching, appear in the American Scholar, Salon, Shenandoah, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. Her work was listed among The Best American Essays 2019 Notable Essays. She lives with her husband and three children in…

C.L. Stambush is the author of Untethered: A Woman’s Search for Self on the Edge of India—A Travel Memoir. She lived in Europe, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia for six years, traveling by foot, train, truck, bus, boat, camel, donkey cart, and motorcycle. After returning to the United States, she was recruited to…

John Krich was raised in New York City, lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 30 years before 20 years in Asia, some working as a feature writer and food columnist for the Asian Wall Street Journal. He now calls Lisbon, Portugal his home in expat exile. His books include Bump City: Winners and…

Daniel Stables is a freelance travel writer based in the United Kingdom. He has authored or contributed to more than 30 travel books on destinations across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, for Rough Guides and DK Eyewitness, among other publishers. He also writes travel articles for publications including BBC Travel, National Geographic Traveller, and Lonely…

JoAnna Haugen is a writer, speaker, solutions advocate, and founder of Rooted. Early in her travel writing career, she published hundreds of articles in more than 60 print and online commercial publications, worked in editorial roles for several B2B travel publications, and assisted dozens of travel brands with content marketing. Over the last several years,…

Carey Baraka is a writer from Kisumu, Kenya. His writing about literary culture, food, travel, books, and politics, among other things, has appeared on TripSavvy, A Long House, Rest of World, Literary Hub, the Johannesburg Review of Books, Electric Literature, Serious Eats, Foreign Policy, and Gay Magazine, among other places. He is working on his…

Andrea Sachs majored in art history at Tufts University, where she wrote about arts and culture for the school paper — mainly to get free food and drinks. She received a master’s degree in journalism at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism (where she learned that journalists should never accept freebies). In between, she lived in…

Jan Morris was one of the most celebrated travel writers of the twentieth century. She was known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, including Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City. Born James Humphry Morris, she published under her birth name until…

Graduating from Sacred Heart University with a bachelor’s in Marketing and Global Studies, Dana Givens has always had an interest in exploring different cultures and countries. She has worked for many brands as a copywriter and content creator for digital media platforms and notable brands. As a journalist, she has been published in top-tier publications…

Craig Mod is a writer and photographer who has called Japan home for most of the last twenty years. He has written for Eater, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, WIRED Magazine, California Sunday Magazine, and others. He is the author of the books Kissa by Kissa (2020), Koya Bound: Eight days on the Kumano Kodo…

Lauren Keith is a freelance travel writer and guidebook author whose work has been published in Lonely Planet, Smithsonian Magazine, Al Jazeera, Atlas Obscura, AFAR, the Independent and elsewhere. She worked for several years as Lonely Planet’s editor for Middle East and North Africa, and she continues to travel the region widely, from scouting out…

Teresa Lynn Hasan-Kerr is an AmeriCorps VISTA for Literacy Mid-South, which aims to eradicate illiteracy in Memphis. She has a background in teaching ESOL and writing travel lit. Her work has been in Lonely Planet, Culture Trip, Morocco World News, Coldnoon, Past-Ten, Refinery29, and Wry Times. How did you get started traveling? I moved a…

Ash Bhardwaj is a travel writer and filmmaker from Britain, who tells stories of adventure, history and current affairs. He is a Telegraph Travel columnist, and the co-founder and presenter of The First Mile podcast. He has reported for the BBC World Service and Radio 4; written for publications including British GQ, The Sunday Times, and…

Joe Henley is a freelance writer, scriptwriter, author and musician. Originally from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Joe moved to Taiwan straight out of journalism school in 2005. Since then, he’s reported from Taiwan, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, China, Cuba, and various other locales around the world for print, online, and television media. His latest book, Migrante, is…

Andy Trincia is an American freelance writer and editor based in Romania. Having visited nearly 60 countries, he writes mainly about travel, with special focus on Eastern Europe. He recently edited three European history books, and a travel guide focused on Jewish history in Romania. Before embarking on a lengthy career in corporate communications and…

Mag Dimond has been a world traveler since her mother took her to live in Italy from ages eleven to fourteen. Now in her seventies, she continues traveling, the most recent adventure being to Machu Picchu and the Amazon jungle. She is a classical pianist, photographer, gourmet cook, animal rescuer, and philanthropist. Her travel book…

Gerry O’Shea’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, National Geographic Traveler, Men’s Journal, AFAR, Hemispheres, Roads & Kingdoms, and several other publications. ­He has surfed and cycled six continents, climbed mountains in East Africa, and fallen down hills in Laos. He once slept through an Indonesian earthquake and twice has been robbed by…

A former entertainment reporter, James Wong began travel writing in 2014. From 2016 to 2018 he wrote for Singapore Airlines’ in-flight publication, Silverkris. After that, he freelanced for titles across Asia including The Japan Times, Time Out: Hong Kong, Time Out: Singapore, Esquire Singapore and Esquire Malaysia. Today he is based in New York City…

Jason Cochran is the author of Here Lies America (Well Hall Books) and Editor-in-Chief of Frommers.com. He has twice been awarded the top honors in the Lowell Thomas Awards for his travel guide books and has been a regular writer for Entertainment Weekly, Travel + Leisure, USA Today and many others. A graduate of the…

Angelique Stevens is Six-Nations Native American living in Upstate New York, where she teaches creative writing, literature of genocide, and race literatures. Her nonfiction can be found in or is forthcoming in LitHub, The New England Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and a number of anthologies. She has been chosen for several writing awards and fellowships,…

Sebastian Modak is a freelance travel writer and multimedia journalist based in New York City. In 2019, he was selected to be the New York Times 52 Places Traveler, which saw him traveling to and reporting from all the destinations on the Times’ “52 Places to Go” list. Before that, he spent about three years…

James Kaiser is an award-winning travel writer and photographer whose work has appeared on the cover of National Geographic. He has written bestselling guidebooks to some of America’s most popular national parks, including Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Acadia, Zion, and Joshua Tree. James has also created a site featuring an unusual natural phenomenon, the Yosemite Firefall. How…

Monisha Rajesh is a British journalist and travel writer whose writing has appeared in Time magazine, The New York Times, The Guardian, Vanity Fair and The Sunday Telegraph, in which she wrote a monthly column about traveling the world by train. Her first book Around India in 80 Trains, was named one of The Independent’s top ten books on India, and her second book…

Henry Wismayer is a writer of non-fiction essays, commentary and features, with a particular focus on travel. His work has appeared in over 80 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post. He lives in South London with his partner and two children, How did you get started traveling? My…

Jeremy Seal writes non-fiction books which combine travel and history, often taking the culture of Turkey – a life-long interest – as their inspiration. His books include: A Fez of the Heart: Travels Around Turkey in Search of a Hat (Picador, 1995); The Snakebite Survivors Club: Travels Among Serpents (Picador, 1999); The Wreck at Sharpnose…

Alex Perry is the author of The Good Mothers, The Rift, Falling Off The Edge, and Lifeblood, as well as several ebooks. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, Outside, Harper’s, The Guardian, TIME, Newsweek, Roads and Kingdoms, The Sunday Times magazine and others. Alex’s journalism has won a number of awards, and his…

Maggie Downs is an award-winning writer based in Palm Springs, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Palm Springs Life, and McSweeney’s, among other publications. It has been anthologized in The Lonely Planet Travel Anthology: True Stories from the World’s Best Writers and Best Women’s Travel Writing. Her first book is Braver…

Matthew Félix is an author, traveler, and podcast host. Matthew’s With Open Arms: Short Stories of Misadventures in Morocco has topped the Amazon Africa category, as well as the Morocco one. The 2019 BookLife Prize called Matthew’s debut novel about a young Spaniard’s awakening to his intuition, A Voice Beyond Reason, “(a) highly crafted gem.”…

Susan Purvis has taught wilderness medicine to everyone from the Secret Service to Sherpa guides in Nepal. Purvis and her search-and-rescue dog Tasha, whom she trained to save lives on the most avalanche-prone slopes in Colorado, launched dozens of rescue missions and received congressional recognition for their role in avalanche search and rescue. Purvis’ work…

Elaine Glusac is a Chicago-based freelance writer who specializes in travel. She’s a regular contributor to the New York Times travel section and writes frequently for AFAR, the Chicago Tribune, National Geographic Traveler and Virtuoso Life. Her work has also appeared, in Conde Nast Traveler, Departures, Smithsonian.com and the Wall Street Journal. In 2019, she…

A former reporter at the Seattle Times, Christopher Solomon has been a freelance writer since 2002, writing for the New York Times Sunday Magazine; National Geographic; Outside (where he’s a contributing editor); Runner’s World (ditto); and other publications. He was the 2018 Lowell Thomas Travel Writer of the Year, as selected by the Society of…

Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade, the novel What We’ve Lost is Nothing, and No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us. Over the last decade, Snyder has been an outspoken journalist on issues of domestic violence…

Tim Hannigan is a travel and history writer from Cornwall in the far west of the UK. His first book, Murder in the Hindu Kush (2011), about the ill-fated Victorian explorer George Hayward, was shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. His second book, Raffles and the British Invasion of Java (2012), won…

Mark Adams is the author of bestselling books Turn Right at Machu Picchu, which Men’s Journal selected as one of the “Fifty Greatest Adventure Books of All Time,” Tip of the Iceberg and Meet Me in Atlantis. His acclaimed history Mr. America was named one of the year’s best books by the Washington Post. His work appears in many national publications, including GQ, Rolling Stone, Outside and the New…

Author of fifty-plus travel guides and many articles, Carolyn McCarthy seeks out original stories, explores environmental issues, and works to create meaningful connections with local cultures. Specialized in remote travel, she has explored the Amazon Basin via dugout canoe and solo hiked Patagonia to write Lonely Planet’s Trekking in the Patagonian Andes. Before that, she…

Camille T. Dungy was named a Guggenheim fellow in 2019. She is the author the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado…

Rory Nugent is a writer and an explorer. His work examines the deep shadows cast by traditions gone missing, or about to go missing. His findings have appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world, and in his three books: Down at the Docks; Drums Along the Congo: On the Trail of Mokele-Mbembe, the Last Living Dinosaur;…

