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.