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.