Lebawit Lily Girma is an award-winning writer and photographer who ditched her legal career for the road in 2008. Born in Ethiopia and raised in Cote d’Ivoire, she’s a serial expat who studied on three continents and speaks four languages. Lily’s work, focusing on all things culture and sustainable travel in the Caribbean, has been…

Shafik Meghji is an award-winning travel writer and journalist based in South London. A Latin America and Asia specialist, he has co-authored more than 35 guidebooks, including Rough Guides to Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Chile, India, Laos, and Mexico. He writes for print and digital publications around the world, including BBC Travel, the Guardian and Time…

Oneika Raymond is a Travel Channel host and on-air travel expert for NBC New York and CTV Canada.  A bona fide travel junkie, her adventures have taken her to over 110 countries on 6 continents. As the author of the award-winning travel blog “Oneika the Traveller”, Oneika is dedicated to inspiring people of color to see…

Tim Mackintosh-Smith is an Arabist, historian and traveler. Named by Newsweek as “one of the twelve finest travel writers of the past hundred years,” Tim, according to the New York Times, “seems incapable of writing a dull sentence, and in him the scholar, the linguist and the storyteller swap hats with marvelous speed.” Born in…

Leon Logothetis is a global adventurer, motivational speaker and philanthropist. He used to be a broker in the city of London, where he felt uninspired and chronically depressed. He gave it all up for a life on the road. This radical life change was inspired by the movie The Motorcycle Diaries. Leon has visited more…

Matthew Teller is a writer, journalist and documentary-maker. He writes for the BBC and other global media, produces and presents for BBC Radio, and is a long-standing travel author for Rough Guides. He is currently writing a book about Jerusalem, to be published in 2020 by New Internationalist. He tweets at @matthewteller and maintains a blog…

Faith Adiele is a travel memoirist and founder of the nation’s only writing workshop for travelers of color. Meeting Faith, her account of becoming Thailand’s first Black Buddhist Nun, won the PEN Open Book Award. She is a Senior Editor for Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel and co-editor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology.…

Adam Valen Levinson is the author of The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah (W.W. Norton, 2017), dubbed “Eat, Pray, Laugh” by The New York Times. He’s an affiliate of the Middle East Institute, and a Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, where he studies senses of humor as a key to cross…

Celeste Brash has contributed to around 75 titles for Lonely Planet, and her work has appeared in many other publications including BBC Travel, Parents, Travel & Leisure, and the Travelers’ Tales anthologies. She’s studied Buddhism in Thailand, danced in a French Polynesian dance troupe and ridden a bike naked with 10,000 other cyclists in her…

Ken Ilgunas is an author, journalist, and backcountry ranger. He has hitchhiked ten thousand miles across North America, paddled one thousand miles across Ontario in a birchbark canoe, and walked 1,700 miles across the Great Plains, following the proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline. He’s written for the New York Times, Time, Backpacker, and…

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is the author of Island People: The Caribbean and The World and the co-editor, with Rebecca Solnit, of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and his essays and journalism have also appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Believer, Artforum, and The Nation. He earned a PhD in…

Kia Abdullah is an author and travel writer based in London. She has published two novels and contributed to the New York Times, The Guardian, and the BBC. She is an ambassador for Lonely Planet and the founding editor of the outdoor travel blog Atlas & Boots. Previously, Kia worked for two years at Penguin Random…

Kimberley Lovato’s lifestyle, food and travel articles have appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Robb Report, Private Clubs, Virtuoso Life, Delta Sky, American Way, Every Day With Rachael Ray, BBC, travelandleisure.com, and many other publications. Her award-winning personal essays have appeared in several editions of The Best Women’s Travel Writing and her culinary travel book, Walnut…

Cindy Ross is an adventurer and long-distance backpacker and cyclist. She has completed the Triple Crown of American hiking: the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail. Cindy is the author of six books on adventuring in the outdoors, including Scraping Heaven: A Family’s Journey along the Continental Divide. Her latest…

Kate Harris is a writer with a knack for getting lost. Winner of the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, her nature and travel writing has been cited in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing anthologies, and has featured in The Walrus, Canadian Geographic, and The Georgia Review. She lives off-grid in…

Born in Scotland and educated at Oxford University, George Black has been based in the U.S. since 1982. He is the author of seven nonfiction books, including On the Ganges: Encounters with Saints and Sinners on India’s Mythic River, which debuts this month. His long-form journalism has appeared in venues such as the New Yorker,…

Jayme Moye is the North American Travel Journalist Association’s 2018 Grand Prize awardee in Travel Journalism. She is the first woman to achieve that honor more than once, having also been the Grand Prize awardee in 2014. Her writing appears in National Geographic, Travel + Leisure, Outside, New York, and Marie Claire, among others. Her travel narratives have been anthologized in The…

Stephanie Rosenbloom is a travel writer for the New York Times. A reporter there for more than a decade, she’s had beats in the Business, Styles, and Real Estate sections. She’s a featured writer in The New York Times, 36 Hours: 150 Weekends in the USA & Canada (Taschen, 2011) and in The New York Times…

Rowan Moore Gerety is a journalist based in Miami. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, the Miami Herald, Slate, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and he has produced radio stories for NPR and PRI. He studied anthropology at Columbia University and was a Fulbright fellow in Mozambique. His first book is Go Tell…

Amy Gigi Alexander is a writer, editor, publisher, and geocultural explorer with an emphasis on travel writing, landscapes imagined and real, memoir, poetry, and lyrical magical realism paired with psychogeography. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the British literary journal Panorama: the Journal of Intelligent Travel, the publisher of Panoramic Publishing, and has taught travel and landscape writing around…

Zora O’Neill is the author of All Strangers Are Kin: Adventures in Arabic and the Arab World, winner of the SATW Lowell Thomas Award for Best Travel Book of 2016. She has been a travel writer since 2002 and has written dozens of guidebooks for Moon, Lonely Planet and Rough Guides. Her writing has appeared…

Mark Johanson is an American travel writer based in Santiago, Chile. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, GQ, Bloomberg Pursuits, The Guardian and the Chicago Tribune, among others. He is also a frequent Lonely Planet author and a regular contributor to Men’s Journal and the BBC. How did you get started traveling? My mom grew…

Dave Seminara is a journalist and former diplomat based in Bend, Oregon. He is the author of Bed, Breakfast & Drunken Threats: Dispatches from the Margins of Europe, which was a #1 bestseller in Liechtenstein. Dave writes a series for BBC Travel called Travel Pioneers, which won a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism award in 2016.…

Pam Houston is the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, the novel Sight Hound, a collection of essays, A Little More About Me, and Contents May Have Shifted, all published by W.W. Norton. Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories,…

Andrew Solomon’s books have won over fifty awards, including the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Wellcome Prize. His most recent book, from 2016, is Far and Away: How Travel Can Change the World, which was one of the New York Times‘ best books of the year. His previous books include…

Joshua Kucera is a freelance writer who has written a number of travelogues from the former Soviet Union and surrounding areas, including from Kazakhstan, the Russia-China border, Ukraine, and western China. Recently he published a series of dispatches from along the Europe-Asia border for Slate and Roads & Kingdoms. He was born in Des Moines, Iowa,…

Abbie Kozolchyk is the author of National Geographic’s The World’s Most Romantic Destinations. She’s spent most of her career in magazines, sometimes in the Glamour/Cosmo/Allure universe, sometimes in the National Geographic Traveler/Conde Nast Traveler/Travel + Leisure universe—and sometimes in both, such as the day she had to file copy on Reese Witherspoon’s bangs from a Tibetan…

Marco Ferrarese writes about travel, culture, and extreme music in Asia for a variety of international publications, including Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia, CNN Travel, BBC Travel, The Guardian, National Geographic Traveler (UK), the South China Morning Post, Roads and Kingdoms, and Time Out. Marco’s first pulp novel Nazi Goreng, published in 2013 by Monsoon Books, explores…

Erick Prince is a writer, photographer, and world traveler. After serving over ten years in the United States Air Force, he is on a quest to become the first African American to visit every country in the world. His blogs and shares photos and videos of his travels at Minority Nomad. How did you get…

Edmund Vallance is a London-born writer and musician. His travel stories and photographs have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The London Evening Standard, and The Independent. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons. How did you get started traveling? I went to Bristol University…

Charlie Grosso is a writer, photographer, art gallery director, and brand consultant. She has traveled across five continents, through nearly 70 countries, via bus, train, caravan, and clunker. She has raced the Mongol rally, survived a hold-up by Ugandan rebels, and fallen in love with sublime moments through the lens of a Hasselblad. How did…

Kim Dinan is an author and adventurer. Her writing has appeared in Parks and Recreation, Northwest Travel, Go Explore, and OnTrak, among others. Her blog, So Many Places, was named one of the best outdoor blogs by USA Today and has been featured online by such sites as Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. Her travel memoir, The Yellow Envelope, hit shelves in April 2017.

Jill K. Robinson writes about travel, adventure, food, and drink for the San Francisco Chronicle, AFAR, National Geographic Traveler, Robb Report, Outside, Sunset, Coastal Living, American Way, Sierra, Wine Enthusiast and more.

Jonathan Arlan is a writer and editor. Born and raised on the Great Plains, he has lived in New Orleans, New York, Egypt, Japan, and Serbia and traveled in over thirty-five countries. His first book, Mountain Lines: A Journey through the French Alps was published in February 2017.

Maribel Steel is a published author, writer and inspirational speaker. She is legally blind and loves to travel using a white cane with bike bell attached. Currently she writes about vision loss for Verywell network and VisionAware (American Foundation for the Blind).

Laura Fraser is the bestselling author of the travel memoir An Italian Affair, as well as All Over the Map. She has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times, Oprah Magazine, Vogue, Sunset, More, Elle, Marie Claire, Gourmet, Salon.com. She’s also the co-founder and editorial director of Shebooks.net, which publishes short e-books by women.

Linda Lappin is the author of The Soul of Place: A Creative Writing Workbook: Ideas and Exercises for Conjuring the Genius Loci (Travelers’ Tales 2015). Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, the Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Rain Taxi, and the Writers’ Chronicle, among others. She is a lecturer in English language and literature at the Sapienza University of Rome.

