Karl Taro Greenfeld has written three books about Asia; the newest, China Syndrome: The True Story of the 21st Century’s First Great Epidemic, is out this month from HarperCollins in the US and Penguin in the UK. His previous books were Speed Tribes and Standard Deviations. A longtime staff writer and editor for TIME and Sports Illustrated, his travel writing has appeared in Conde Nast Traveler, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, Details, Arena and TIME, among other publications, and has been anthologized in Lonely Planet travel books.

Franz Wisner is a reformed cubicle worker and the author of Honeymoon With My Brother, the true story of how Franz was left at the altar, then decided to take a two-year, 53-country honeymoon with his younger brother, Kurt. The best-selling memoir is currently being made into a movie by Sony Pictures. In addition, Franz has penned numerous articles and opinion pieces for The San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Redbook Magazine, and Coast Magazine, among others.

Lea Aschkenas has written for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Salon.com. She has also contributed stories to Travelers’ Tales Central America, Travelers’ Tales Cuba, The Unsavvy Traveler, and The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2006. In her book, Es Cuba : Life and Love on an Illegal Island, she examines the personal legacy of politics via the window of her relationship with a Cuban man and with the three generations of Cuban women she lived with in the year 2000.

Author and filmmaker Robert Young Pelton has made a career out of traveling through the world’s most dangerous places. In addition to writing a regular column for National Geographic Adventure, Pelton has worked for the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, ABC News, CBS 60 Minutes, and CNN. As an author, he is best known for his classic underground guide to surviving danger, The World’s Most Dangerous Places, now in its fifth edition.

Joshua Berman co-authored Moon Handbooks: Nicaragua and wrote the latest edition of Moon Handbooks Belize. In addition to “guidebook writer,” Joshua’s varied resume includes wildland firefighter, Outward Bound instructor, freelance writer, and tourism consultant.

Shanti Sosienski has contributed to Outside, National Geographic Adventure, Men’s Journal, FHM, Shape, Dandelion, Sports Illustrated Kids, and Stuff, among other titles. Her niche is taking adventure sports, outdoorsy topics, athletes, and travel and turning these into topics even the armchair weekend warrior can relate to.

Peter Moore has been described as “The Australian Bill Bryson.” His books include The Wrong Way Home, which saw him traveling overland from London to Sydney, Swahili for the Broken-Hearted, an account of a journey from Cape Town to Cairo, and Vroom with a View, where he went in search of Italy’s dolce vita on a 1961 Vespa. At last count he had visited 95 countries and written six books. When he is not traveling he can be found in either Sydney or London.

Taras Grescoe has written articles on travel for The Times, Independent, Condé Nast Traveller (U.K.), National Geographic Traveler and the New York Times. His bestselling first book Sacré Blues: An Unsentimental Journey Through Quebec won the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-fiction and First Book Award, among numerous other awards. His newest book is The End of Elsewhere: Travels Among the Tourists. He lives in Montreal.

C.M. Mayo is the author of Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico, and Sky Over El Nido, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Mayo’s travel writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and numerous literary journals, among them, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, and the North American Review.

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.