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.

Forgoing the standard Q&A format, writer Ken Vollmer shares some words of warning about self-publishing. Vollmer self-published The Wanderlust Survival Guide: Tips and Tales for World Travel, and is a contributor to Travelers’ Tales’ Hyenas Laughed at Me and Now I Know Why.

During the past decade, Andrew Dean Nystrom has contributed to two dozen Fodor’s and Lonely Planet travel guidebooks, and his work has been translated into a dozen languages. His travel writing first appeared online in 1996 in a weekly column on Tripod.com. When not out rambling, he hangs his hats in a garden cottage straddling a major earthquake fault in Alta (Northern) California.

Harry S. Pariser is a writer, publisher, photographer, graphic artist, and artist living in San Francisco. He has traveled widely in North America, the Caribbean, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. He speaks Japanese, Indonesian, and Spanish in order of fluency

Stephanie Elizondo Griest has belly danced with Cuban rumba queens, volunteered at a Russian children’s shelter, and polished the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party. These adventures are the subject of her first book: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana, which will be published by Villard/Random House in March 2004.

Tom Bissell is the author of Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia. His criticism, fiction, and journalism have appeared in Agni, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Boston Review, BOMB, Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, and Salon. He is currently finishing a collection of Central Asia-themed short stories entitled Death Defier. He lives in New York City and has returned to Uzbekistan four times since completing Chasing the Sea.

Ayun Halliday, is the the sole staff member of the quarterly zine, The East Village Inky, and author of two books, No Touch Monkey! And Other Travelers’ Lessons Learned Too Late and The Big Rumpus: A Mother’s Tale from the Trenches. You can find her in Brooklyn with children Inky and Milo and their father, Greg Kotis, the man responsible for Urinetown (The Musical), foreign productions of which will take the family to Japan, Korea, London and Madrid in the near future.

Over the past two decades, Tim Cahill has established a reputation as America’s best known (and funniest) adventure travel writer. A founding editor of Outside Magazine, he is the author of seven books and an editor at large for Outside. His work appears in National Geographic Adventure, The New York Times Book Review, and other national publications.

James Sturz is a freelance writer and novelist. His travel articles have run in Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Cigar Aficionado, Blue and Lexus. His first novel Sasso, was one of The Sunday Telegraph‘s top picks for 2001. Sturz also teaches travel writing in New York City for Mediabistro.