Tim Neville is a correspondent for Outside, Ski and Skiing magazines and a frequent contributor to the New York Times travel section. His work has been featured in Best American Travel Writing, Best American Sports Writing and other anthologies. He has reported from seven continents, loves languages, and lives in Bend, Oregon, with his wife and daughter.

Sally Shivnan’s travel writing has been featured in anthologies such as The Best American Travel Writing, as well as in The Washington Post, Miami Herald, Nature Conservancy Magazine, Washingtonian, Saturday Evening Post, railstotrails.org, baltimore.org and many other publications and websites. Her short story collection Piranhas & Quicksand & Love is due to be published in fall 2016.

Robert Moor is an award-winning essayist and journalist living in British Columbia. His first book, On Trails: An Exploration, was published in July 2016. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, New York Magazine, GQ, and many other publications.

Marcia DeSanctis is the author of 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go, a book of essays on where to go in France and why. A frequent contributor to Vogue and Town & Country, she has also written for Marie Claire, National Geographic Traveler, BBC Travel, Tin House, and The New York Times. She is the recipient of four Lowell Thomas Awards for excellence in travel journalism.

Todd Pitock’s work has appeared in wide-ranging publications, among them National Geographic Traveler, Discover, The Atlantic, Nautilus, and the New York Times, and he has been anthologized and noted in Best American Travel Writing, Best American Science and Nature Writing, and other anthologies. He’s a three-time Lowell Thomas Award winner, including Travel Journalist of the Year in 2015.

Phil Cousineau is a freelance writer, documentary filmmaker, independent scholar, and creativity consultant. His thirty-plus published works include several bestsellers, such as The Art of Pilgrimage, The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, Stoking the Creative Fires, Wordcatcher, and Burning the Midnight Oil.

Since her first taste of Europe at the age of twenty-one, Evita Robinson has been to over twenty countries and lived on three different continents, including France, Japan, and Thailand. She is the creator of the NomadnessTV web series and the founder of the Nomadness Travel Tribe.

Costas Christ is Editor At Large for National Geographic Traveler and a member of the National Geographic Editorial Council. His articles and essays have appeared in some of the world’s leading publications, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, and Sunday Times of London.

Gary Arndt is an awarding winning travel photographer who has been traveling around the world non-stop since 2007. His blog Everything Everywhere one of the Top 25 Blogs on the Internet by Time Magazine in 2010. He is a regular contributor to American Forces Radio and has appeared in the New York Times, CNN, BBC, The Atlantic, Outside Magazine and many other news outlets around the world.

Erin Byrne is author of Wings: Gifts of Art, Life, and Travel in France, editor of Vignettes & Postcards From Paris and Vignettes & Postcards From Morocco, and writer of The Storykeeper film. Her work has won three Grand Prize Solas Awards, an Accolade Award for film, and was a finalist for Foreword Reviews’ Book of the Year.

Jonathan Yevin is recognized as a pioneer of “no-baggage” travel, having embarked on many voyages around the world with only a passport, money, phone and toothbrush. He has written for Rough Guides, Fodor’s, Frommer’s, Conde Nast Traveler, Outside, Matador Travel, and been profiled by Lonely Planet, Financial Times, U.S. News & World Report, Travel & Leisure, Details and Maxim.

Lola Akinmade Åkerström is an award-winning writer and photographer whose work has appeared in National Geographic Traveler, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, Travel + Leisure, Slate, MSNBC, Huffington Post, Travel Channel, Lonely Planet, Fodor’s, National Geographic Channel, and the New York Times online.

Wade Shepard is a traveling writer who has been moving through the world for the past 16 years, going to over 55 countries. He is the author of Ghost Cities of China: The Story of Cities without People in the World’s Most Populated Country.

Lauren Quinn is a writer, editor, traveler, and former expat. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Guardian, Vela, Best Women’s Travel Writing, and The Best American Travel Writing 2015. She is currently teaching middle school in Los Angeles.

Simon Fenton is a travel writer and photographer. He lives in Senegal with his Senegalese partner Khady and their sons Gulliver and Alfie, running a guest house that he built. Squirting Milk at Chameleons is an account of his journey to West Africa and a year of life there.

Ann Marie Brown is the author of 13 outdoor travel guidebooks to California and the West. Her work has appeared in Sunset, VIA, Backpacker, Sierra, Travel + Leisure, Wanderlust, Cross Country Skier and other magazines and newspapers.

Ernest White II is a writer, educator, and native Floridian. The former assistant editor of Time Out São Paulo, he has been published in Time Out London, Ebony, TravelChannel.com, and American Airlines’ Black Atlas. He has appeared as a host on the Travel Channel’s Destination Showdown, and in the documentary film Gringo Trails. He maintains a semi-regular blog on international travel from an African-American perspective, called Fly Brother.

Sarah Menkedick’s writing has been featured or is forthcoming in Harper’s, Oxford American, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, The New Inquiry, Amazon’s Kindle Singles, and elsewhere. Her story Homing Instincts was selected as notable in The Best American Essays 2014. She is the founding editor of Vela, an online magazine of nonfiction inspired by travel and written by women.

Mitch Moxley has written for publications including GQ, The Atlantic, Grantland, TIME, and the New York Times, and he is the features editor at Roads & Kingdoms, an online journal of international reporting. He’s the author of Apologies to My Censor: The High and Low Adventures of a Foreigner in China, a memoir about the six years he lived in Beijing.

Leigh Ann Henion is the author of Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer’s Search for Wonder in the Natural World. She has contributed to Smithsonian, The Washington Post Magazine, and Oxford American, among other publications. Henion has received a variety of accolades, including a Lowell Thomas Award from the Society of American Travel Writers, and her work has three times been cited as notable in The Best American Travel Writing.

Teri Johnson is the creator, producer and host of the web series Travelista Teri. Her passion for adventure and storytelling has taken her to 60 countries, where she has hunted with the Kuku-Yalanji aborigines in Australia and trekked through Dogon country in Mali. In addition to being a freelance writer for TravelChannel.com and Huffington Post, she frequently speaks on travel at various festivals and conferences.

Kevin Fedarko has written for Outside, Esquire, and National Geographic Adventure. His first book, The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon, was a New York Times bestseller. His adventure stories from the Himalayas, the Horn of Africa, and the Colorado River have been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing.

Patricia Schultz is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers 1,000 Places to See Before You Die and 1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die. A veteran travel journalist with 25 years of experience, she has written for guides such as Frommer’s and Berlitz and periodicals including The Wall Street Journal and Travel Weekly.

Andy Isaacson is a freelance writer and photographer whose stories have appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, AFAR and National Geographic Traveler. He’s the recipient of four Lowell Thomas Awards for travel writing and photography. He lives in his hometown of Brooklyn.

Tracy Ross won the 2009 National Magazine Award for her essay The Source of All Things. She later turned that into a book, published by Free Press. Her stories have been anthologized in Best American Sports Writing, Best American Magazine Writing, and Best American Travel Writing.

Chris Taylor is a writer based in Bangkok and Southwest China. He wrote, co-wrote and updated Lonely Planet guides to several Asian destinations, including China, Tibet, and Cambodia. His first novel, published in 2010, is Harvest Season.

Eva Holland is a freelance writer and editor based in Canada’s Yukon Territory. She’s the co-editor of World Hum, a former associate editor at Up Here and Up Here Business magazines, and a founding contributor to Vela Magazine. She’s a regular contributor to SB Nation Longform and a former online columnist for Outside.

Brian Kevin is the author of The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America. He’s a contributing editor at Down East magazine and an occasional contributor to Outside, Travel + Leisure, Men’s Journal, Sierra, Audubon, and the Fodor’s series of travel guidebooks.

Darley Newman is the host, writer and producer of the Emmy-winning Equitrekking TV series broadcast nationally on PBS and international networks in over 82 countries, and owner of DCN Entertainment, a multi-media production company. She’s been honored with five Daytime Emmy Award nominations, the North American Travel Journalist Award, and the Inspiring Woman Award from Women in Philanthropy and Leadership.

Hilary Bradt co-founded Bradt Travel Guides in 1974. Her books include ten editions of the Bradt Guide to Madagascar and the anniversary edition of Trekking in Peru, as well as two narrative books describing a journey on horseback through western Ireland, Connemara Mollie, and Dingle Peggy. She was awarded an MBE by Queen Elizabeth in 2008, and now lives in semi-retirement in Devon, England.

Grant Martin is a freelance writer and editor based out of Chicago. Specializing in consumer travel and the airline industry, he recently worked as the editor of AOL’s Gadling.com, and currently splits his time between projects at The Economist and Forbes. His favorite airline lounge is the Turkish Airlines lounge in Istanbul.

Born and raised in Croatia, New York-based Anja Mutic has been traveling the world professionally since 2000. Her writing — which has won several awards — has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, National Geographic Traveler and BBC Travel. Fluent in Croatian, English and Spanish, she has authored or contributed to Lonely Planet guidebooks for Croatia, Bolivia, and Chile.

Mary Morris is the author of fourteen books, including four travel memoirs. In her memoirs she has traveled through Latin America, traversed Siberia, infiltrated New Age groups in Latin America, and sailed down the Mississippi River in a houseboat. Morris has published extensively in such magazines as AFAR, the New York Times, Travel & Leisure, Islands, and Town & Country. Her 1988 travel memoir, Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone was named one of the top travel memoirs in the 20th century by Suite 101.

Christopher Elliott is a travel consumer advocate, multimedia journalist and customer service expert. He’s the author of Scammed, a manifesto for empowering consumers and encouraging corporate responsibility, and How to Be the World’s Smartest Traveler, a definitive manual for having a better trip. Elliott is National Geographic Traveler‘s reader advocate, and writes a weekly column for The Washington Post and USA Today.

Alden Jones is the author of The Blind Masseuse: A Traveler’s Memoir from Costa Rica to Cambodia. She has lived, worked, and traveled in over forty countries, including as a WorldTeach volunteer in Costa Rica, a program director in Cuba, and a professor on Semester at Sea. She teaches creative writing and cultural studies at Emerson College in Boston.

Aaron Smith is an Australian freelance journalist and author of Shanti Bloody Shanti: An Indian Odyssey, a travel memoir published in Australia, New Zealand, UK and USA. He is a regular contributor to Australian Geographic Magazine and often talks on Australian radio. Aaron has a MA in Journalism from the University of Tasmania and lives in Hobart (sometimes).

