Pico Iyer is one of the most revered and respected travel writers alive today. Born in England, raised in California, and educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard. His essays, reviews, and other writings have appeared in Time, Conde Nast Traveler, Harper’s, the New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, and Salon.com. His books have been translated into several languages and published in Europe, Asia, South America, and North America.
Thomas Swick has been the Travel Editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel since 1989. His reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post Book World; his articles and essays in The American Scholar, The Oxford American, The North American Review, Ploughshares, Commonweal, and National Geographic Traveler. His essays have twice appeared in The Best American Travel Writing anthologies. He is the author of the travel memoir Unquiet Days: At Home in Poland.
Dr. Jane Wilson-Howarth is a British physician with a fascination for parasites and other loathsome creatures. She has led expeditions to Peru and Madagascar and has done a dozen high altitude treks in Nepal with her children from the age of four months. She has lived in Asia for eleven years, working on various health projects. She is the author of four books and is currently working as a general practitioner in England.
Gary Warner is the travel editor for the Orange County Register in Orange County, California. A 44-year-old native Southern Californian, he has undergraduate degrees from Cal Berkeley (history) and Cal State Long Beach (psychology), and he has a masters in journalism from Columbia University. A former legislative aide in Sacramento, he worked for The Pittsburgh Press as a political reporter before coming to the Orange County Register in 1987. He was on the Register’s government team, with his longest and last stint as military writer. He became travel editor in 1994.
Brad Newsham majored in basketball at Principia College (Elsah, Illinois), but emerged bewildered, in 1972, with a degree in history and sociology. He has lived in ten of the United States, visited all fifty, and has circled the globe four times. Since 1985 he has been a San Francisco Yellow Cab driver. His second travel book, “Take Me With You: A Round-the-World Journey to Invite a Stranger Home” was published by Travelers’ Tales in 2000. “Take Me With You” is the story of Brad’s 100-day trip through the Philippines, India, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.
Lucy McCauley’s travel essays have appeared in Salon, the Atlantic Monthy, the Harvard Review, and several Travelers Tales anthologies. Once an editor at Harvard Business Review, McCauley has also worked as a freelance writer/editor of academic and business prose for more than a decade, writing case studies in Central and South America for several departments at Harvard University, working as a contributing editor to Fast Company magazine, and as a “book doctor” for publishing houses.
Peter Hessler is a Beijing correspondent for the New Yorker. A native of Columbia, Missouri, he studied English literature at Princeton and Oxford before going to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996. His two year experience of teaching English in Fuling, a town on the Yangtze, inspired River Town, his critically acclaimed first book.
Patrick Symmes is a Contributing Editor at Harper’s and Outside magazines. As a foreign correspondent, he has traveled with Maoist insurgents in Nepal, visited both main guerrilla groups in Colombia, and profiled drug gangs in Brazil. His essays on Cambodia and Columbia have been selected for the “Best American Travel Writing” anthology, and he is the author of “Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey through the Guevara Legend,” an account of a 12,000-mile ride across South America, retracing the journeys and guerrilla campaigns of Che Guevara. He also writes frequently for GQ and Conde Nast Traveler.
Judith Babcock Wylie has been a travel writer and editor for 20 years, and her articles have appeared Travel & Leisure, TWA Ambassador, the London Financial Times, Walking, the Denver Post, the San Jose Mercury News and more than 70 other publications. She teaches travel writing workshops at New York University, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. Her latest book “Best Places: California Central Coast” came out in April, 2002.
Richard Sterling is both a travel and food writer. The principal author of Lonely Planet’s World Food series, he has been dubbed the Indiana Jones of Gastronomy for his willingness to go anywhere and court any danger for the sake of a good meal and has written 14 books. Though he lives in Berkeley, California, he is very often politically incorrect.
Jeffrey Tayler, a former Peace Corp worker, is the author of “Siberian Dawn” and “Facing the Congo.” He has published numerous articles in Atlantic Monthly, Spin, Harper’s and Condé Nast Traveler. He is a regular commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Two of Tayler’s travel essays were selected by Bill Bryson for the inaugural edition of “The Best American Travel Writing 2000”. He lives in Russia.
