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.