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.