Dan Saltzstein has worked at the New York Times since 1999. He is currently an editor in the Travel section. His writing and photography has appeared in the Travel, Dining, Arts, Books, and Metropolitan sections. He graduated from Amherst College and lives in Woodside, Queens, with his wife and daughter.

Pegi Vail is an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. Her documentary Gringo Trails features the stories of travelers and locals, alongside footage from Bolivia, Thailand, Mali, and Bhutan, to explore both positive and negative impact of tourism on these places over the last 30 years. Right of Passage, a book based her anthropology research among travelers and their stories in Bolivia as a Fulbright Scholar, is forthcoming (Duke University Press).

Edward Readicker-Henderson is a contributing editor at National Geographic Traveler and ISLANDS. Writing stories so autobiographical a bio note becomes utterly redundant, he’s won three Lowell Thomas awards, has interviewed kings and shamen, but has never once noodled for flatheads.

Suzanne Roberts is the author of the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (winner of the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award) as well as four collections of poetry, including Three Hours to Burn a Body: Poems on Travel. She currently teaches at Lake Tahoe Community College, and for the low residency MFA program in creative writing at Sierra Nevada College.

Michael Meyer is the author of The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed, which details the three years he spent in the Chinese capital’s oldest neighborhood. He first came to China in 1995 as a Peace Corps volunteer, then worked as a Beijing-based journalist, contributing to The New York Times, TIME, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, South China Morning Post and many more outlets.

Torre DeRoche is the author of Love with a Chance of Drowning, a travel memoir that recounts her two year sailing voyage across the Pacific Ocean with her new lover and her morbid fear of deep water. When she’s not at home in Melbourne, Australia, DeRoche is at large in the world, making art, pursing adventures, and blogging at fearfuladventurer.com.

Matthew Power is a contributing editor at Harper’s and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and his work has also appeared in GQ, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, Wired, The New York Times, Slate, The Atavist, Granta and elsewhere. He has been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing three times (2007, 2008, 2010), and has won two Lowell Thomas Awards. He lives in Brooklyn.

Jodi Ettenberg is the author of The Food Traveler’s Handbook. She is also the founder of Legal Nomads, which chronicles worldwide travel and food adventures, and is a contributing editor for Longreads. Prior to founding Legal Nomads, Jodi worked for five years as a corporate lawyer in New York City. She frequently speaks about social media strategy, food and travel, and curation.

Seth Kugel writes the Frugal Traveler column for the New York Times. Not a lifelong travel writer, he has been a public school teacher in the Bronx, an immigrant services provider, a municipal bureaucrat, a stringer for the City section of the New York Times, and the Brazil correspondent for GlobalPost.com.

Michael Luongo is an award winning freelance journalist and photographer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Bloomberg News, Out Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, and many other publications. His focus is on Latin America and the Middle East, and he has been to all seven continents and over 80 countries and has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza. His specialties include conflict zone travel, business travel, gay travel, and human rights issues.

Miranda Kennedy’s first book, Sideways on a Scooter: Life and Love in India, was published in 2011. The Daily Beast called it “sharp social commentary” and “a compelling, humorous travel memoir.” The book grew out of Miranda’s five years as a South Asia correspondent for National Public Radio and APM’s Marketplace Radio. Her stories have also appeared in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, The Nation and Slate.

As National Geographic’s “Digital Nomad“, Andrew Evans has sent live updates from kayak, camel-back, airplane, helicopter, cargo ship and sailboat — atop arctic glaciers and from deep within the tropical jungle, while staring in the face of wild animals or from the summits of rare mountains. He is the author of four books, including bestselling guidebooks to Ukraine and Iceland. He has contributed to several other books, including 100 Great Cities of the World.

Pam Mandel is a freelance writer and photographer. She’s been blogging since 1997. She’s written travel stories for Conde Nast Traveler online, Afar, World Hum, Gadling, Perceptive Travel, and a handful of food, travel, and in-flight magazines. She’s worked on two guidebooks — BC and Hawaii — for Thomas Cook. She’s a cofounder of Passports with Purpose, a group that works with travel bloggers to raise money for NGO projects around the world.

Andrew McCarthy is an editor-at-large for National Geographic Traveler. He’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Travel+Leisure, and many others. He was named “Travel Journalist of the Year” by the Society of American Travel Writers in 2010. His memoir, The Longest Way Home, debuted in September of 2012. He is also an actor , having appeared in dozens of movies and on television.

Rachel Friedman is the author of The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure (Bantam Books, 2011). She has written for The New York Times, New York and Bust magazines, Nerve.com, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. She is a contributor to the The McSweeney’s Book of Politics and Musicals (Vintage, 2012).

Peter Chilson is the author of two books about Africa: The travelogue Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa, and the fiction collection Disturbance-Loving Species, which won the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference prize for short fiction. His essays and fiction have appeared in The American Scholar, Ascent, Audubon, Best American Travel Writing, Gulf Coast, North American Review, thesmartset.com, and elsewhere.

Doug Mack is a freelance writer based in Minneapolis and the author of the travel memoir Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day: One Man, Eight Countries, One Vintage Travel Guide (Perigee Books/Penguin). His stories tend to focus on fresh, offbeat takes on familiar topics and places, and have appeared in such publications as World Hum, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Onion AV Club, and the Lonely Planet travel writing anthology A Moveable Feast: Life-Changing Food Adventures Around the World.

Lisa Napoli is the author of Radio Shangri-La: What I Discovered on my Accidental Journey to the Happiest Kingdom on Earth. She has been a reporter and back-up host for Marketplace, the public radio show, and was one of the first journalists to chronicle the dawn of the Internet age at the NY Times and MSNBC. She can now be heard each day on the legendary public radio station, KCRW in Santa Monica.

Gary Buslik is the author of A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean, and The Missionary’s Position. His new novel, Akhmed and the Atomic Matzo Balls, is scheduled for launch this spring. His shorter work appears in many travel and literary anthologies, often in Best Travel Writing.

Richard Grant is a freelance journalist based in Arizona and the author of three travel books. His first book, American Nomads: Travels with Lost Conquistadors, Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians, Hoboes, Truckers, and Bullriders, won the Thomas Cook travel-writing award. It was followed by God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre, and most recently Crazy River: Exploration and Folly in East Africa.

Jamie Maslin has hitchhiked from England to Iran, traveled throughout Asia, and couch-surfed all over Latin America. Author of Iranian Rappers and Persian Porn: A Hitchhiker’s Adventures in the New Iran, he has been banned from re—entering The Islamic Republic of Iran. His newest books is Socialist Dreams and Beauty Queens: A Couchsurfer’s Memoir of Venezuela. He lives in London, England.

Eamonn Gearon is a writer, analyst and Arabist who has spent most of the past two decades living, working and traveling across the Greater Middle East, from Kabul to Casablanca, including a number of solo, camel-powered explorations of the Libyan Desert. His first book — The Sahara: A Cultural History — was published to great acclaim last year in the UK and USA.

Lavinia Spalding is the author of Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Writing Traveler, chosen one of the best travel books of 2009 by the L.A. Times, coauthor of With a Measure of Grace, and editor of Travelers’ Tales’ The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011. A regular contributor to Yoga Journal, her work has also appeared in a wide variety of print and online publications, including Sunset Magazine, Post Road, and World Hum. She lives in San Francisco.

John Keahey’s latest book, Seeking Sicily: A Cultural Journey Through Myth and Reality in the Heart of the Mediterranean, debuted in November of 2011. He has also authored A Sweet and Glorious Land: Revisiting the Ionian Sea and Venice Against the Sea: A City Besieged. John is an Idaho native who has worked in daily newspaper/wire service journalism in the American West since age 17.

Julian Smith is the author of Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure, which won the 2011 Outstanding Book Award in memoir/autobiography from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. His articles and photographs have appeared in Smithsonian, Wired, Outside, National Geographic Traveler, New Scientist, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and US News & World Report. He has won the country’s top travel writing award from the Society of American Travel Writers.

Mary Jo McConahay is the author of Maya Roads: One Woman’s Journey Among the People of the Rainforest. Born in Chicago, she came of age in California in an era when On the Road was a bible for young people. She traveled in Mexico and Central America before moving to the Middle East to work as a reporter on the English-language Arab News. In the 1980s she became a correspondent for Pacific News Service, covering the wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and the U.S. invasion of Panama.

Spud is a journalist and late-blooming traveler who, in the past 10 years as a writer and editor for the Travel section of the San Francisco Chronicle, has written about, reported on and been hopelessly lost in destinations on five continents. His attempts to divine, describe and defy the expectations of places — from Havana’s back alleys to Genoa’s cathedrals to the floor of a hippie bus in Modesto — have earned him five Lowell Thomas Awards.

La Carmina is a professional alternative-cultures blogger, travel/culture journalist, travel TV host, and author of three Jpop books. Her popular blog has been featured in publications such as the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New Yorker (which called her, “adorable, in a somewhat bizarre way”). She has co-hosted an episode of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern for the Travel Channel, and she is the Asia host for educational travel TV series, Project Explorer.

Elisabeth Eaves is the author of Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents. Her travel writing has been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing 2009, The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010, and Lonely Planet’s A Moveable Feast: Life-changing food adventures from around the world. Elisabeth has freelanced widely, including for Slate, Foreign Policy, Harper’s, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and has worked at Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and The Daily, where she is editor of the opinions page.

Jim Benning and Michael Yessis are the cofounders and coeditors of WorldHum.com, a culture and travel website that celebrates its 10th anniversary this month. Countless travel publications and websites tell you where to go, where to stay, what to do. World Hum focuses not only on destinations but on the journey, on travel in the broadest sense of the word.

Brook Silva-Braga is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. He was a producer at HBO before founding Earthchild Productions in 2005. He has since directed two feature length documentaries, A Map for Saturday, which explores the subculture of long-term travel, and One Day in Africa, a portrait of six individuals from different parts of the continent. His current project explores US/China relations through expert interviews and profiles of everyday Americans and Chinese.

Susan Van Allen is the author of 100 Places in Italy Every Woman Should Go (Travelers’ Tales). She’s written about Italian travel for NPR, magazines (including Tastes of Italia and Town & Country), newspapers, and websites. Van Allen also writes for television, and was on staff of the Emmy winning sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. When she’s not in Italy, she’s based in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband.

