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.