Raphael Kadushin is the executive editor at the University of Wisconsin Press. He is also an award-winning travel and food journalist. He has served as a contributing editor at both Bon Appetit and National Geographic Traveler magazines, and his work has appeared in Conde Nast Traveler, and the Wall Street Journal.

Alden Jones is the author of Unaccompanied Minors, winner of the New American Fiction Prize and the Lascaux Prize, and The Blind Masseuse, winner of the Independent Publishers Book Award in Travel Essays and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award. She directs the Cuba Writers Program.

Brian Bouldrey's most recent book is The Peasant and the Mariner. He is the author of four works of fiction and four works of nonfiction. He is the North American editor of the Open Door series and teaches writing, environmental policy & culture, and literature at Northwestern University.

Lucy Jane Bledsoe is the author of six novels, most recently A Thin Bright Line. Her fiction has won a Yaddo fellowship, the Saturday Evening Post Fiction Prize, the Arts & Letters Prize, a California Arts Council Award, an ALA Stonewall Award, and two National Science Foundation Writer Fellowships.

Guillermo Reyes is the author of Madre and I: A Memoir of Our Immigrant Lives. He's a professor in the School of Film, Dance, and Theatre at Arizona State University.