Wayne Curtis is a contributing editor at The Atlantic, Preservation and Down East magazines, and he’s also written for the New York Times, Canadian Geographic, American Archeology, Men’s Journal, Yankee, American Heritage, VIA, and This American Life. He’s also author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails (Crown 2006). He lives in New Orleans, but flees the heat and yellow fever each summer for the pines of eastern Maine.

Ted Conover is the author of five books including Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes, Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders With America’s Illegal Migrants, Whiteout: Lost in Aspen, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), and, most recently, The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today.

Poet, travel writer, novelist and teacher Linda Watanabe McFerrin is a contributor to numerous journals, newspapers, magazines, anthologies and online publications including the San Francisco Examiner, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Modern Bride, Travelers’ Tales, Salon.com, and Women.com. She is the author of two poetry collections and the editor of the 4th edition of Best Places Northern California.

Joe Ray is a freelance food and travel writer and photographer based in Paris and Barcelona. He is a frequent contributor to the Boston Globe‘s travel section, Agence France Presse Lifestyle, and the Asian editions of American Express magazines Centurion and Platinum. He was named the 2009 Travel Journalist of the Year by the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation, is a certified Sherry Educator, a Knight of Cava and has successfully navigated the streets of Palermo by car.

Jennifer Baggett, Holly Corbett and Amanda Pressner journeyed across four continents and more than a dozen countries, sharing their experiences with other aspiring vagabonds on their blog, LostGirlsWorld.com, which attracted the attention of book publishers and was transformed into a travel memoir, The Lost Girls: Three Friends. Four Continents. One Unconventional Detour Around the World..

Tim Leffel is author of several books, including The World’s Cheapest Destinations (in its 3rd edition) and Travel Writing 2.0: Earning Money from your Travels in the New Media Landscape. He is the editor of the narrative webzine Perceptive Travel and runs several travel blogs, including Practical Travel Gear and the Cheapest Destinations Blog.

Julia Dimon is a TV host, writer and travel expert who has traveled around the world four times, through six continents, across over 80 countries. Julia is co-creator and co-host of Word Travels, a 39-episode TV series broadcast nationally on OLN in Canada and internationally on National Geographic Adventure in over 40 countries worldwide. This show follows the real lives of two travel writers as they jet set around the world, under pressure and under deadline.

Tom Vater is the author of Beyond the Pancake Trench: Road Tales from the Wild East , and several travel guidebooks, including Moon’s Moon Cambodia. His articles are published in a wide range of publications including The Asia Wall Street Journal, Marie Claire and Penthouse. He has co-written several documentary screenplays, including The Most Secret Place on Earth: The CIA’s Covert War in Laos.

Beth Whitman is the author of Wanderlust and Lipstick: The Essential Guide for Women Traveling Solo. She has trekked the Himalayas in Nepal and Bhutan, ridden a motorcycle solo from Seattle to Panama, helped build a playground for an orphanage in Vietnam; and maneuvered the back roads of France’s Dijon region in a rental car. When she’s not traveling, she calls Seattle home.

Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of Barolo (The University of Nebraska Press), a food memoir based on his illegal work in the Italian wine industry. Recent work appears in The New Republic, Epoch, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, North American Review, AGNI, The Best Food Writing 2006, The Best Travel Writing (2008 and 2009), Creative Nonfiction, Gastronomica, and others.

Seth Stevenson is a contributing writer for Slate. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone. He’s received multiple Lowell Thomas awards from the Society of American Travel Writers, and he’s been excerpted three times in the Best American Travel Writing series. His first book, Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World, was published in April of 2010.

Carl Hoffman is the author of The Lunatic Express: Discovering the World . . . via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes. A contributing editor at National Geographic Traveler, Wired, and Popular Mechanics, his stories about travel, adventure and technology – and often the nexus between them — have also appeared in Outside, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure and Smithsonian.

Bonnie Tsui is the author of American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods. A graduate of Harvard University and a former editor at Travel + Leisure, she is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and has written for the Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic Adventure, and Conde Nast Traveler. She is also the editor of A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise, a collection of essays on the outdoors.

Peter Delevett is an editor, erstwhile columnist and occasional travel writer at the San Jose Mercury News. Delevett has frequently been featured on radio and television, and his work has appeared at WorldHum.com and in Travelers’ Tales, the Honolulu Advertiser, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the Miami Herald, among many others.

Catharine Hamm has been part of The Los Angeles Times Travel section since 1999, serving as travel editor since 2003. She launched the “On the Spot” travel consumer column early in 2007, and it now appears in newspapers and on websites across the country. She was born in Syracuse, N.Y., but counts Virginia, Hawaii, the Philippines, Kansas, and, of course, California as among the 34 places she has called home.

Peter Rudiak-Gould’s first travel book, Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island, was published in November of 2009 by Union Square Press. He is a doctoral student in Anthropology at Oxford University, conducting research on Marshallese reactions to the threat of devastating sea level rise caused by global warming. Originally from Berkeley, California, he now lives in Oxford, England.

Peter Ferry is an editor, writer and teacher. His travel pieces have appeared in the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun Times. His short fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Fiction, the New Review of Literature and McSweeney’s. His first novel, Travel Writing, which is built around five travel pieces, was published in 2008 by Harcourt. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

Pauline Frommer is the creator of the Pauline Frommer Guidebooks, a new series for budget-conscious travelers. She also co-hosts The Travel Show heard on over radio stations nationwide; appears weekly on CNN.com to discuss travel; and authors a bi-weekly column on MSN.com.

Robert Reid has updated updated 21 Lonely Planet guidebooks — including New York City, Central America, Trans-Siberian Railway and Myanmar (Burma) — and created his own experimental free guidebook to Vietnam. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, World Hum and Wanderlust.

David Farley is the author of An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town and the co-editor of Travelers’ Tales Prague and the Czech Republic: True Stories. His writing appears in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Conde Nast Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, New York, and Slate.com, among other publications.

Eve Brown-Waite was born and bred in New York until she joined the Peace Corps, fell in love with her recruiter and then, in an effort first to win his heart (and then, because she was married to him) lived in Ecuador, Uganda and Uzbekistan. First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria: How a Peace Corps Poster Boy Won My Heart and a Third World Adventure Changed My Life, published by Broadway Books, tells the story of what ensued.

Eric Weiner the is author of The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World. He has reported from more than 30 countries, and served as a correspondent for National Public Radio in New York, Miami and Washington. A former reporter for The New York Times, his commentary has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Slate and The New Republic, among other publications.

A three-time Emmy award-winning writer, reporter and host, Karen Schaler is the author of Travel Therapy: Where Do You Need to Go? Karen has written for publications such as The New Yorker, the Boston Globe, Town and Country, Elite Traveler, and Islands, and she has appeared on television shows such as Good Morning America, The Today Show, FOX & Friends, and CNN.

David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has written about everything from New York City’s antiquated water tunnels to the hunt for the giant squid to the presidential campaign. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, published by Doubleday, is his first book and is being developed into a movie by Brad Pitt’s Plan B production company and Paramount Pictures.

Stephanie Pearson is a freelance writer and contributing editor to Outside magazine. Stephanie grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, and has lived in Chicago, Santa Fe, Quito, and Bogota. During her 13-years on staff at Outside Stephanie wrote “The Wild File,” a column about science and nature, and numerous features, three of which received honorable mentions in The Best American Travel Writing series.

Kelsey Timmerman is the author of Where am I Wearing: A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People that Make Our Clothes. He has spent the night in Castle Dracula in Romania, gone undercover as an underwear buyer in Bangladesh, and played PlayStation in Kosovo. His stories have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Condé Nast Portfolio, and have aired on National Public Radio.

Ben Box has written and edited a number of Latin American and Caribbean travel guidebooks for Footprints, including the legendary South American Handbook. He has contributed to newspapers, journals and scholarly books — usually on the subject of travel, but also on South American literature. Born in England, his outside interests include village cricket and gardening.

Catherine Watson, a pioneer in narrative travel writing for newspapers, was the first travel editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and its chief travel columnist from 1978 to 2004. Her books, Roads Less Traveled: Dispatches From the Ends of the Earth (Syren Book Company, 2005) and Home on the Road: Further Dispatches from the Ends of the Earth (Syren, 2007), both won awards from the Society of American Travel Writers.

Matthew Polly is an award-winning travel writer for Slate. His first book, American Shaolin, was published in February of 2007. A Princeton University graduate and Rhodes Scholar, his work has appeared in Esquire, Playboy, and The Nation. He grew up in Kansas and lives in New York City.

Matt Gross was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and raised everywhere from Brighton, England, to Williamsburg, Virginia. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 1996, he moved to Vietnam, then found his way into the media business in New York. He now writes the Frugal Traveler column for the New York Times travel section.

Amanda Castleman’s articles have appeared in the International Herald Tribune, MSNBC.com, Wired, Salon, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She has contributed to dozens of books, including Greece, A Love Story and Single State of the Union, as well as titles for Frommer’s, Michelin, National Geographic, DK Eyewitness, Time Out and Rough Guides. She is based in Seattle.

Gary Shteyngart is the author of the novels Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, GQ, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine, and his essays from Travel + Leisure were selected for the 2006 and 2007 editions of The Best American Travel Writing. He lives in New York.

Arthur Frommer, one of America’s foremost travel authorities, is the founder of the Frommer’s guidebook series. In addition to authoring and publishing guidebooks, he also presents a weekly radio program on travel, and writes a column on travel that appears in major newspapers ranging from the New York Daily News to the Chicago Tribune to the Los Angeles Times. He lives in New York City.

Andrew Hempstead has been a fulltime travel writer for the last 20 years. He specializes on writing about Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In addition to authoring six guidebooks and co-authoring and contributing to a dozen others, he is a regular contributor to various magazines, works with a number of online clients, and has written on guidebook writing for a higher education textbook.

An Emmy award-winning writer and producer, Peter Greenberg is the Travel Editor for NBC’s Today Show, CNBC and MSNBC, a best-selling author, and host of the nationally syndicated Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio show. Greenberg is also contributing editor for America Online (AOL) and Men’s Health magazine, a contributor to The New Yorker, and a frequent guest on ABC’s Oprah Winfrey Show and The View.

