Mark Jenkins is a monthly adventure travel columnist for Outside magazine, and the author of three award-winning books: The Hard Way, To Timbuktu and Off the Map. A resident of Wyoming since the age of seven, Jenkins does expeditions into the world’s last remote regions. Hallmarks include the U.S. Everest North Face Expedition (1986), the first ascent of the highest peaks in the Arctic Circle (1988), the first coast-to-coast crossing of the former Soviet Union by bicycle (1989), and the first descent of the Niger River headwaters in West Africa.

J. Maarten Troost is the author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific. His essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, and the Prague Post. He spent two years in Kiribati in the equatorial Pacific and upon his return was hired as a consultant by the World Bank. After several years in Fiji, he recently relocated to the U.S. and now lives with his wife and son in California.

Cleo Paskal has contributed to everyone from The Economist to the (better paying) Weekly World News. Along the way she has hosted BBC radio travel shows, appeared in several anthologies, wrote an Emmy-winning TV series, taught at universities in the U.K., Canada and New Zealand, won ten major travel writing awards (including the Grand Prize from the North American Travel Journalist’s Association). Cleo’s travel column appears weekly in Canada’s National Post.

Don George is the Global Travel Editor for Lonely Planet Publications. His new book, Travel Writing, will be published this month. In 25 years of wandering, Don has visited more than 60 countries and has published more than 600 articles in newspapers and magazines around the globe. He has also edited four travel anthologies, and he often appears as a travel expert on radio and television, and speaks on travel writing and travel industry issues around the world.

Rory MacLean’s five books, including best-sellers Stalin’s Nose and Under the Dragon, have (according to the Financial Times) challenged and invigorated travel writing. He has won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work prize and an Arts Council Writers’ Award, was twice short-listed for the Thomas Cook Travel Book prize and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary award. He lives with his wife and two-year-old son in a rural Dorset village in England.

Larry Bleiberg has been travel editor of The Dallas Morning News since 1999. His travel section has won numerous honors, including being named best in North America in the 2002 Lowell Thomas Awards, and an individual honorable mention as Travel Journalist of the Year in 2001. He also was a member of the Louisville Courier-Journal team that won the Pulitzer Prize for general news in 1989.

Wendy Knight is a freelance writer and editor who contributes to the New York Times, Outside Magazine, the Toronto Globe and Mail, and Vermont Life, among other publications. She is the editor of Far From Home: Father Daughter Travel Adventures (Seal Press, 2004) which was featured on CNN, and Making Connections: Mother Daughter Travel Adventures (Seal Press, 2003) which won a 2004 Lowell Thomas Award for “Best Travel Book”.

Tom Miller has been writing about the American Southwest and Latin America for more than three decades. His nine books include Jack Ruby’s Kitchen Sink, The Panama Hat Trail, Trading with the Enemy, Travelers’ Tales: Cuba and Writing on the Edge, a collection of some of the best writing about the U.S.-Mexico border from the last hundred years. Miller began his journalism career in the underground press of the late 1960s, and has written articles for the New York Times, Smithsonian, Natural History, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone.

Michael Shapiro has biked through Cuba for the Washington Post, celebrated Holy Week in Guatemala for the Dallas Morning News, and floated down the Mekong River on a Laotian cargo barge for an online travel magazine. His work also appears in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and several national magazines. His book, A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Lives, Craft and Inspiration was published September, 2004, by Travelers’ Tales.

Jennifer L. Leo is the editor of the travel-humor books Whose Panties Are These? and Sand in My Bra, and co-editor of A Woman’s Path. She has also written for Time, Lonely Planet, BootsnAll.com and other books in the Travelers’ Tales series. Her website, WrittenRoad.com, is an online resource for travel writers.

Sarah Erdman grew up in seven countries, including Portugal, Israel, Yugoslavia, and Cyprus. She served as a Peace Corps health volunteer in northern Cote d’Ivoire, and her first book, Nine Hills to Nambonkaha, was selected for Border’s “Original Voices,” Booksense 76, and Barnes and Noble’s “Discover Great New Writers” program. It also won a New York Times Editor’s Choice award for travel literature.