Gayle Keck has written for Gourmet, GQ, Islands, the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Denver Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and New Orleans Times-Picayune. Her story, “Onionskin,” was selected for the anthology Best Travelers’ Tales 2004. Gayle has visited 49 US states (sorry, North Dakota) and more than 40 countries — though her favorite trip was a flight from Chicago to San Francisco, when she met her husband on the airplane.

Patrick Smith is an erstwhile pilot and air travel columnist. His book, Ask the Pilot: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel, was Amazon.com’s choice for Best Travel Book of 2004. Patrick has visited more than 60 countries and always asks for a window seat. He lives near Boston.

John Gimlette is the author of the travel books At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig and Theatre of Fish. Born in London in 1963, he crossed the Soviet Union by train at age 17, and has since traveled to over 60 countries. A barrister specializing in medical negligence, he lives in London with his wife, Jayne Constantinis, who is a TV presenter, and their daughter, Lucy.

Kate Siber’s writing has appeared in Outside, National Geographic Adventure, Men’s Journal, and The New York Times. She is also a contributing editor to Plenty magazine, for which she often writes about sustainable travel. She resides in Durango, Colorado with the fruits of her labor: a growing pile of used running shoes, five pairs of skis, an impressive collection of international teas, and a seven-pound feline that (sometimes) answers to the name of Sophia Maria Lourdes Gato.

Over the last 30 years Eric Hansen has traveled throughout Europe, the Middle East, Australia, Nepal, and Southeast Asia working as a writer and photojournalist. He is the author of Stranger in the Forest, Motoring with Mohammed, Orchid Fever, and The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Travel + Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal, and Natural History Magazine.

Gary Lee is veteran staff writer who has reported from over 60 countries for the Washington Post travel section. Among his many awards, he won the 2002 Lowell Thomas Award in travel journalism for coverage of 9/11. A fluent speaker of five languages, Lee has covered Germany and central Europe for Time, written extensively about the environment, and served as chief of the Post‘s Moscow bureau.

L. Peat O’Neil is the author of Travel Writing: See the World, Sell the Story (2nd edition, Writer’s Digest Books, 2005) and a co-author of Making Waves: 50 Greatest Women in Radio and Television (Andrews McMeel, 2001). For nearly two decades, O’Neil worked in the newsroom of The Washington Post and she continues to freelance for periodicals, websites and newspapers, including National Geographic News. O’Neil currently teaches online for UCLA Extension journalism program, and she is at work on a book about walking the Pyrenees.

Richard Bangs is an entrepreneur, world adventurer, international river explorer, Web pioneer and award-winning author. He has led first descents of 35 rivers around the globe, including the Yangtze in China and the Zambezi in Southern Africa.

Tahir Shah is the author of ten books, chronicling a wide range of unusual and outlandish journeys. In addition, he makes documentaries, writes screenplays, works as a journalist and photographer. His most recent book is The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca. He is also the author of In Search of King Solomon’s Mines which takes the reader through Ethiopia on the quest of the source of Solomon’s fabulous wealth. He lives in Casablanca with his wife and two children.

Anastasia M. Ashman and Jennifer Eaton Gokmen are the Istanbul-based co-editors of the nonfiction anthology Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey. Anastasia is a cultural essayist who has appeared the Wall Street Journal Asia and the Village Voice. Jennifer is a regular contributor to TimeOut: Istanbul.

A winner of the National Book Award for First Fiction and the Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Bob Shacochis has crisscrossed the globe in his literary pursuits. He is the author of two short story collections, Easy in the Islands and The Next New World; a novel, Swimming in the Volcano; and The Immaculate Invasion, about the 1994 military intervention in Haiti.

Tony D’Souza is the author of the novel Whiteman (Harcourt, 2006), which was a New York Times Editor’s Pick, People Magazine Critic’s Choice, Poets & Writers Best First Fiction, and Border’s Original Voices Selection. A graduate of Notre Dame, he served a two-year Peace Corps stint in Cote d’Ivoire. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy, Salon.com, Esquire, Tin House, McSweeney’s, O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Black Warrior Review.

Jeff Biggers has worked as a writer, radio correspondent, and educator across the United States, Europe, Mexico, and India. He presently divides his time between Illinois and Italy. Winner of the American Book Award and a Lowell Thomas Award for Travel Journalism, he is the author of In the Sierra Madre, and The United States of Appalachia : How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment to America.

Cynthia Barnes has sampled sambal in Borneo for Endless Vacation, been chased by a bull in Mali for Slate, and joined an archaeological dig for National Geographic. Cynthia’s work also appears in Voyaging, Global Traveler, Humanities, and other national magazines. Her essay “Blame It On Rio” was published in the Travelers’ Tales anthology Whose Panties Are These? She’s at work on her first book, “Blue: Wanders from Arkansas to Timbuktu.”

Tony Horwitz is the author of Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before (Henry Holt 2002), Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Pantheon 1998), Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia (E.P. Dutton 1991) and One For the Road: An Outback Adventure (Random House 1988). He has also been a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and a staff writer for the New Yorker. His awards include a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, and an Overseas Press Club award for coverage of the first Gulf War.

Lawrence Millman is the author of eleven books, and his travel articles have appeared in such magazines as Smithsonian, National Geographic Adventure, The Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated, and Islands. He has made 30 trips and expeditions to the Arctic and Subarctic, discovered a previously unknown lake in Borneo, and is a Fellow of the Explorers Club. Best of all, perhaps, he has a mountain named after him outside Angmagssalik, East Greenland. When not on the road, Millman lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Eddy L. Harris is the author of four critically acclaimed books, Mississippi Solo: A River Quest, Native Stranger: A Black American’s Journey into the Heart of Africa, South of Haunted Dreams: A Memoir, and Still Life in Harlem: A Memoir, all of which partake of memoir, travelogue, adventure tale, and cultural reportage.

Joanne Miller has been on the road since childhood, traveling with her father while he photographed the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone for National Geographic. She is the author of Moon’s Pennsylvania Handbook, Moon’s Maryland-Delaware Handbook, Moon’s Chesapeake Bay Handbook, and Best Places: Marin.

Clay Hubbs has had a long double career as a college professor and a journalist. In 1977 he combined his two interests to start Transitions Abroad magazine “for people who travel to learn.” The bimonthly magazine and its website focus on the life-changing alternatives to mainstream tourism.

David Downie is a native San Franciscan who moved to Paris in the 1980s and divides his time between France and Italy. His travel, food and arts features have appeared in magazines and newspapers worldwide, including Bon Appetit, Gourmet, Gastronomica,the Los Angeles Times Magazine, the San Francisco Sunday Chronicle, and the Sunday Times of London. He’s is the author of two thrillers — most recently Paris City of Night — and a dozen nonfiction books.

Karin Muller is the author of three books — Hitchhiking Vietnam : A Woman’s Solo Journey in an Elusive Land, Inca Road: A Woman’s Journey into an Ancient Empire, and Japanland : A Year in Search of Wa — all of which she simultaneously produced as television documentaries for the likes of PBS, MSNBC Explorer, and National Geographic’s global channel. From 1987 to 1990 she served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines, and she speaks English, Spanish, German, and Tagalog. She has a blackbelt in both judo and jujistu, and flies hang gliders competitively.

Tom Haines is the staff travel writer at The Boston Globe. During more than a decade as a journalist, Tom has reported on economics, politics and culture in dozens of countries and on five continents. As the Globe‘s travel writer, Tom has covered guns and cricket in Guyana, trumpets and nationalism in Serbia, and Gandhi’s legacy in rural India. In 2005 and 2003, he was named Travel Journalist of the Year by the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation. His story about an Ethiopian village facing famine appeared in the 2004 edition of Best American Travel Writing. A native of Pittsburgh, Tom now lives north of Boston with his wife and two children.

John Flinn writes a weekly column and feature articles for the award-winning San Francisco Chronicle travel section. He’s journeyed on assignment to more than 20 countries, including Bhutan, Cuba, the Cook Islands and Croatia, and written more than 400 travel articles. Prior to his job at the Chronicle, Flinn was a feature writer for the San Francisco Examiner, where he was paid to, among other things, fly with the Blue Angels, climb El Capitan, wrestle a bear and go on a date with Miss America.

Amanda Jones is a writer and photographer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work appears in books, magazines and newspapers worldwide, including Vogue, Travel & Leisure, Town & Country, Islands, Brides, Food & Wine, Condé Nast Traveller, the London Sunday Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She has been published in several travel anthologies including Salon.com’s Wanderlust: Real-Life Tales of Adventure and Romance, and Lonely Planet’s literary anthologies The Kindness of Strangers and By The Seat of My Pants.

Karl Taro Greenfeld has written three books about Asia; the newest, China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st Century’s First Great Epidemic, is out this month from HarperCollins in the US and Penguin in the UK. His previous books were Speed Tribes and Standard Deviations. A longtime staff writer and editor for TIME and Sports Illustrated, his travel writing has appeared in Conde Nast Traveler, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, Details, Arena and TIME, among other publications, and has been anthologized in Lonely Planet travel books.

Franz Wisner is a reformed cubicle worker and the author of Honeymoon With My Brother, the true story of how Franz was left at the altar, then decided to take a two-year, 53-country honeymoon with his younger brother, Kurt. The best-selling memoir is currently being made into a movie by Sony Pictures. In addition, Franz has penned numerous articles and opinion pieces for The San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Redbook Magazine, and Coast Magazine, among others.

Lea Aschkenas has written for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Salon.com. She has also contributed stories to Travelers’ Tales Central America, Travelers’ Tales Cuba, The Unsavvy Traveler, and The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2006. In her book, Es Cuba : Life and Love on an Illegal Island, she examines the personal legacy of politics via the window of her relationship with a Cuban man and with the three generations of Cuban women she lived with in the year 2000.

Author and filmmaker Robert Young Pelton has made a career out of traveling through the world’s most dangerous places. In addition to writing a regular column for National Geographic Adventure, Pelton has worked for the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, ABC News, CBS 60 Minutes, and CNN. As an author, he is best known for his classic underground guide to surviving danger, The World’s Most Dangerous Places, now in its fifth edition.

Joshua Berman co-authored Moon Handbooks: Nicaragua and wrote the latest edition of Moon Handbooks Belize. In addition to “guidebook writer,” Joshua’s varied resume includes wildland firefighter, Outward Bound instructor, freelance writer, and tourism consultant.

Shanti Sosienski has contributed to Outside, National Geographic Adventure, Men’s Journal, FHM, Shape, Dandelion, Sports Illustrated Kids, and Stuff, among other titles. Her niche is taking adventure sports, outdoorsy topics, athletes, and travel and turning these into topics even the armchair weekend warrior can relate to.

Peter Moore has been described as “The Australian Bill Bryson.” His books include The Wrong Way Home, which saw him traveling overland from London to Sydney, Swahili for the Broken-Hearted, an account of a journey from Cape Town to Cairo, and Vroom with a View, where he went in search of Italy’s dolce vita on a 1961 Vespa. At last count he had visited 95 countries and written six books. When he is not traveling he can be found in either Sydney or London.

Taras Grescoe has written articles on travel for The Times, Independent, Condé Nast Traveller (U.K.), National Geographic Traveler and the New York Times. His bestselling first book Sacré Blues: An Unsentimental Journey Through Quebec won the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction and First Book Award, among numerous other awards. His newest book is The End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Tourists. He lives in Montreal.

C.M. Mayo is the author of Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico, and Sky Over El Nido, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Mayo’s travel writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and numerous literary journals, among them, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, and the North American Review.

Mark Jenkins is a monthly adventure travel columnist for Outside magazine, and the author of three award-winning books: The Hard Way, To Timbuktu and Off the Map. A resident of Wyoming since the age of seven, Jenkins does expeditions into the world’s last remote regions. Hallmarks include the U.S. Everest North Face Expedition (1986), the first ascent of the highest peaks in the Arctic Circle (1988), the first coast-to-coast crossing of the former Soviet Union by bicycle (1989), and the first descent of the Niger River headwaters in West Africa.

J. Maarten Troost is the author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific. His essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, and the Prague Post. He spent two years in Kiribati in the equatorial Pacific and upon his return was hired as a consultant by the World Bank. After several years in Fiji, he recently relocated to the U.S. and now lives with his wife and son in California.

Cleo Paskal has contributed to everyone from The Economist to the (better paying) Weekly World News. Along the way she has hosted BBC radio travel shows, appeared in several anthologies, wrote an Emmy-winning TV series, taught at universities in the U.K., Canada and New Zealand, won ten major travel writing awards (including the Grand Prize from the North American Travel Journalist’s Association). Cleo’s travel column appears weekly in Canada’s National Post.

Don George is the Global Travel Editor for Lonely Planet Publications. His new book, Travel Writing, will be published this month. In 25 years of wandering, Don has visited more than 60 countries and has published more than 600 articles in newspapers and magazines around the globe. He has also edited four travel anthologies, and he often appears as a travel expert on radio and television, and speaks on travel writing and travel industry issues around the world.

Rory MacLean’s five books, including best-sellers Stalin’s Nose and Under the Dragon, have (according to the Financial Times) challenged and invigorated travel writing. He has won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work prize and an Arts Council Writers’ Award, was twice short-listed for the Thomas Cook Travel Book prize and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary award. He lives with his wife and two-year-old son in a rural Dorset village in England.

Larry Bleiberg has been travel editor of The Dallas Morning News since 1999. His travel section has won numerous honors, including being named best in North America in the 2002 Lowell Thomas Awards, and an individual honorable mention as Travel Journalist of the Year in 2001. He also was a member of the Louisville Courier-Journal team that won the Pulitzer Prize for general news in 1989.

Wendy Knight is a freelance writer and editor who contributes to the New York Times, Outside Magazine, the Toronto Globe and Mail, and Vermont Life, among other publications. She is the editor of Far From Home: Father Daughter Travel Adventures (Seal Press, 2004) which was featured on CNN, and Making Connections: Mother Daughter Travel Adventures (Seal Press, 2003) which won a 2004 Lowell Thomas Award for “Best Travel Book”.

Tom Miller has been writing about the American Southwest and Latin America for more than three decades. His nine books include Jack Ruby’s Kitchen Sink, The Panama Hat Trail, Trading with the Enemy, Travelers’ Tales: Cuba and Writing on the Edge, a collection of some of the best writing about the U.S.-Mexico border from the last hundred years. Miller began his journalism career in the underground press of the late 1960s, and has written articles for the New York Times, Smithsonian, Natural History, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone.

Michael Shapiro has biked through Cuba for the Washington Post, celebrated Holy Week in Guatemala for the Dallas Morning News, and floated down the Mekong River on a Laotian cargo barge for an online travel magazine. His work also appears in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and several national magazines. His book, A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Lives, Craft and Inspiration was published September, 2004, by Travelers’ Tales.

Jennifer L. Leo is the editor of the travel-humor books Whose Panties Are These? and Sand in My Bra, and co-editor of A Woman’s Path. She has also written for Time, Lonely Planet, BootsnAll.com and other books in the Travelers’ Tales series. Her website, WrittenRoad.com, is an online resource for travel writers.

Sarah Erdman grew up in seven countries, including Portugal, Israel, Yugoslavia, and Cyprus. She served as a Peace Corps health volunteer in northern Cote d’Ivoire, and her first book, Nine Hills to Nambonkaha, was selected for Border’s “Original Voices,” Booksense 76, and Barnes and Noble’s “Discover Great New Writers” program. It also won a New York Times Editor’s Choice award for travel literature.

Forgoing the standard Q&A format, writer Ken Vollmer shares some words of warning about self-publishing. Vollmer self-published The Wanderlust Survival Guide: Tips and Tales for World Travel, and is a contributor to Travelers’ Tales’ Hyenas Laughed at Me and Now I Know Why.

During the past decade, Andrew Dean Nystrom has contributed to two dozen Fodor’s and Lonely Planet travel guidebooks, and his work has been translated into a dozen languages. His travel writing first appeared online in 1996 in a weekly column on Tripod.com. When not out rambling, he hangs his hats in a garden cottage straddling a major earthquake fault in Alta (Northern) California.

Harry S. Pariser is a writer, publisher, photographer, graphic artist, and artist living in San Francisco. He has traveled widely in North America, the Caribbean, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. He speaks Japanese, Indonesian, and Spanish in order of fluency

Stephanie Elizondo Griest has belly danced with Cuban rumba queens, volunteered at a Russian children’s shelter, and polished the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party. These adventures are the subject of her first book: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana, which will be published by Villard/Random House in March 2004.

Tom Bissell is the author of Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia. His criticism, fiction, and journalism have appeared in Agni, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Boston Review, BOMB, Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, and Salon. He is currently finishing a collection of Central Asia-themed short stories entitled Death Defier. He lives in New York City and has returned to Uzbekistan four times since completing Chasing the Sea.

Ayun Halliday, is the the sole staff member of the quarterly zine, The East Village Inky, and author of two books, No Touch Monkey! And Other Travelers’ Lessons Learned Too Late and The Big Rumpus: A Mother’s Tale from the Trenches. You can find her in Brooklyn with children Inky and Milo and their father, Greg Kotis, the man responsible for Urinetown (The Musical), foreign productions of which will take the family to Japan, Korea, London and Madrid in the near future.

Over the past two decades, Tim Cahill has established a reputation as America’s best known (and funniest) adventure travel writer. A founding editor of Outside Magazine, he is the author of seven books and an editor at large for Outside. His work appears in National Geographic Adventure, The New York Times Book Review, and other national publications.

James Sturz is a freelance writer and novelist. His travel articles have run in Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Cigar Aficionado, Blue and Lexus. His first novel Sasso, was one of The Sunday Telegraph‘s top picks for 2001. Sturz also teaches travel writing in New York City for Mediabistro.

Isabella Tree writes about travel for the Sunday Times, Evening Standard and the Observer. Her 1991 book, The Bird Man: The Extraordinary Story of John Gould, was reissued by Ebury Press this year. She is currently at work on a novel set in Kathmandu.

After ten years at Lonely Planet, where he specialized in southern South America, Wayne Bernhardson moved to Moon Handbooks, where he has published books on Guatemala and Chile. Moon Handbooks Buenos Aires will appear in October 2003, and Moon Handbooks Argentina is in the works.

After writing a book about Courtney Love (Courtney Love: Queen of Noise), which Courtney didn’t like, Melissa Rossi decided to become a world traveler, and has visited most European countries. She has also lived in assorted parts of Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium. Fluent in “Spitalnishsian” — an Italian, Spanish blend with a dash of Russian thrown in — Rossi has written for such publications as National Geographic Traveler, Newsweek, MSNBC and George, and is the author of What Every American Should Know about the Rest of the World.

Tony Wheeler was born in Britain but grew up in Pakistan, the West Indies and the USA. His family returned to Britain shortly before he finished school and after studying engineering at Warwick University and a short spell as a car designer he returned to university at the London Business School. Then, with his wife Maureen, he joined the Asian ‘hippie trail’ of the early ’70s. A year later they founded Lonely Planet Publications.

Tom Clynes is an author and journalist whose passion for discovery has taken him around the world. Tom writes about and photographs adventure, culture, issues and personalities for a wide range of publications, and is a contributing editor for the magazine National Geographic Adventure.

After years of assigning other writers to travel the globe — as editor of the award-winning Islands for 13 years and founding editor of National Geographic Traveler before that — Joan Tapper is now on the other side of the desk. As contributing editor for travel for Santa Barbara Magazine, she writes a column in every issue and does destination stories (as well as features about people, arts, and culture) for other publications.

Rick Steves hosts the popular public television series, “Rick Steves’ Europe,” and is the author of 24 European travel books. In addition to his guidebooks, Steves writes columns for various newspapers and magazines, and he appears frequently on television and radio talk shows and online travel chats as a leading authority on independent European travel.

Born in Sydney, Australia, he traveled around Asia and South America before becoming a foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires. Now a world traveler living in New York, he contributes to publications such as Esquire, Outside, Islands, the New York Times and London Sunday Times. His book Route 66 A.D.: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists, was released in 2002; the paperback edition, to be published this month, will be titled Pagan Holiday.

David Stanley has visited 175 countries and crossed six continents overland. His travel writing career began in 1979, and over the next two decades he produced nine trailblazing guides for Moon Handbooks and Lonely Planet. After five years in Amsterdam, David returned to Canada in 1996.

Bill Dalton founded Moon Publications in 1973, with the publication of his groundbreaking Indonesia Handbook. The Moon Handbooks series has since become known for its award-winning, well-written and exceptionally informative guides. His travels have taken him to 81 countries around the world, and he is considered the foremost travel expert on Indonesia.

Pico Iyer is one of the most revered and respected travel writers alive today. Born in England, raised in California, and educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard. His essays, reviews, and other writings have appeared in Time, Conde Nast Traveler, Harper’s, the New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, and Salon.com. His books have been translated into several languages and published in Europe, Asia, South America, and North America.

Thomas Swick has been the Travel Editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel since 1989. His reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post Book World; his articles and essays in The American Scholar, The Oxford American, The North American Review, Ploughshares, Commonweal, and National Geographic Traveler. His essays have twice appeared in The Best American Travel Writing anthologies. He is the author of the travel memoir Unquiet Days: At Home in Poland.

Dr. Jane Wilson-Howarth is a British physician with a fascination for parasites and other loathsome creatures. She has led expeditions to Peru and Madagascar and has done a dozen high altitude treks in Nepal with her children from the age of four months. She has lived in Asia for eleven years, working on various health projects. She is the author of four books and is currently working as a general practitioner in England.

Gary Warner is the travel editor for the Orange County Register in Orange County, California. A 44-year-old native Southern Californian, he has undergraduate degrees from Cal Berkeley (history) and Cal State Long Beach (psychology), and he has a masters in journalism from Columbia University. A former legislative aide in Sacramento, he worked for The Pittsburgh Press as a political reporter before coming to the Orange County Register in 1987. He was on the Register’s government team, with his longest and last stint as military writer. He became travel editor in 1994.

Brad Newsham majored in basketball at Principia College (Elsah, Illinois), but emerged bewildered, in 1972, with a degree in history and sociology. He has lived in ten of the United States, visited all fifty, and has circled the globe four times. Since 1985 he has been a San Francisco Yellow Cab driver. His second travel book, “Take Me With You: A Round-the-World Journey to Invite a Stranger Home” was published by Travelers’ Tales in 2000. “Take Me With You” is the story of Brad’s 100-day trip through the Philippines, India, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.

Lucy McCauley’s travel essays have appeared in Salon, the Atlantic Monthy, the Harvard Review, and several Travelers Tales anthologies. Once an editor at Harvard Business Review, McCauley has also worked as a freelance writer/editor of academic and business prose for more than a decade, writing case studies in Central and South America for several departments at Harvard University, working as a contributing editor to Fast Company magazine, and as a “book doctor” for publishing houses.

Peter Hessler is a Beijing correspondent for the New Yorker. A native of Columbia, Missouri, he studied English literature at Princeton and Oxford before going to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996. His two year experience of teaching English in Fuling, a town on the Yangtze, inspired River Town, his critically acclaimed first book.

Patrick Symmes is a Contributing Editor at Harper’s and Outside magazines. As a foreign correspondent, he has traveled with Maoist insurgents in Nepal, visited both main guerrilla groups in Colombia, and profiled drug gangs in Brazil. His essays on Cambodia and Columbia have been selected for the “Best American Travel Writing” anthology, and he is the author of “Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey through the Guevara Legend,” an account of a 12,000-mile ride across South America, retracing the journeys and guerrilla campaigns of Che Guevara. He also writes frequently for GQ and Conde Nast Traveler.

Judith Babcock Wylie has been a travel writer and editor for 20 years, and her articles have appeared Travel & Leisure, TWA Ambassador, the London Financial Times, Walking, the Denver Post, the San Jose Mercury News and more than 70 other publications. She teaches travel writing workshops at New York University, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. Her latest book “Best Places: California Central Coast” came out in April, 2002.

Richard Sterling is both a travel and food writer. The principal author of Lonely Planet’s World Food series, he has been dubbed the Indiana Jones of Gastronomy for his willingness to go anywhere and court any danger for the sake of a good meal and has written 14 books. Though he lives in Berkeley, California, he is very often politically incorrect.

Jeffrey Tayler, a former Peace Corp worker, is the author of “Siberian Dawn” and “Facing the Congo.” He has published numerous articles in Atlantic Monthly, Spin, Harper’s and Condé Nast Traveler. He is a regular commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Two of Tayler’s travel essays were selected by Bill Bryson for the inaugural edition of “The Best American Travel Writing 2000”. He lives in Russia.

Christopher P. Baker has written for more than 150 publications as far-ranging as Newsweek, Elle, Islands, National Wildlife, the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, and the South China Morning Post. His numerous books include best-selling guidebooks to Cuba, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Bahamas, and elsewhere, and he penned the best-selling travelogue, Mi Moto Fidel: Motorcycling Through Castro’s Cuba.

Elliott Hester’s stories have appeared in National Geographic Traveler, Salon.com, Glamour, Maxim, Details and more than 30 newspapers in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. He also writes Out of the Blue — a syndicated newspaper column that reaches more than 1.5 million readers. Hester’s first book, “Plane Insanity,” was published in January by St. Martin’s Press.

Tanya Shaffer is a San Francisco-based writer and actress. Her most recent solo show, “Let My Enemy Live Long!” based on her travels in West Africa, enjoyed an extended run in the San Francisco area and was awarded a 1999 Bay Area Theatre Critics’ Circle Award for Solo Performance. Tanya was a frequent contributor to the now-extinct travel section of Salon.com.

Larry Habegger began publishing his writing about adventure and offbeat travel in 1980. His travel stories have appeared in magazines and newspapers in the U.S. and abroad, including Outside, Travel & Leisure and the Los Angeles Times. Since 1985 Habegger has co-written a safety and security column, “World Travel Watch,” that has been syndicated in major newspapers in five countries. In 1993 Habegger and partners founded the publishing company Travelers’ Tales.

Holly Morris is the writer, director and host of the PBS travel/biography series “Adventure Divas.” The award-winning series pilot “Cuba: Paradox Found” began airing nationally in primetime in April 2000. Morris has published two books and writes for publications including The New York Times Book Review, abcnews.com, Blue Magazine, Ms. and Outside.

Ron Gluckman is an American journalist who has been roaming Asia for more than a decade. he mixes travel tales with news, analysis, features and business stories. His byline has appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. He is a regular contributor to Time and Asiaweek, and has been a guest discussing travel in Asia on CNN.

Jason Wilson is the series editor of The Best American Travel Writing and a contributing editor at Trips. He has written freelance pieces for a broad variety of publications, including Salon, the Washington Post Magazine, , The New York Times and Conde Nast Traveler. Wilson’s travel writing has garnered two Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism awards.

Manja Sachet co-authored Open Road Publishing’s “Turkey Guide” with her husband, Adam Peck. While living in Turkey, she did business development for a Turkish ISP, and also wrote a handful of freelance articles for English-language publications in Istanbul.

Simon Winchester, having reported from almost everywhere during an award-winning 20-year career as a Guardian foreign correspondent, was appointed Asia-Pacific editor for Condé Nast Traveler in 1987, later becoming Editor-at-Large. He also contributes to a number of publications, including Harper’s, The Smithsonian, The National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, and the BBC. His writings have won him several awards, including Britain’s Journalist of the Year.

Doug Lansky grew up in Minnesota and graduated from Colorado College. After interning at “Late Night with David Letterman,” “Spy Magazine,” and “The New Yorker Magazine,” Lansky, hit the road in 1992. He has been traveling the world ever since, chronicling his adventures in his nationally syndicated humor column, “Vagabond.” He is also the author of two books.

Janet Fullwood, 48, has traveled in 60-odd countries and has been publishing travel stories and photos for 22 years, the first one being a newspaper story on camping and backpacking on Kauai. Since then, with a few breaks for extended periods of roaming the globe, she’s worked out a career — first at the Dallas Times Herald and since 1987 at The Sacramento Bee — that allows her to travel on someone else’s nickel and get paid for writing about it. Travel and writing are actually just a small part of her job, which involves producing a weekly newspaper travel section with writing from many sources.

Carl Parkes writes the Southeast Asia Handbook Moon Handbooks: Southeast Asia (3rd Ed.) for Moon guides, as well as Moon country guides for Thailand Moon Handbooks: Thailand (3rd Ed.), Singapore the Philippines Moon Handbooks: Philippines (3rd Ed.). He also contributes reviews and profiles to Reed Travel Group and Weissmann Travel Reports. His latest book, National Geographic Traveler’s Thailand will be released in spring of 2001. He lives in San Francisco.

Frank Bures has published travel pieces in Outside, Salon, Geographical, Outpost, and Oregon Live. As an emerging freelancer, Bures’ example and insights are especially valuable to writers who have just started — or have yet to begin — their travel writing efforts. Bures lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works part-time at the world-famous Powell’s Bookstore.

Laurie Gough is the author of “Kite Strings of the Southern Cross,” which won a silver medal for Foreword Magazine’s Best Travel Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book of the Year award in the U.K. Gough has also written for Salon, Outpost, and the Toronto Globe and Mail. Her work appears in several travel anthologies, including “Travelers’ Tales: A Woman’s World,” The Adventure of Food,” and “Salon.com’s Wanderlust: Real-Life Tales of Adventure and Romance.” She divides her time between Ontario and northern California.

Jeff Greenwald is the author of four books: “Mister Raja’s Neighborhood” (John Daniel), “Shopping for Buddhas” (Lonely Planet), “The Size of the World” (Ballantine) and “Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth” (Penguin). His travel essays appear in numerous anthologies, including “I Should Have Stayed Home,” “In Search of Adventure” and eight volumes of the award-winning Travelers’ Tales series. Jeff lives in Oakland, writing full time and contributing travel and science articles to a wide variety of publications.

Joe Cummings’ Lonely Planet guide to Thailand has sold over a million copies in its various editions since 1982. Cummings also authors the Lonely Planet guides to Southeast Asian destinations such as Laos and Myanmar (Burma), and he writes guides to northern Mexico and Baja for Moon Handbooks. He divides his time between homes in Chiang Mai, Thailand and Todos Santos, Mexico.